Parks Canada’s new reservations system is fun. Used to be you’d log in 7 AM on opening day, the database server would crash, and you’d refresh, and the database server would crash, and you’d have a couple browsers open to get one as far as the cart, and the database server would crash, but you’d check out, and then the payment server would crash, and you’d repeat this ten times until your credit card had been overcharged a few hundred bucks and, because you were high-agency, you’d get your campsites. I wrote about it! It worked for me, which is not the same as saying that it worked.

Now you log in opening day and are randomly assigned a place in line. The website hardly crashes at all but, no matter how on-the-ball you are, you cannot advance more quickly than the luck of the draw. When I visited on Banff, Kootenay, and Yoho backcountry day there were 14,715 people ahead of me taking the good campsites. 14,715. I wrote it down.

I had planned two hard and fast weeks through three parks, from Field, British Columbia to Canmore, Alberta, a hike to be proud of, one you have to train for. But 14,715 people made that impossible. So I had to gear down and hike Kootenay National Park‘s Rockwall, one of the crown jewels of the Canadian Rockies, the one they put on the cover of the Canadian Rockies Trail Guide for seven out of ten editions, a beautiful and popular destination I was truly lucky to get into. I even found myself obliged to stop at every campground along the way, a relaxed itinerary that would allow me to spend the summer sitting and getting tubby rather than grinding the Grind.

Oh darn.

It was amazing: five of the best nights of my life. You should go.

Solar power, as anyone who has tried it knows, does not work.

Perhaps there are niche cases, like desktop calculators or orbital satellites, where solar cells pay off their expense and bulk, but when it comes to backpacking the science is settled. Look at gear surveys on long-distance trails, at the items hikers love, hate, keep, throw away. If a hiker brings solar panels onto the Pacific Crest or the Appalachian, they are soon discarded. If he does not bring them, at no point is he tempted to buy a set. Not even their biggest fan pretends a solar panel relieves you from long hours sitting next to a power outlet recharging your battery pack. Garmin, acknowledged masters of the great-hardware-shitty-software industry, advertise their solar-powered Fēnix 6 smartwatch as having extended range, rather than being able to live off the sun. Reviews of backpacking-oriented panels try as diplomatically as possible to suggest that if you keep the best you can buy soaked in sunlight in Colorado in the summer, you might just possibly get something useful out of them.

My experience with my backpacking solar panels has been thoroughly bad, dragging them like boat anchors around British Columbia’s Lower Mainland and Southern Gulf Islands without the least satisfaction. But surely the apex of futility was when I used them sailing from Bellingham, Washington to Skagway, Alaska on the Alaska Marine Highway. Sleeping out on deck for four days in the Alaskan summer we had decent weather, eighteen hours of sun a day, and a shortage of power outlets. I tried my solar panels to bridge the gap, and by journey’s end was just this side of pitching them into the Lynn Canal.

There’s no sugarcoating it: solar panels are heavy (my set weighs almost two and a half pounds), expensive, and ineffectual. The backpacking solar panel is completely useless.

Or is it?

After two years of frustrated would-be backpacks in the Rocky Mountains¹ 2020 would be a winner. A half-dozen early mornings, scoring opening-day reservations for some of Canada’s most-coveted campsites. Jasper frontcountry, Banff frontcountry, Jasper backcountry, Banff backcountry, provincial parks: processing and stress, HTTP 503s and duplicate credit card charges: all worth it to see great trails in peak season.

Take the train to Jasper, one night in the frontcountry, then two on the famous Skyline Trail. Bus to Banff, and three more nights up the Sunshine Village gondola, through the Assiniboine Pass, and down to the southeastern corner of Banff National Park via legendary Lake Magog. A trip worth the wait.

Then the virus came. VIA Rail, Canada’s passenger rail provider, suspended transcontinental service for the year. So I had to fly into Edmonton, with associated problems moving fuel and bear spray, and bus to Jasper on Sundog. This meant a needless night at Wapiti, watching elk and ordering pizza.

On the Banff side Sunshine Village announced they, including the gondola leading to Assiniboine Pass, would not open for the summer of 2020. So an already-long day would be lengthened by a sketchy cab ride and a boring uphill walk. Then, in July, the bombshell: a nice lady from Brewster called and said that due to “extreme low demand” their Jasper–Banff bus would not run until September at the earliest².

It was disappointing but one cannot be angry at small businesses trying to survive in a time of panic. Every thwarted booking, every reservation canceled, was refunded promptly and without hassle. Everybody was very polite, and the reputation of the Rocky Mountains’ little transport companies and outfitters has only improved. But now I could either go to Banff and do Assiniboine Pass, or go to Jasper and do Skyline, but, with no connection between them, not both.

I chose Skyline. A mistake was made.

Hiking-wise it has been a rough summer. Some of this has been viral, of course; even when parks have opened it’s felt antisocial to bus willy-nilly to small towns³, smiling and breathing on things. But quite a bit has been my own fault. For example, I canceled a planned overnight on Pender Island after hiking 98% of the way to Beaumont campground only to find I’d forgotten my cooking pot. I canceled a trip to Manning Park because there was lightning in the forecast and I’m a wimp. Another trip to Gulf Islands National Park was all booked-up when the ‘rona struck and when reservations re-opened I couldn’t get a replacement. One way or another I’ve canceled more camping reservations that I’ve used this year.

On one trip I combined “covid panic” and “Ben you fucking moron,” nicely spraining my ankle on the Norvan Falls trail of all the ridiculous places, a simple enough hike I know as well as kiss-my-hand, when just after the final bridge before the falls I stepped of to responsibly social-distance from a nice old lady passing the other way and landed wrong⁴. I hiked out, denying myself even a free helicopter ride, but it rather laid me up, as did my aggravating it on a run without a brace because have we established I’m an idiot?

It’s unfortunate to sound so bitter, because on balance my 2020 has been way better than the median. But from a backcountry perspective it’s been rather a bust.

So with a week of fun and rain in Jasper coming up, when confronted with a fine summer weekend I resolved to do something (anything) that let me sleep with a tent over my face, if only to enliven my legs and remind myself what shape trees are. Stawamus Chief Provincial Park, within walking distance of Squamish, opened up BC Day long weekend, and I leapt. So-to-speak. (People do leap off the Chief, but not even I am dumb enough for BASE jumping.)

Pandemics are boring. My home office in Vancouver, British Columbia looks out on a beautiful sunny day I am powerless to enjoy. Snowfields stare at me from the North Shore mountains while my snowshoes gather dust. Running around my neighbourhood only does so much; I miss nature. I miss the fresh air. I miss content for my hiking blog. I miss trees. I miss campsites and dehydrated food and reading a book on a lightweight chair and worrying about the rain and putting on three layers of jacket as I finish up the last camp chores while a gentle white light swings placidly within my tent. I miss being sweaty and stinky for days on end and not caring. I miss it all.

On the list of problems in the world today this is, to be sure, not number one. We’re all in the same boat and I think we all understand why we’re doing it. At risk of sounding controversial, if we all died of coronavirus that would be sad. Probably all of us who can are social distancing in ways which would normally seem ludicrously anti-social and feeling pretty good about ourselves.

And while we all want to get outside, outside can be crowded. Smart people are avoiding busy beaches and crowded trails. The District of North Vancouver has closed down the ultra-popular Quarry Rock and Lynn Valley Suspension Bridge trails. The big Vancouver-area resorts, Cypress Mountain, Grouse Mountain and Mount Seymour, are shut down, along with every zoo, water park, or other outdoor playplace.

photo by Andrew Bowden via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0

This August I’m off hiking in Jasper and Banff National Parks. Take the train in to Jasper, camp for a night in the frontcountry, hike a trail, take the bus to Banff, another frontcountry night, more hiking, camp at Lake Louise, then head home. Since I am the sort of person who enjoys planning trips almost as much as going on them, I had this planned out, with routes researched, campgrounds picked, and schedules ready, before Christmas.

Good thing. I needed a night in a frontcountry campsite in Jasper; reservations opened up January 7. The largest campground in the park is under renovation for all of 2020 so I played it safe, got up early to snag my spot. This was smart. Parks Canada’s database server failed under the strain of us early-risers; as errors and “processing…” queues kept me waiting I could watch the sites I wanted turn from green to red. Luck was on my side: I got in. But that was merely the first battle in a long war, a campaign of all against all between thousands of fellow-travelers from Canada and around the world, for the right to go camping.

The worst part is, there isn’t a better way.

I like hiking, but if there’s one thing I like even more, it’s eating. Perhaps the reason I enjoy overnight backpacking trips so much is that I can combine both these interests.

Of course when you’re car camping or carrying food for a night or two you can eat like you would at home. Spark up your two-burner Coleman stove and fry that bacon and eggs. On the West Coast Trail I met some people who’d brought in steaks… for one night, anyway. Carrying and cooling that stuff gets hard fast so if you’re backpacking, and your budget runs to CDN$13 or so per dinner, dehydrated meals are pretty universally considered the way to go. Their shelf life is years, meaning your extra food will be perfectly good next time you go out. There’s a certain sameiness of taste, given which ingredients are good dehydrated and which aren’t, but within those limits you can find food to suit any palate.

The world of backcountry cuisine is full of misinformation. Meals say “2 servings,” or even “2.5 servings,” on the package, and if you’re eating them while sedentary, rising only occasionally to tend the fire, that may be true, but on the move carrying a big ol’ backpack it ain’t. (Admittedly I am rather fat.) Then there are the “cookless” types, who try to tell you that eating pouches of peanut butter, nuts, and ghee for two weeks makes not carrying a stove seem like a reasonable idea, or on the other hand the “backcountry gourmets” whose backpacks are two-thirds spice rack and who stagger into camp, having carried more than is reasonable, only to spend four weary hours trying to perfectly sear salmon on a JetBoil. I can understand people who don’t take dehydrated backpacking meals along because they’re too expensive (and they are), but that consideration aside they are the ideal combination of convenience and tastiness.

As always I am the only one who will tell you the truth. Here are the ten best dehydrated backpacking meals, out of the ones I’ve eaten.

Until this past Labour Day Garibaldi Provincial Park was one of the many obligatory outdoors spots in British Columbia which I had not visited. There’s always some more exciting way to spend scarce vacation time, always some reason to go elsewhere. For non-drivers it’s certainly accessible, but a bit of a hassle. It’s notoriously crowded, of course, and you can see quite a lot of it any given sunny weekend by searching Instagram. The real outdoorsmen swear by its true backcountry, and the cross-country skiing is said to be excellent, but I lack the game (and the 4×4) for those. So it stayed vaguely on my “I’ll get around to it” list for a long time.

This year I finally knocked quite a lot of it off. Parkbus offers service to the Rubble Creek trailhead, access point to Garibaldi Lake, Panorama Ridge, and the Black Tusk, every weekend. From there one can do a day hike, or even an overnight there-and-back (this, I believe, is the only Parkbus destination out of Vancouver with both Saturday and Sunday service). But if you want to experience more of the park then you can hike out the Cheakamus Lake exit and down the access road to the #20 Whistler city bus run by BC Transit, and from there ride into Whistler itself, from which, even in the post-Greyhound era, any of several intercity buses can whisk you back to downtown Vancouver in touristy comfort. It looked too practical to allow of any excuses.

I don’t think I’ll be back, at least not to Rubble Creek. I hear people say that the West Coast Trail is crowded, well, I liked it a lot. They’ve had to slap stiff overnight quotas on the Chilkoot Trail and I liked that too. So the crowds didn’t scare me, even when I got up at 5 AM the first day campsite reservations were open and saw that, of the 50 sites at Garibaldi Lake itself, half were already booked. Maybe they should have. There were plenty of compensations but it turns out that, after all, there’s such a thing as too busy a backpack for me, and Garibaldi was it.

Skagway. I can’t believe I’m back in Skagway.

I have visited three times, which is two more than you should. In 2017, an aborted backpack to Kluane National Park (our river disappeared) turned into a week pottering around anywhere you could bus from Whitehorse. Thus a bus trip to Carcross, the most boring town in the world, and a transfer onto the White Pass and Yukon Route railroad down to Skagway. In my spare time I am a train nerd, and like most western Canadians I’d always nursed a modest, Pierre Berton-level interest in the Klondike Gold Rush, a grand tale of human irrationality, hubris, greed, glory, triumph, and despair. Skagway was one of the main Gold Rush towns, these days preserved almost as a memorial, and the railway had been built to convey prospectors and equipment through the early days of modern mechanical mining.

En route the train stopped at Bennett, British Columbia, the near-ghost town that is the northern terminus of the Chilkoot Trail⁵. From the station you can see a sign for the Chilkoot Trail National Historic Site of Canada. Saint Andrews Church, a rare surviving Gold Rush-era building, looms between the mountains above. You get off the train with the other tourists and ramble briefly around Bennett, looking at the interpretive signs and enjoying the scenery. It is extremely pretty. Some people camp there for a night or two and take the train back without hiking, and you see why.

Then you get back aboard and ride to Skagway through the White Pass, which is stunning. I swore, on that train in 2017, that I would someday hike the Chilkoot, the 33-mile route from sea level by the Taiya River, through the kilometer-high Chilkoot Pass, and back down to Bennett, where Gold Rush prospectors took to their boats and the hiker to his train.

It’s summer in Vancouver, British Columbia. The weather is sunny and perfect. It is a statutory holiday. Somehow you hanker to visit Grouse Mountain, one of the city’s premier outdoor attractions. Maybe you want to watch the lumberjacks, or see what you’d look like if you were standing next to a bear, or eat the worst poutine in Canada. We’re not here to judge. But you know that the gondola up the mountain is going to be both crowded and, at a minimum $59 per person, expensive.

You could hike the Grouse Grind but on a long weekend you’ll spend 90 minutes climbing stairs with your nose in an ultramarathoner’s crack. Alternate trails will be only a little better. Looks like you’re doomed to expense and inconvenience.

But what if I told you that there was another way, a back door into Grouse Mountain that’s in fine condition yet for half its length is visited only a few times a day? And all it takes an entire day spent hiking nearly thirteen miles, climbing a mountain up mud and a mile-long boulder field, and crossing a wide, deep creek on a precarious log jam?

Ladies and gentlemen, the Hanes Valley Route.

We all go to nature for different things. Some enjoy the challenge and solitude of attacking difficult places, spending days or weeks reliant on our guts, our abilities, and a few thousand dollars’ worth of ultra-modern, lightweight gear. Most think of a well-groomed drive-up site, maybe in an RV, with water and fuel close-to-hand, and rusticity without labour more intense than driving for a few hours down the backroads and a fight with tent poles.

This is great! Perfect for young children and the infirm, of course, but these places offer scenery, fun, and lifelong memories to anyone with a minimum of trouble (if not expense). You won’t see me defend soulless RV parks with concrete pads, gravel for your incontinent dog, and nary a plant that hasn’t been mowed, but even in those places many patrons are there for a base camp to explore more interesting sites and it’s hardly fair to consider the rest as typical. Most people seek pleasant climes that fits the amount of effort they’re willing to expend, and exposure to nature is an inherent good. Front country has a lot to be said for it.

But not a lot said about it. You ever notice that? If, God forbid, you do want that lousy time sitting in a trailer park you will find a surfeit of guidance, because RVers have disposable income and even those who just park their trailers at a site and wander around need to know where to park. The backcountry side of camping writing is even more massively oversubscribed, including by this very website; thousands of people thinking “if I work this hard enough I’ll get the marks to pay for my four months on the Pacific Crest Trail⁶.”

We’re left with people who want to experience natural wonder but not a Life-Changing Experience on the West Coast Trail for a week. Many such people are in southwestern British Columbia, Vancouver and Victoria and so forth, and the trails resound with their steps. But your best source for good, vehicle-accessible, but naturally-situated camping in this area is always a governmental website. Being bureaucrats, and therefore category-oriented, they shove everything into two bins. “Front country” and “back country,” and what does that even mean?

I spend a night or so a year in the backcountry of Golden Ears Provincial Park. British Columbia’s Lower Mainland knows all about Golden Ears; the vehicle-accessible campgrounds sell out most nice weekends, day use areas resound with visitors, and the official trails are well-trafficked almost for the length of the 150,000-acre park. It is a huge place that draws a huge number of people.

As well it should. This park inspires awe. Forest, subalpine lakes, haunting valleys, beautiful creeks, and mountain views. The only thing missing is solitude, which admittedly is important. Yet the backcountry campsites are gems which, while hardly hidden, are less well-known than they should be. A feature of these trips is people who ask “can you really camp back here?” Yes, and most affordably; there are a number of BC Parks-approved sites and the permit runs $5 per night.

With a car the backcountry sites at Viewpoint Beach are accessible even to parties of Cub Scouts, and Alder Flats is not so far that you can’t get bring a two-four of beer. Without a car, Golden Ears Park becomes a proper trek. In 2019 ParkBus will drive you to the Gold Creek parking lot, the jumping-off point for the backcountry, for $49 return⁷. Better than a cab, but not cheap, and the ParkBus only operates on Saturdays meaning that if you want to camp you’ll need to make your own way in or out.

Vancouver has two types of hikers. There are those who put on Crocs and wander around a lake on a path that might as well be paved, go up a flight of stairs, pat their fat old dog, and say “that was a good hike.” Then there are the people who voyage into places shown on the map only as “Bad Idea,” dropping sentences like “after a brisk fourteen miles through waist-deep poison ivy I ascended the cliff to Mount Hopeless and ate an entire box of After Eights.” The first group writes tour guides and fills up buses, the second group writes trip reports and fills up message boards. Damn the lot of ’em.

What about us normies? Those who don’t mind being sore the next morning but react to the word “bushwhack” like the fat old dog to “vet”? Our stories are lost, not impressive enough for the survivorman and too try-hard to the weekend stroller.

Today I defy convention. On a sunny Sunday in July I took my first shot at Coliseum Mountain, in Lynn Headwaters Regional Park on Vancouver’s North Shore. Lynn Headwaters is one of my favourite places in the world. It has trails for all: ones you can wheelchair down, ones with a bit of a climb, ones which tax all but the very fit, and routes with mountain traverses and alpine challenges that the park would not dare to advertise, for fear of great reeking heaps of dead tourists. If you like company, head into Lynn Canyon and get booty-shorts tight with people taking iPad selfies on a suspension bridge that’s more biomass than structure. If you like solitude, Lynn Headwaters can provide even on weekend afternoons. It is a little patch of joy.

Coliseum Mountain is, with the justly-famous Hanes Valley trail and justly-ignored Lynn Lake, one of three hikes the park calls very difficult. You can seek out tougher routes in the deep backcountry but for a tubby guy in 27-degree weather with a heavy pack full of crackers Coliseum is certainly tough enough to be getting on with. It is a long way horizontally and vertically: more of both than I had ever hiked in a day before. Is it worth it?

Oh heavens yes.

The Long Trail in Vermont is held to be the oldest long-distance hiking trail in the United States. Running 273 miles long, experienced backpackers can finish it in about a month through the mountains between the Massachusetts and Quebec borders, plunging deep, deep into the forest where no civilized man would go. Though not the most famous patch of track the Long Trail is regarded as a must-try for the ambitious backpacker.

While I did not have a month to spare, my hiking partner Carolyn and I arranged to do six days of it, nearly fifty miles from the Appalachian Gap to the resort town of Stowe, before gorging on ice cream and beer. However, while I was en route Carolyn noticed that we were in for the most appalling weather in recent history: temperatures always around 35° Celsius⁸, humidity in the nineties, and three days of lightning storms while we would have been crawling across the top of Mount Mansfield. It appeared to make travel ill-advised.

A late-night Skype conference from a shitty hotel in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania produced a plan. The news was grim but even in such hostile conditions the Long Trail could be conquered.Thirst and privation would be our constant companions, the heat our implacable nemesis, and death our only friend, but should we succeed the adventure would define the rest of our lives. Generations not yet born would feel their blood quicken as they thrilled to our tale. The price would be immense; perhaps greater than we could pay. But it is not given to everyone to carve new tracks out of the wilderness: sometimes you simply persevere when the weaker, and perhaps the wiser, would long ago have turned back. The prize for all this pain? Trivial, local, but real immortality.

But it was really hot so we went glamping in Ontario instead.

My Victoria Day long weekend was spent at Golden Ears Provincial Park near Maple Ridge, British Columbia. I’ll diarise about that another time; suffice to say it was a bust. There were clouds and bugs but most of all there was a crowd; a happy, rowdy pain-in-the-ass. At a spacious campground 45 minutes from the nearest parking lot people gave up and went home by three in the afternoon. The survivors seemed like nice people; the problem is that they were there. Enjoying the outdoors in their own way so, just by being around, we made that enjoyment a bit less for each other.

This was obviously going to happen. Golden Ears is a popular park, being gorgeous, easy to access and getting easier, and possessed by that enormous mass popularity of many local nature spots. Golden Ears, like Garibaldi and Alice Lake and oh God I’m going to stop listing them before I get depressed, is going to be too popular to be fun a lot of the time. The same applies for many day-hiking spots in the Vancouver area, and here I’m particularly thinking of the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge and the beautiful Quarry Rock viewpoint. The /r/Vancouver Reddit thread on Quarry Rock Victoria Day gave me all the bad feelings. And, going not that much further afield, the world-famous West Coast Trail is renowned as a hotspot for all the bad things the phrase “world-famous” implies in hiking culture.

Of course, backpacking in Golden Ears is an immensely popular overnight experience, so there is a cost attached. That cost is, um, $5 a night. Paid, by the way, essentially on the honour system.