Woods Wanderer

Every once in a while, someone comes at me with the dramatic tale of some starry-eyed pilgrim dying in the Alaskan wilderness. Few things upset me more.

In 1992, a bush pilot dropped me on a gravel airstrip near the Endicott River Wilderness, about forty miles northwest of Juneau. I set up camp next to the river and stayed there for two weeks, completely cut off from the rest of humanity, learning the hard way what it takes to keep body and soul together in a truly wild place. It was the best two weeks of my life.  It was a truly life-changing experience.  But it left me with a profound intolerance for the kind of stupidity that so often passes for backcountry adventure.

Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild is a prime example of that kind of stupidity. In that book, Krakauer writes about a young man named McCandless who wandered into the Alaskan wilderness and died there. Many people are fascinated by the story. Some find the affair tragically romantic; others get a big kick out of survival dramas regardless of the hero’s fate. Others, I suspect, use such tales to justify their own risk-taking or lack thereof. When I read Krakauer’s book, I saw only a woefully unprepared backcountry traveler with no real plan.

I spent a year and a half preparing for my venture into the Alaskan wild. I had skills. I had 125 pounds of food, clothing and equipment. I was as careful as anyone can be while I was out there and still came close to becoming food for the ravens.  The wilderness is a dangerous place.

Right before I went into the wild, I read in the Juneau newspaper about some guy who had disappeared up Eagle Creek two weeks earlier. Only the remains of his camp were found. When I asked several native Alaskans what they thought of this, I got the same response: “People disappear in the bush all the time.” And that’s that. There’s a steady stream of starry-eyed pilgrims coming up from the Lower Forty-Eight.  They slip into the Alaskan backcountry and some of them are never heard from again.

Lord knows I’ve taken more than my share of risks. I’ve been traveling alone into deep woods for decades. I’ve had many close calls. As a result, I’ve learned to treat the wild with great respect. First and foremost, I carry with me the tools I need to get out there and back in one piece.  And I know how to use them.

I can’t with good conscience recommend going it alone, but with a track record like mine, I can’t discourage it, either. All I can say is this: Be as prepared as you can possibly be before stepping into backcountry by yourself. Use your head. Don’t disappear. There’s nothing the least bit romantic about a premature and unnecessary death.  The bush is littered with the carcasses of fools.

Tags: Alaska, hiking alone, Into the Wild, survival, wilderness travel

Yesterday I went back into the Green Mountains to regain some semblance of sanity. A series of events, largely out of my control, kept me away from them for over a month. That’s way too long. A great weight lifted from my shoulders the moment I stepped out of my car and into the woods. I looked around long enough to notice daisies, buttercups and tall meadow rue in bloom nearby, then shouldered my rucksack and charged up the logging road. My dog, Matika, was already twenty yards ahead of me – no doubt as glad as I was to get back to the wild.

A mile up the logging road, I tagged the Basin Brook. I followed it into the green infinity without as much as a deer trail underfoot. When the brook forked, I took the tributary leading back to a series of beaver ponds that I had visited a few years ago. There I would put the collapsed fly rod in my rucksack to good use. But first I had to reach those ponds. That’s easier said than done, as any seasoned bushwhacker will tell you.

The Vermont woods are lush this time of year. The extra rain they’ve seen recently has made a lot of plants and animals happy. Mosquitoes greeted me while I flailed through thick entanglements of hobblebush, but I was happy enough tramping across the forest floor, listening to the stream’s song and breathing in the dank smell of a wet forest. For a few hours, I was off the grid. And that’s a feeling you can’t buy at your nearest superstore.

Matika was a knot of exuberance, running back and forth through the woods just to be running. More than once she leaped over blowdown only to land chest-deep in a mud hole. She didn’t care. When I crossed the brook, she bounded past, splashing me in the process. I think she did that on purpose.

It took a couple hours but eventually I found that old beaver pond I’d fished a few years back. The newer ones below it had broken and drained, but the old one still held firm even though there was no indication that any beaver still lived there. From the beaver dam, I waved my fly rod a few times and landed a fair-sized brook trout. I didn’t let Matika wade into the pond so she sat on the dam looking rather bored while I fished. She pulled sticks from the dam and chewed on them until she caused the dam to leak. That and the gray clouds overhead cut my fishing short. No matter. I had reached the pond and, quite frankly, that was all I really wanted to do. The pond was just a destination – something to aim for while wandering around the woods for a day. The way I see things, it’s all about the journey. The destination doesn’t really matter.

I bushwhack through life. Show me a trail and I’ll follow it for a while but not forever. I’m not a big rules kind of guy. Some people live their lives in a box; others think outside of the box; I can’t even find the box and don’t know what I’d do with it if I could. So I go into the woods on a regular basis, finding there the kind of meaning and purpose that most people find in credos, scientific facts or sacred texts. I walk streams, hike trails and generally wander about the woods, looking for insights into the real. I’m rarely disappointed.

The hike out was easy – downhill for the most part. When I got back to the car, I realized that I hadn’t seen another human being all day. Just what the doctor ordered. Matika climbed into the back seat and slept all the way home. I basked in the glow that always follows a day spent outdoors. Returning home, I hooked myself back into the grid. But I’ll be out there again soon. I hope to return to the woods before my mud-caked boots have a chance to completely dry out.

Tags: bushwhacking, fly fishing, Green Mountains, hiking with dogs, the wild, Vermont