cliffLAND

A root is an odd thing to go looking for in the woods. Most of the time we are interested in what a tree is doing above ground. We notice the trunk, the branches, the leaves, perhaps the shape of the crown. The roots are largely left to their private arrangements beneath the soil. Yet for bushcraft, some of the most useful material a tree produces is down there, out of sight.

When it comes to roots for lashing, spruce is the tree I would look for first. Spruce roots are generally considered the best for this purpose, although other evergreens, including cedar, can provide useful material as well. The roots can be used for lashing and sewing birchbark canoes, making birchbark crafts, binding things together and, in an emergency, even replacing a shoelace. It is a useful resource that does not require you to carry it into the woods. You just have to know which trees are likely to provide it.

Finding suitable roots is less about digging enthusiastically than noticing the circumstances in which they are likely to be useful. Soft, damp or loamy soil is preferable to ground that seems determined to defend itself. A slope can help too, particularly on the lower side of a large spruce or other suitable evergreen, where the soil may be easier to work. The roots themselves often have a reddish or orange outer skin, which gives another clue once you know what you are looking for. After that, the job becomes less archaeological excavation and more following a line.

And following a line is important. A root does not generally present itself as a length of cord waiting politely for collection. It disappears under other roots, changes direction, branches, kinks and occasionally decides that six inches of progress is quite sufficient for one afternoon. Pull too hard and it breaks. Dig too aggressively and you disturb everything around it. The useful skill is not extracting the root. It is learning how little extraction is necessary.

That changes the character of the activity. The forest is not a hardware store in which everything has been placed for our convenience. Taking material from it has consequences, even when those consequences are small. A large spruce has a great many roots, and taking a modest amount of small root material is unlikely to trouble it, but that does not turn carelessness into a principle. Small young trees are another matter. If the tree is only a couple of inches in diameter, taking roots can cause serious harm. The practice is to choose larger established trees, take only what you need and leave the place looking much as it did before you arrived.

There is a curious amount of technique in what happens next. Fresh roots need to stay damp because once they dry out, they become brittle and lose the flexibility that made them useful in the first place. The outer reddish skin can be peeled by hand, but there is a much more efficient method involving a split piece of branch. The root is pulled through the split and the branch does the scraping. It is the sort of simple solution that seems obvious immediately after someone shows it to you, which is generally how the best bushcraft tricks operate.

Larger roots can then be split lengthwise to produce flatter material. That takes a little more attention than it sounds. The split does not necessarily remain obediently in the middle. One side begins to take more than its share, and the correction is surprisingly delicate: bend the thicker side until the split returns to centre, then continue. Underground growth leaves its evidence in the material. Kinks and awkward turns remain in the root because the root had to negotiate the ground long before we decided it might make a useful piece of lashing.

There are manufactured alternatives, of course. Cane works. It is convenient, consistent and available in a roll rather than several inches beneath a spruce. But convenience has its own limitations. In my experience, cane used on a birchbark canoe eventually needed replacing while the spruce-root lashings remained sound. That is not an argument against cane so much as a reminder that a material’s usefulness depends partly on what it is being asked to do. The cane was convenient. The roots were already doing the job.

What interests me more is the knowledge behind the material. Knowing that a spruce root can become a binding is useful. Knowing where to look for one, which soil will make the search reasonable, how to follow it without tearing up the ground, when to leave a tree alone, how to keep the material from drying and how to prepare it without wasting it is something else. That is not really a list of facts. It is a relationship with the material. You begin to see the forest differently because you know what is happening beneath it.

This is one of the pleasures of bushcraft. The forest gradually becomes less like scenery and more like a place with working parts. A spruce is no longer simply a spruce. Its roots have become potential cordage. A fallen branch can become the tool for preparing them. A birchbark canoe, which might otherwise look like a remarkably complicated object, begins to reveal the materials that hold it together. The more you know about those materials, the less mysterious the object becomes and, somehow, the more interesting it gets.

There is also a useful restraint in the practice. Bushcraft involves taking things from the woods, and that makes the attitude with which the skill is taught part of the skill itself. If someone learns only how to harvest a material, they have learned half of something. They also need to learn when not to take it, how much is enough and what their actions leave behind. The lesson gets passed along with the technique, whether we intend it to or not.

A root is therefore a fairly good teacher of attention. It is hidden, inconveniently shaped, easily damaged and useful in ways that are not obvious until someone points them out. You can walk through a spruce stand for years without noticing any of this. Then somebody shows you one root, and suddenly the forest floor has acquired another layer of information.

The trees have not changed. Your list of things to notice has.

Evergreen Roots: bushcraft & survival resource is Episode 10 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, released May 25, 2024.

-Chad

Outdoor clothing is often discussed as though there is a correct answer. There is a right jacket, the right boot, the right fabric, the right number of layers. Then you go outside and discover that the weather has not read the catalogue.

The more I have spent time outdoors, the less interested I have become in finding the perfect piece of clothing and the more interested I have become in what clothing is actually doing. It is shelter. It regulates heat, deals with moisture, blocks wind, keeps insects out, protects us around fire and, occasionally, determines whether we are comfortable enough to notice anything else. Style gets a vote too, although it probably should not be allowed to chair the meeting.

I was reminded of this one winter when a group of international outdoor recreation students came to Canada to experience winter camping, bushcraft and tracking. They arrived looking exactly as you might expect future outdoor professionals to look. Modern shells, fleece layers, technical footwear, high-tech snowshoes. I arrived at the other end of the clothing spectrum wearing traditional snowshoes, wool from head to toe, leather mitts and a Hudson Bay blanket made into a coat. The temperature was around minus 30 Celsius. By evening, while we were out looking at animal tracks, I was warm enough to have the blanket coat open. The students were beginning to look rather less enthusiastic about standing still.

It was not proof that old clothing is better than new clothing. It was proof that clothing has a job to do, and the job changes with circumstances. If you are moving hard through snow, you have different problems from someone standing still. If it is wet, wind matters differently. If you are sitting beside a fire, synthetic fabric has some additional considerations. If you are in the Arctic, the rules become more particular still. Clothing is less a uniform than a negotiation.

Layering is one of the simplest expressions of that negotiation. Instead of asking one garment to do everything, you divide the work. An underlayer manages moisture and sits against the body. Insulation provides warmth. An outer shell deals with wind, rain and snow. When you are working hard, you remove layers before you become soaked with your own effort. When you stop, you put them back on before the cold has a chance to collect the debt.

That last part is easy to underestimate. In the outdoors, problems are often cumulative rather than dramatic. You are a little damp. Then you are tired. Then the wind picks up. Then you discover that you are hungry. None of these things, by itself, is particularly impressive. Together they can become a fairly persuasive argument. Clothing is one of the places where small decisions accumulate.

Cotton gets much of the attention in this conversation because of its reputation for becoming a liability when wet. And in cold, wet conditions it can be. But even cotton refuses to stay in its assigned role. In a hot environment, a wet cotton shirt can be useful. In the Arctic, I have used cotton as an outer shell over warmer layers because the cold, dry conditions were doing something very different from a rainy Ontario afternoon. The same material can be sensible in one environment and foolish in another.

Wool is similarly interesting because it does not need perfect conditions to remain useful. It can absorb moisture and still provide warmth. It works as an underlayer, an insulating layer, socks, mitts, hats and even improvised wrist gaskets. An old wool sock with a hole in the heel does not necessarily become garbage. Cut off the foot and you have a tube that can cover the gap between your coat and mitts. It is not particularly glamorous. It is, however, quite good at being there.

Traditional materials make the same point in a more dramatic way. When I lived in the Arctic, I used caribou clothing. The material was remarkably warm and light, and the footwear looked more like slippers than winter boots. The clothing was not designed around the assumptions of modern outdoor retail. It was designed around a particular place, a particular climate and a particular need. I even kept the caribou clothing in the freezer and lightly dampened the leather before putting it on so it would remain flexible. It sounds like a poor beginning to a clothing review. In that environment, it made perfect sense.

Modern materials, of course, have their own advantages. Down creates an excellent insulating layer because of the amount of still air it can hold, and it packs into a remarkably small space. That makes a down jacket particularly useful when you have been working hard and then stop. Pull it from the pack, put it on, and suddenly the heat you were producing five minutes earlier has somewhere to stay. Wear that same jacket while breaking trail through deep snow and you may simply manufacture a damp sleeping bag inside your coat.

That is one of the recurring oddities of outdoor clothing. A feature that is excellent in one circumstance becomes a problem in another. Breathability is useful until it is raining hard. Waterproofing is useful until you are sweating inside it. Bulk is useful for insulation but less useful when you have to carry it uphill. Lightweight footwear feels wonderfully freeing until you need enough insulation for deep winter. Aggressive boot tread gives you impressive grip and can also give a well-used trail an increasingly impressive collection of erosion problems.

Even the head is part of this ongoing argument. A hat is not merely something you wear because Canadians have apparently agreed that winter requires one. Wind can strip away the warm layer around your head surprisingly efficiently. A fur-edged hood works partly by interrupting that moving air before it reaches your face. In summer, I have taken a wool hat, soaked it in water and put it back on. The same material that helps retain heat in one situation can help keep the sun off and hold cool moisture in another.

Rain gear presents perhaps the clearest example of the compromise. A waterproof shell keeps rain off, but it cannot completely prevent the body underneath from producing its own weather. When you work hard, you can become wet from the inside while remaining perfectly protected from the rain outside. Sometimes, in a light mist, allowing clothing to breathe may be more comfortable than sealing yourself inside a waterproof shell. In a hard rain, that calculation changes. The rain gets a vote.

So does fire. Leather is not particularly elegant in the rain, but it is comfortable, reasonably resistant to sparks and acquires an excellent campfire smell. Synthetic clothing has many virtues, but some synthetic fabrics have the unfortunate characteristic of turning a careless encounter with a fire into an expensive collection of ventilation holes. A couple of holes and five hundred dollars later, the lesson can become quite memorable.

Footwear introduces another set of compromises. Weight matters because anything attached to the end of your leg has to be moved with every step. Stiffness matters too. Aggressive tread can affect a trail. Ankle support may be useful for some people and restrictive for others. Winter footwear needs enough bulk to insulate, but bulk has a weight of its own. Gaiters can keep snow, water, burrs and ticks out, which is a respectable amount of work for something that mostly looks like a fabric sleeve.

By the time we get to insects, clothing has become less about comfort than about negotiating with the local population. Long sleeves, hats, handkerchiefs, gaiters and tightly closed cuffs can all change how accessible you are to mosquitoes, deer flies and ticks. The woods are not particularly interested in whether your clothing looks technical. They are interested in whether they can get through it.

That may be the larger lesson in all of this. Outdoor clothing is often sold as a collection of solutions, but outside there are mostly trade-offs. Natural fibres have advantages and limitations. Synthetic materials have advantages and limitations. Traditional clothing can be remarkably sophisticated without looking sophisticated. Modern clothing can be remarkably effective while occasionally solving one problem by creating another. The useful question is not, “What is the best clothing?” It is, “What does this particular place require from me today?”

That question tends to simplify things.

You start looking at the weather rather than the label. You notice whether you are moving or standing still. You pay attention to dampness before it becomes a problem. You consider the fire before you sit beside it. You notice the bugs. You notice the trail beneath your feet. You start choosing clothing for the place you are actually in rather than the wilderness you saw in the advertisement.

Eventually, the clothing becomes less noticeable.

Which is probably what good outdoor clothing was supposed to do in the first place.

The Essentials of Outdoor Clothing, Parts 1 and 2 are Episodes 8 and 9 of the Reverie Nature Podcast.

-Chad

The song that became the theme for the Reverie Nature Podcast did not begin as a song. It began with ten minutes on a hilltop. I was doing some regular hikes on Blueberry Mountain and, as I sometimes did, stopped at the lookout to write in a nature journal. There was no intention of composing anything. I was simply trying to record what was happening around me before my attention wandered off to something else. A scarlet tanager was singing. Trembling aspen leaves were moving in the wind and falling one by one. A heavy mist was coming through the countryside, climbing the hills and being combed by the pines. I was above the forest, looking down on the canopy. The weather was changing quickly. The leaves made their particular aspen noise until, eventually, they did not. They had fallen.

The first lines came from what was actually there. The tanager was singing. The leaves were falling. The mist really did seem to be combed by the pines. Sometimes nature writing requires less imagination than attention. The song came later, which is worth noting because when I look back at those journal notes now, I can see things in them that I did not consciously put there. At the time, I thought I was recording a place. But I was also living through a particular moment, and the news of the day was somewhere in the room, even though the room happened to be a hilltop.

In Canada, residential schools and the discovery of unmarked burial sites were occupying a great deal of public attention. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had already documented the deaths of children at residential schools and the long history of inadequate records concerning their deaths and burial places. In 2021, discoveries and investigations at former residential school sites brought the subject into public consciousness with renewed force. I was not sitting on the mountain thinking, I should now write a song about residential schools. Quite the opposite. I was trying not to write about anything. And yet some of those thoughts seem to have been waiting just outside the journal.

The trembling aspen leaves became more than leaves. Falling one by one suggested loss. The mist moving through the hills suggested departure. The storm became weather, and something else. None of this was planned. Meaning had simply arrived after the fact, which may be one of the more useful things about writing. We tend to imagine that meaning is something a writer puts into a piece, but sometimes it is already sitting there, waiting for the writer to notice it. That is also why I have always preferred songs that leave some room for the listener. A mist can remain a mist. It does not need to be promoted to metaphor before it is allowed to be interesting.

The storm imagery in this song was partly the weather itself. It was a windy day, the sky was dark and moving, and the mist was travelling quickly. But there was another storm in the background, one that had nothing to do with meteorology. “Lightning surges. Thunder pounds. The sky’s dark and out of control.” Those lines can belong entirely to the weather. They can also belong somewhere else. The same thing happened with the more hopeful images. There was still green among the brown hills. Sunlight was breaking through the darker sky and reaching the forest floor. I had the thought of resilience without necessarily deciding that I was writing about resilience. The image arrived first. The interpretation came later. A fallen leaf can be a fallen leaf. It can also remind you that things end. Both statements can survive quite comfortably in the same song.

The music gave the images another layer, and this is where prosody became part of the writing. I had been experimenting with drop D tuning, lowering the lowest string so it could continue to ring underneath the chords. The progression was simple: D-sus2, C-sus2 and G-sus2. The chords repeat, and many of the notes remain in place as they change, so rather than moving dramatically from one harmonic destination to another, the song tends to hover. The lyric is carrying loss, uncertainty and a little hope, while the harmony refuses to settle the matter for us. That relationship between what the words are saying and what the music is doing is the useful part of prosody. The chords do not simply accompany the lyric. They give it another meaning.

There is something slightly sombre in the harmonica and arrangement, but the underlying chords are not particularly unhappy. There is a lift underneath them. The result sits somewhere between loss and hope, which seems appropriate for a song that began with falling leaves. Later, the song acquired a video and, with it, a life that had very little to do with the original ten minutes on the mountain. There was an old cedar tree, estimated to be somewhere between 250 and 500 years old, with generations gathered around it. My daughter played harmonica. There was drone footage over Blueberry Mountain during an unusually good fall for colour. None of those things had been in the journal, but they belonged to the song anyway.

A year and a half after I wrote the song, someone at a local song circle suggested submitting it to CKCU’s Tree Songs project, which brought songwriters together around the idea of celebrating and protecting trees. A song that began with sitting above a forest had somehow wandered into a conversation about protecting one. That seems appropriate. A song can make a landscape feel familiar without becoming a policy document about it. It can make a tree difficult to regard as merely a tree. The old cedar does not need to make an argument. It has already been standing there for several centuries. The rest of us are comparatively recent arrivals.

Looking back, the song was never really just about what I saw that morning. The weather was there. So was the news. Personal memories were there. Family came later. Other musicians came later still. The recording itself changed it. What began as three chords and a few notes in a journal gradually accumulated people, places and meanings. But underneath all of it, the original hilltop remains: a bird, aspen leaves, mist, pines, wind and a darkening sky.

It is tempting to think that writing begins when you decide to write. I am less convinced of that now. Sometimes the writing begins earlier, while you are simply paying attention. The sentence arrives later. The song arrives later still. Meaning may take even longer. You go up the mountain intending to write down what you see and come home with a song. Then a daughter, a cedar and a few hundred years of history get involved. At that point, it seems reasonable to stop explaining.

Writing a Song: Podcast’s Theme Song is Episode 7 of the Reverie Nature Podcast.

-Chad

Henry David Thoreau was not particularly good at leaving things alone. Give him a pond and he wanted to know how deep it was. Give him a walk and he wanted to know where it led. Give him a school and, before long, he was questioning the educational philosophy. Give him a generally accepted opinion and there was a reasonable chance he would want to inspect it personally. When people in Concord said Walden Pond was bottomless, Thoreau eventually sounded it with a compass, chain and line. He found the deepest point to be 102 feet. The pond had a bottom after all. It was apparently willing to cooperate with science.

That habit of looking for himself ran through much of his life. After graduating from Harvard in 1837, Thoreau taught at Concord’s public school, resigned when the school committee insisted on corporal punishment, and later taught with his brother John at a private school. His problem was not simply with the unpleasantness of the rod. He objected to the idea that education should depend on obedience rather than curiosity and direct experience. There is something almost comically efficient about his response: he was told how education was supposed to work, tried the prescribed method, and then left.

That connects surprisingly well with what we now call outdoor experiential education. The value of taking people outside is not simply that the scenery improves. Experience changes the relationship between a person and the thing being studied. You can explain a forest, identify its trees and describe its ecology. Or you can put someone in the forest and let them discover that the ground is wet, the weather has opinions and the tree they have been standing beside for ten minutes is considerably more interesting than it looked in the classroom.

Thoreau’s journal became another form of this attention. Emerson encouraged him to keep one, and over the years it became a remarkable record of weather, plants, animals, walks, people and observations. He kept looking at the same world and finding that it changed. That sounds obvious until you spend enough time outdoors to realize how much you miss by looking only once. A tree in November has very little interest in explaining what it was doing in May.

Walden gave Thoreau an extended opportunity to practise this. He moved into his cabin on July 4, 1845, and stayed for a little over two years. The mythology sometimes places him deep in the wilderness, although Walden Pond was only about a mile and a half from Concord. He walked into town. Visitors came to see him. A railroad ran nearby. His solitude had a fairly convenient relationship with civilization.

That is one of the more interesting things about the experiment. Thoreau was not really trying to disappear. He was trying to remove enough noise to notice what remained. The pond, weather, birds, ice, trees and changing seasons became subjects of sustained attention. He watched storms. He walked for hours. He measured things. He listened. The world did not become more interesting because he went to Walden. He became more interested in the world.

The consequences eventually reached well beyond the woods. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, published in 1849, argued that conscience could take precedence over obedience to an unjust government. Gandhi read the essay and was influenced by its argument, although his philosophy of satyagraha had already begun developing from his own religious, ethical and political traditions. Martin Luther King Jr. encountered Thoreau’s work as a student at Morehouse College and later drew on both Thoreau’s ideas about civil disobedience and Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolence. An essay written by a man living beside a pond in Massachusetts eventually became part of the intellectual history of India’s independence movement and the American civil-rights movement.

There is a useful connection between that history and what Thoreau was doing outdoors. In both cases, he was suspicious of conclusions that had been handed to him. Look for yourself. Decide what you actually see. Do not confuse an established answer with a correct one. Sometimes that meant sounding a pond. Sometimes it meant questioning a school. Sometimes it meant refusing to cooperate with a government he believed was acting unjustly.

We can give people facts about a place all day and still leave them untouched by it. But let them sit beside it, walk through it, get wet in it, notice it changing, and the facts begin to acquire some weight of their own. A place that has become familiar is no longer quite as easy to dismiss. You may forget the name of the tree. You are less likely to forget the tree.

Perhaps that is what solitude gave Thoreau. Not an escape from the world, but enough quiet to examine his relationship with it. He went to Walden to simplify his life and produced one of the most discussed books about complicated life in American literature. He sought solitude a short walk from Concord. He went looking for a bottomless pond and found 102 feet. Then an essay about refusing unjust authority travelled from Massachusetts to Gandhi and King.

Thoreau had gone into the woods to see what was there.

He found rather more than he was measuring.

Finding Solitude in Nature: A Journey with Henry David Thoreau is Episode 6 of the Reverie Nature Podcast. Story-telling.

-Chad

Echoes of Conservation: John Muir’s Presidential Rendezvous is Episode 5 of the Reverie Nature Podcast, part of the Legends of Environmental Stewardship series. The episode uses reenactment and storytelling to bring Muir’s encounters with Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft to life. This companion piece steps outside the theatre to look more closely at the idea underneath those encounters: that experiencing a place may be the beginning of caring enough to protect it.

John Muir had an interesting way of getting people to understand a place. He did not seem particularly interested in explaining it first. He wanted you to go there.

That idea is easy to overlook because we tend to think of conservation as something that happens through information. We learn about an ecosystem, understand its importance, hear the arguments for protecting it, and presumably become more inclined to care. Muir seemed to have a different order of operations. First, experience the place. Then see what happens to the argument.

It is also the underlying principle of much of outdoor experiential education today. In my own work, I have seen how differently people respond when something is no longer an abstraction. A forest is one thing when it is described. It is another when you have spent a wet afternoon in it, noticed how the ground changes under your boots, watched the light move through it, and discovered that you have been paying attention for an hour without quite realizing it.

People do not need to know more. They need to care more.

That may sound like a small distinction, but it changes the purpose of taking people outdoors. The goal is not simply to transfer information from one head to another. It is to create an encounter that makes the information matter. Once you care about a place, facts have somewhere to land.

Muir understood this well enough to invite Theodore Roosevelt into the landscape rather than merely explain it to him. In 1903, Roosevelt asked Muir to accompany him into Yosemite, writing that he wanted to “drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.” The actual wilderness trip lasted three days and three nights. They camped in Mariposa Grove, travelled through the high country, spent a night in a snowstorm near Sentinel Dome and Glacier Point, and eventually returned to Yosemite Valley.

There is something rather practical about the arrangement. Muir did not have to make a presentation. Roosevelt was already there, standing among giant sequoias, sleeping outdoors and dealing with snow. Muir could talk about conservation around a campfire, but the surroundings were making their own argument.

The distinction matters because Muir was not simply trying to make wilderness sound beautiful. He was trying to make its protection seem necessary. During the trip, he discussed the condition of Yosemite and the need for federal protection of Yosemite Valley and the Mariposa Grove. The conversations became part of a longer political effort that eventually helped return those areas to federal protection in 1906.

That is a useful reminder that experience does not replace knowledge. It gives knowledge some traction.

Muir continued to work that way, although not every encounter produced the result he wanted. His later involvement with President William Howard Taft and the Hetch Hetchy controversy is a good example. In 1909, Muir showed Taft Yosemite Valley, and shortly afterward took Secretary of the Interior Richard Ballinger through Hetch Hetchy. Taft authorized Muir to accompany Ballinger to examine the valley and the proposed dam project.

This time, experience did not settle the argument in Muir’s favour. Hetch Hetchy was eventually approved for development, and the O’Shaughnessy Dam was authorized in 1913. Muir died the following year.

That part of the story is important because conservation is sometimes told as though the right person says the right thing and history politely agrees. It rarely behaves so courteously. Muir could take people into a landscape, make the case for what he saw there, organize supporters, write about it and still lose an argument.

But the larger work continued.

Muir helped found the Sierra Club in 1892 and became one of the most influential voices in the emerging American conservation movement. His writing and advocacy contributed to the protection of Yosemite and influenced the establishment and protection of other national parks and public lands. His name now sits on a national historic site and a national monument, among other reminders of the scale of his influence.

The interesting part of that legacy is not simply that Muir persuaded presidents. It is that he understood something about persuasion that remains useful long after the particular argument has changed.

Sometimes the most effective way to explain why a place matters is to stop explaining it.

Take someone there.

Let them notice the tree.

Let them get cold.

Let the rain arrive.

Let the place become something they have experienced rather than something they have been told about.

That may be the most durable part of Muir’s legacy. Not that he told people the wilderness was important, but that he understood the possibility that, once people experienced it closely enough, they might decide that for themselves.

-Chad

There is a particular moment in the woods when you realize you are no longer entirely certain where you are. It may not be dramatic. Nothing has happened. There is no bear, no broken leg, no sudden disappearance of the trail. You have simply been walking along and, at some point, the landscape has stopped agreeing with your understanding of it. That is the point of lost-proofing.

It is not the same thing as knowing how to use a map and compass, although you should know how to use them. It is not a substitute for a trip plan, knowing your route, understanding coordinates, or carrying the appropriate equipment. Those are the nuts and bolts of navigation and deserve to be learned properly. Lost-proofing is something a little different. It is the habit of remaining oriented to the landscape before you need to be. It is noticing what the country is doing around you, and occasionally asking yourself whether what you think is happening is actually what is happening.

Experienced people are not immune to getting turned around. In some ways, experience can make a person particularly comfortable with small assumptions. A person who has spent years in the woods may be less inclined to stop and question something that feels familiar. Complacency does not require inexperience. It only requires confidence to get slightly ahead of the evidence.

One of the simplest ways to begin is to stop looking at the ground so much. When walking through unfamiliar country, try to imagine the landscape from above. Where are the ridges? Where are the valleys? Is there a lake, a river, a creek or some other feature that gives the country a shape? Navigators call these kinds of features handrails because they give you something recognizable to follow. A ridge can keep you oriented. A shoreline can do the same. A valley can tell you where you are going even when the trees around you have become remarkably similar.

It is easy to miss all of this while following someone else. There is a curious tendency to watch the heels of the person in front of you and allow them to do the navigating. The ground directly in front of your boots is rarely the most useful piece of information in the forest. Every so often, stop and look around. More importantly, look behind you. The country you have just walked through can look surprisingly different from the other direction. A trail that was obvious from one side can disappear from the other. A rock outcrop, bend in a river or distinctive tree that seemed insignificant on the way in may become the thing that tells you where you are on the way out. Looking back is therefore not really looking backward. It is collecting information for later. This matters particularly when travelling off trail, and on rivers and larger lakes, where the landscape can be especially good at disguising the direction you came from.

The sun is another piece of information that is available most days without requiring a battery. Over the course of a day, its position changes predictably. You do not need to turn this into an elaborate exercise in celestial navigation to make use of it. Simply paying attention to where the sun is in relation to your direction of travel can provide another reference point. The sun moves roughly fifteen degrees across the sky each hour, so if you are walking in what you believe to be a straight line, its changing position gives you another way to notice whether your understanding of direction is holding together.

At night, the North Star provides another reference. It points toward true north, and the Big Dipper provides a familiar way to find it. I have used it myself. On one occasion I was travelling between two campsites with a camp counsellor. I knew the general area and thought I knew the little bush trail we were following. We were travelling in the dark without flashlights, which was perhaps already an indication that the evening had developed more confidence than equipment. At some point I noticed that the North Star was not where it should have been if we were travelling in the direction I thought we were. The useful thing was not simply knowing where north was. It was noticing that something did not agree. We stopped, considered it, and turned around. The North Star had not moved. Our understanding of where we were had. That distinction is at the heart of lost-proofing.

The wilderness also provides smaller clues, although they should be treated as clues rather than instructions. Moss is often more abundant on the shadier, moister side of trees, which in many circumstances is the north side. But it is not a compass. I have seen plenty of moss growing where it apparently had other ideas. That is precisely why it is useful, not because it can be trusted absolutely, but because it can be noticed. The same applies to the pale, chalky substance that can appear on the south side of trembling aspen in spring. It is associated with the tree’s response to the changing conditions of early spring and reflects sunlight from the bark. Again, it is not a compass. It is another small piece of information the landscape happens to be carrying around with it.

The point is not to find one magical natural sign that will tell you which way to go. It is to collect several small observations and see whether they agree. When paddling, even the weeds beneath the water can provide information. In slow-moving water, they bend with the current. If the current itself is difficult to see, the weeds are quietly displaying it. Clouds can do something similar. If you have been paying attention to the direction they have been moving and, a short time later, they appear to be moving differently, it is worth considering whether the weather changed or whether you did. If fifteen minutes from where you were standing the clouds appear to have changed direction while everything else seems much the same, there is another possibility: perhaps the clouds did not change direction at all. Perhaps you did.

This is one of those observations that sounds almost too simple to be useful until you begin noticing how often the landscape changes when you turn your own body around inside it. There are also ways to create information when the obvious information is unavailable. A stick and its shadow can establish a rough east-west line over time, giving you another way to orient yourself. A small piece of grass or a thin stick placed on the thumbnail can sometimes reveal the direction of the sun by the stick’s shadow even when the sun itself is hidden behind cloud. A magnetized needle floating on a small leaf can indicate magnetic north if you have the materials and know how to use the technique. These are not replacements for a compass. They are reminders that navigation is not confined to the object hanging around your neck or the screen in your hand.

The screen, in fact, has its own ideas about navigation. Phones die. Batteries die. Coverage disappears. Screens freeze in cold weather. GPS devices have limitations. A compass can even leave you without permission. I have had saplings pickpocket mine. The string attached to a compass can catch on a young branch as you walk. The branch bends, springs back, and takes the compass with it. I have had to backtrack to find one hanging from a branch, and I have watched it happen to other people as well. It is an oddly efficient theft. The woods do not need to take much from you to make things more complicated.

This is why awareness matters even when the technology is working perfectly. A GPS can tell you where you are. It cannot necessarily tell you whether you understand what the country around you is saying. A compass can give you a bearing. It cannot make you notice that the ridge you expected is somewhere it should not be. And then there is the most important piece of equipment, which is considerably harder to pack: your state of mind.

Becoming lost changes the situation. The temptation is to move. You want to undo the problem immediately. You want to walk until you find something familiar. That is often precisely when stopping becomes important. If you realize you are lost, panic is not a navigation technique. Sit down. Take a moment. Work out what you know, what you do not know and what resources you have with you. A person who has been lost for fifteen minutes does not necessarily need to spend the next two hours walking around trying to make the first fifteen minutes disappear. The longer you move without a sound reason for moving, the more complicated the problem can become.

There is a technique I use with groups called spokes on a wheel. It is not something I recommend casually to someone who is genuinely lost, and it requires practice and discipline. The first priority in a real lost situation is to stop, stay safe, and make yourself easier for rescuers to find. But as a practiced exercise, the idea is straightforward. Your starting point becomes the centre of the wheel. If you have a good reason to investigate a particular direction, you mark your starting point and create a clearly marked route outward. You go only as far as you can safely maintain that marked route, then return to the centre. If that direction tells you nothing useful, you can consider another. The important part is not the spokes. It is the wheel. You must always know how to get back to the centre.

When I practise this with groups, one of the things that becomes apparent very quickly is how easy it is to lose sight of your own markers. A piece of flagging tape that looked obvious when you tied it to a branch can disappear when you turn around. Wind can move it. A poor knot can let it fall. Bark or foliage can hide it. You discover that marking a trail and being able to follow a trail are two different skills.

That is the larger idea behind lost-proofing. It is not advanced navigation. In many cases the individual observations are quite simple. What makes them useful is that they are being noticed before there is a problem. You begin to see the ridge instead of merely walking through the trees. You notice where the sun is. You look behind you. You notice the current in the weeds. You notice where the clouds are going. You notice when something that should be familiar has become slightly unfamiliar.

None of these things, by themselves, will necessarily get you home. Together, they build a picture. And the more often you practise noticing that picture, the less likely it is that you will suddenly discover that you have been walking through the wrong one.

Navigation is usually presented as a matter of knowing where you are. I think there is another part to it. You need to notice when you are beginning to be somewhere you did not intend to be. That is what lost-proofing is really about. Not waiting until the map, compass or GPS becomes necessary, but developing enough awareness that the landscape has already given you a few hints by the time you realize you need them.

Navigation: Lost Proofing, Definitely Not the Basics is Episode 4 of the Reverie Nature Podcast. The podcast tells the fuller story and explores the techniques in greater detail. This account looks at the quieter part of navigation: paying attention to where you are before you need to know.

-Chad

Champion of the Wilderness: A Journey with Grey Owl is Episode 2 of the Reverie Nature Podcast. The podcast tells the story; this account looks at the facts, contradictions, and what remains worth considering.

Archibald Belaney was born in Hastings, England, in 1888 and raised by two aunts. His father was alive but largely absent, and there was little in the boy’s early life to suggest the Canadian wilderness that would eventually become his home. Yet he read about the North, about rivers and forests and the people who lived there, and became fascinated by a country he had never seen. A Buffalo Bill Wild West show that came through England added to the fascination. At seventeen, he left for Canada.

He worked briefly in Toronto, saved enough money for a train ticket, and headed north to Temagami. There he found the country he had been imagining in books. He also found people who seemed willing to accept him in a way he had not experienced at home. He learned the life of the bush and eventually became a trapper, guide and forest ranger. Somewhere along the way, Archie Belaney began becoming Grey Owl.

One winter, early in his years in the bush, he went out from a cabin dressed for weather considerably kinder than the weather that arrived. A blizzard came on. He followed a set of snowshoe tracks, believing they belonged to another trapper and would lead him to a camp. The tracks seemed to multiply until he realized they were his own. Then the weather cleared briefly, he saw the cabin, and found his way back. There are some lessons about winter that require very little explanation.

In 1925 he met Gertrude Bernard, a young Mohawk woman from Mattawa who would become known as Anahareo. She had been raised in town and, by her own account, had little real bush experience when they met. Archie taught her much of what he knew. She would eventually become a prospector, guide and accomplished canoeist in her own right. Their life together was not simply the story of a man showing a woman how to survive in the woods. Each would alter the other’s life in ways neither could have expected.

Their early years in the bush provided practical instruction of the sort that is difficult to forget. On one winter outing, Archie tested thin ice ahead of them with a stick while Anahareo followed behind. He told her to stay at least thirty feet back. She gradually closed the distance until the ice gave way. Archie hauled her out and sent her toward the cabin before her wet clothing could freeze. Winter had made its position clear.

The more important change came with a beaver.

A neighbouring trapper asked Archie to shoot a beaver caught in a trap on top of its lodge. Archie raised his rifle, then noticed that the animal was holding a young kit against its body with one paw while the other was caught. He lowered the rifle and freed her with a hatchet. She disappeared into the pond with the kit.

It was a small encounter, but Archie had begun looking at the animal differently.

Later, he and Anahareo found two young beavers alone and crying. Their mother was presumably gone, another casualty of the trapline. Anahareo insisted they take the kits home. The beavers became part of their daily lives, and Archie began to see behaviour in them that was difficult to reconcile with the idea that they were simply animals on a trapline. They had habits and tempers. They sulked when he was away and forgave him when he returned. They became companions rather than quarry.

The change in Archie was gradual. He continued trapping for a time, but the beavers and Anahareo’s influence eventually pushed him in another direction. Anahareo suggested that if he wanted to save beavers, he might try writing and speaking about them instead. He did. His first public address left him nervous, but Anahareo was there with one of the beavers, and the subject itself seemed to settle him. He spoke for about an hour and made more money from that speech than he had made from several years of trapping.

Writing followed. His first published articles appeared in 1929 and 1930, and The Men of the Last Frontier followed in 1931. That same year he was appointed a conservation officer and caretaker of park animals at Riding Mountain National Park before being transferred to Prince Albert. Eventually he and Anahareo settled at Ajawaan Lake, where their small cabin became known as Beaver Lodge. Their two tame beavers, Jelly Roll and Rawhide, became part of the attraction. Jelly Roll in particular became something of a celebrity, eventually earning the title “Queen of the Beaver People.”

There were visitors now. There were books and films. There were lecture tours.

The Grey Owl that had begun as a private invention had become a public figure.

In Britain, his popularity became enormous. He was invited to Buckingham Palace. He was expected to speak for twenty minutes. Archie wanted to enter last, representing the Indigenous people and the beavers he had come to champion. The arrangement was accepted. He spoke for the allotted twenty minutes, and then Princess Elizabeth asked him to continue. The King nodded, and Archie spoke for another forty minutes.

The story had grown considerably beyond a man living in a cabin beside a lake.

That is also where it becomes difficult.

Archibald Belaney was not Indigenous. He had constructed the identity of Grey Owl and allowed the public to believe that he was speaking from an Indigenous identity and experience that he did not possess. Parks Canada notes the particular difficulty of this history: while Grey Owl was being celebrated as a voice for Indigenous people and wilderness, Indigenous people around Prince Albert were themselves facing discriminatory government policies and restrictions on access to their territories and resources.

It is tempting to settle the matter from the comfortable distance of the present. The name was invented. The identity was false. We can find the appropriate vocabulary, put the man in the appropriate category and move on.

But the actual life is less cooperative.

The deception was real. So was the conservation work. Belaney did not merely put on a costume and lecture about wilderness. He spent decades in the bush, learned its habits, changed his mind about trapping, lived with beavers and devoted the latter part of his life to protecting animals and wilderness. His books and public appearances brought those ideas to a very large audience. None of that makes the deception disappear. It does make the story harder to reduce to the deception.

Anahareo makes the story harder to settle. She was not simply the woman behind Grey Owl. She became a prospector, guide, accomplished canoeist and author in her own right. Her 1972 book, Devil in Deerskins: My Life with Grey Owl, recounts her life with Grey Owl, their extensive travels through the bush and their work in environmental and wildlife protection. It also gave her a chance to tell that period of her life more fully and on her own terms. She later became an active campaigner for animal protection, including efforts to ban leg-hold traps and the poisoning of wolves, and in 1983 was appointed a Member of the Order of Canada.

By the 1960s, Grey Owl’s conservation work was attracting renewed attention, along with a new crop of sensational stories about his life. Anahareo objected to accounts she considered false and was prompted to write her own version of what had happened. She did not erase Grey Owl from the story, nor did she pretend the deception had not existed. She had lived with the man behind the name, and she had seen the change in him firsthand.

That leaves us with a rather awkward historical figure. Belaney invented an Indigenous identity that was not his to claim, and that matters, particularly in a period when Indigenous people around Prince Albert were themselves facing discriminatory government policies and restrictions on their territories and resources. At the same time, the conservation work was not invented. Neither was the wilderness that shaped him, or the beavers that helped change his mind about trapping.

Perhaps that is enough to leave the story unsettled. We are accustomed to deciding what a person was, particularly once we know how the story ended. But a life is generally less cooperative than a verdict. Grey Owl was Archie Belaney, an Englishman who invented a name and identity that made him famous. He was also a trapper who became a conservationist, a writer who brought wilderness into thousands of homes, and a man whose life with Anahareo and the two beavers helped change the direction of his life. Anahareo, meanwhile, became a conservationist and author in her own right, rather than remaining merely a character in his story.

There is no need to tidy all of that up. It is more useful to look at it carefully and let the contradictions remain where they are.

-Chad

This account draws on the second episode of the Reverie Nature Podcast, “Wilderness Survival 101: Don’t Panic.”

Wilderness survival, properly defined, is a perceived threat to life or limb — real or not makes no difference to how it lands on a person. You don’t practice wilderness survival; the practice of it has its own name, survivalism, a distinction that matters only once you start talking shop. Bushcraft is a different animal — old skills fitted to modern gear — a term made popular on this continent by Mors Kochanski, whom I had the good fortune to camp with in Alberta: a humble man, and the reason half the guides on television now wear a Mora, Sweedish steel around their neck. Nature lore is the plants and the ecology underneath all of it — knowing where to find what, before you need it.

Getting lost usually starts smaller than people expect: a step off the trail, a turn around, and the trees behind no longer resemble the ones just left. Two common responses to this are also the least useful — walking off in a chosen direction on nothing but instinct, or doing the same at a run. The instruction, instead, is to sit down first and think.

A young man in a group I was part of once, in the Sierra Nevada, found this out the hard way. New to the woods, sent off alone for a solo exercise while the rest of us did the same nearby, he got lost and did exactly what he’d been told — blew his whistle, sat, and waited for the truck horn marking the way back at day’s end. He didn’t hear it. From there he started walking, in the wrong direction, grew thirsty, and drank from a stream untreated, in a country where the water is assumed guilty until boiled. He left his backpack at that stream — his coat and spare water still in it — not through forgetting, but because it had simply stopped mattering to him by then. Needing some way to carry water onward, he took off his one remaining warm layer, soaked it, and wrung it out as he walked, solving the water problem and creating the cold one in the same motion, on a night headed toward freezing. I went out after him myself, tracking as far as I stated I would before turning back to report to the group’s leader — one lost person is a manageable problem, two is a different kind of problem, and I wasn’t willing to make myself the second. He was found on a roadway that evening, on his own, unhurt.

Panic scales down as easily as it scales up. A coworker of mine, winter camping, found her hands cold inside her mittens and took the mittens off — got about twenty feet before noticing what she’d done, ten minutes from shelter, no harm beyond the twenty feet.

One case I tracked involved a couple on a trail at a fork, took the wrong branch, and caught it within a minute. One went into the woods to relieve himself; the other turned back to wait at the fork. Coming back, he missed it by a matter of feet — the brush thick enough to hide the other standing twenty or thirty meters apart — and carried on alone. The other eventually came for help. We followed the footprints along a dusty four-wheeler trail and caught up with him just as he reached another road.

The order taught for actual survival situations starts with sitting down, then moves through priorities that shift with context: body temperature, water, fire, food, roughly in that sequence. Food is the most patient of the four — three or four weeks pass before it becomes an emergency, longer than most situations run. Someone managing a condition tied to blood sugar doesn’t get that patience, and should treat food differently from the start. Water is a matter of days. Body temperature can turn on a person within hours, faster still if the clothing involved is wet.

In a scenario when daylight is limited — two hours left, say, with no certainty of reaching the way out before dark — good instruction is to spend that light on shelter and water rather than on covering ground. Walking on after dark adds its own risk: uncertain footing, and no way to see what a branch might do on the way past. As uncomfortable as the notion of spending the night in the woods is, it is quite resaonable to believe you will safely see daylight after spending available time preparing for your priorities/needs.

-Chad

Ordinarily, I take the 80GB+ of recordings gathered through the year, make spreadsheets from them, then fill Dropbox folders so my bird’r buddies can help identify the sounds—an arrangement which works reasonably well, though it does ask a certain administrative commitment from everyone involved, particularly the person standing between the microphones and the spreadsheets.

This year, I started posting the recordings directly into the iNaturalist project / cliffLAND Saunter Journal instead

Now the IDs can happen more naturally, with my usual helpers—and others from the community—adding observations as they come across them, rather than waiting for me to transport audio files around the internet like a slightly overcommitted courier of frogs.

As an added benefit, the land trust website now automatically pulls in any observation made within the site boundaries as well, which means the whole system has begun updating itself quietly in the background, with noticeably less ceremonial handling from me.

The technologies are finally beginning to cooperate with one another.

Though there remains a reasonable chance they were always willing, and I was simply approaching them from the wrong end of the forest. 

 

-Chad

Decades ago, I rarely heard anyone in outdoor circles talking about chaga.

These days it appears in teas, health shops, and all manner of woodland conversations, though back then the only people I knew using it regularly were a few bushcrafters and winter travelers. We did not call it chaga.We called it True Tinder Fungus.

At the time, I had no idea it could make such a good drink. What interested us was the golden foamy centre — the part without the darker grain running through it. Once dried, it makes an excellent coal holder. A spark catches easily, and putting it out becomes a more serious discussion altogether.

Blowing on it greatly improves its mood.

A small amount powdered and dried on a rock catches quickly. A piece the size of a dime is usually enough. Something marble-sized may smoulder for fifteen minutes or more, carrying fire quietly along with it. The outer black crust is less enthusiastic in these matters. A dear friend, Martha Weber — among the most knowledgeable wild edible experts I have ever known — laughed when I described using it for fire lighting.
“Oh, what a waste.”
Apparently it makes an excellent and healthy drink. My far removed and unspoken response was that priorities sometimes depend on whether one needs tea or warmth more urgently.

Harvesting chaga is not especially easy work. It holds tightly to the birch and less known, on ironwood, and in any case, a little goes a very long way. Regardless of use, it seems best not to take more than needed.

I first learned about its fire-lighting qualities from a canoe guide friend many years ago. I still remember him standing there with an axe and flint, casually throwing a few sparks toward a piece on the ground. Away it went. One of those small wilderness moments that permanently improves your respect for certain ordinary things.

Some people may know this tinder from Northern Bushcraft by Mors Kochanski. Mors was one of a kind, and very much a gentleman. I had the privilege of camping and wandering alongside him once or twice in northern Alberta.

Those stories are probably best saved for another fungus fueled fire.

-Chad