Minimalist Hiking

An excerpt from a previous writing - 

Being a loner a lot of the time on such things as running, biking, and trail (or no trail) walking, after reading the 10 Essentials of Winter Hiking I realized that I often have been a minimalist in terms of doing well thought out preparations for a hike - whether winter or summer - and have survived some dumb decisions by the application of a number of lucky breaks.

I had moved to Nova Scotia in January of 1974 in the midst of many feet of snow and temperatures that at night were sometimes as low as minus 30 degrees Fahrenheit. The house took weeks to warm up and was so cold the first few days - even with two stoves burning day and night - that the inside walls were coated in ice from the moisture in our breath, I guess, and we would sleep bundled in clothing in our sleeping bags covered by quilts. (My now ex-wife cried a lot in those first two weeks or so). It was at this stage of our new arrival that I decided to walk the seemingly marked property line of our 50 acres to get a feel for what our property was like, as when we had bought the old farm we had just looked over the house and took the land for granted. So at about 3:30 in the afternoon I went out the back door and over the hundred feet or so to the southern boundary and headed westward to the cairned back corner some unknown distance into the wood. The snow was deep and I was wearing rubber wellingtons and decent enough coat, hat. gloves etc but nothing else such as a compass, or a light or matches or whatever and of course this was in the days before cell phones. In fact the house phone (not yet connected) was an old crank phone - four longs two shorts - party line deal. I reached the corner well marked wooden pillar incised with various information by Lands and Forests surveyors and turned north into a long marshy heath with bushes slashed to form a fairly well marked trail. It had been snowing now for about a half hour or so and my deep foot steps in the snow were filling rapidly, and early twilight was darkening just as rapidly with the cloud cover and the snow. By the time I crossed the heath - nicely frozen under the several feet of snow - and entered the dark and brooding spruce wood the trail was becoming less well-defined, and in fact the trail was no longer a trail and the twilight was no longer a light. I debated turning and following my track back to the house but with the falling snow covering in the tracks and the lack of light to see by I figured that it was best to head on to the north and eventually I should run into my neighbors property about a half-mile or so in front of me. The 'or so' of the previous sentence was in actuality more like a mile but I liked the uphill, solid ground (versus marshy heath which could have had springy open water areas to suck me in). It was really dark by now, but if you have ever hiked by dark night in snow covered terrain you know that it's amazingly simple to see 10 to 15 feet around you, so that avoiding trees and picking a reasonably straight line trail is fairly straight forward. I wasn't overly happy about being semi-lost in an unknown forest in the dark of a snowy bitter cold night but I wasn't worried either. I planned on giving myself an hour or so to find the neighbor or a road and if I didn't, I figured I would hunker down beneath a big spruce, pile up a little snow for a wind barrier and wait it out till morning. I didn't want my wife worried if I didn't get in but I knew that she knew I often sorta forgot to get home when I said I would so it would probably have been midnight or so before she would have called the Mounties. Eventually I reached a 'choppings' - a somewhat of a cleared area of forest where pulp-wood cutters had clear cut 15 or 20 acres leaving great piles of toppings - so I turned following the choppings boundary line to the eastward, toward the river and the road that followed it. As I crested the top of the hill before descending toward the river I caught a dim glimpse of a streetlight far back in the village of Grand River and I have to say that it really boosted my morale a bit. I was headed in the right direction. On reaching the Frank MacDonald road I turned toward home and by the time I came to my lane I knew I just taken a memorial hike of about four miles in unknown territory at night in a light snowstorm. Up the quarter mile of lane to the house and into a hot shower that warmed me up with cold toes and fingers stinging madly.

"Have a nice walk?", she said as she served me up steaming hot tea and such after my shower.

"Yep!", said I.