Faye and Maciek's Adventures in the frosty Canadian North
We did a murder mystery party for my birthday this year (at a nearby park due to space constraints and current regulations). This one was set in a small village in the 1930s. Everyone did a great job with their characters!
I also got another “Maciek Special” birthday cake this year:
A lot of people are asking about animal sightings on our hike. Although there was a ton of bear sign (tracks & scat) along the trail, especially in the first few days, we never actually saw any bears, which is probably for the best in the remote wilderness. We also saw lots of wolf tracks and heard a pack of wolves howling in the distance. We mostly saw caribou on the hike, plus two porcupine and a Dall’s Sheep up on the Plains of Abraham (plus lots of sheep tracks in Dodo Canyon).
Several websites claim that the CANOL trail is either one of or the single most difficult hiking trail in Canada or even all of North America. One of the guys we ran into on our hike (who was a professional outdoors guide) said that it was hands down the toughest trip he’s done. It’s hard to say how many people hike the CANOL every year, but I’ve heard that it’s probably around 15-20. It’s also unclear what proportion of those people actually complete the hike, but it’s substantially fewer.
Outpost Magazine wrote a nice article about hiking the CANOL. Spoiler alert: they didn’t make it (complete with gruesome injury photos), and had to get picked up around where I was having ankle issues. I agree with their summary of the difficulty of the trail:
Anyone with experience and strong skills can hike the Canol Heritage Trail. The hiking isn’t technically difficult; navigation is straightforward and the hazards are manageable. Its challenge lies in the mile after relentless mile of uncompromising terrain, in the way that a heavy pack grinds you down day after day, sapping your recovery and steadily depleting your reserves. That and Canol’s extreme isolation are what make it a testing ground.
Of course any hike this extreme is going to attract the type of people who want to make it even more extreme. One guy hiked it without any food. A number of people have cycled it… having hiked the trail, I can authoritatively say that it is not a bikeable trail. We found several abandoned bicycles along the trail. How did they get there? What happened to their owners?
And yet, these guys somehow biked it in only 8 days. Perhaps we should have heeded their advice on the Blue Mountain section of the route:
Eventually, the road climbs a bit, giving one the option of either the high route over Blue mountain, or the low. Trying to find the road was an exercise in Alder schwacking, and future parties would be advised to just stick near the river, as the flats get better just beyond where the high route leaves the river. Word of warning; DON’T use the high route.
Another guy biked it solo in 2016 – his blog post is here and his YouTube video is here. He was shockingly under-prepared for the trip (“Sucks to be the yahoo without much preparation or a sat phone but it’s either do it now or never”). He’s got some good pictures of the old buildings before they were boarded up or demolished, the canyon lake where we ended our hike, and the nasty swamp that we skipped. Perhaps most notably, he’s the one who found the hikers whose buddy drowned crossing the Little Keele, and then had to bike out to alert the authorities. Oh, and then instead of buying a flight out, he packrafted 600 km to Inuvik.
I guess all of this is to say that this hike attracts a particular type of person.