The story behind a missing man
Canoe trippers on Ottertooth.com sent in a flurry of messages about their summer encounters with Trask, describing him as “amazing,” “great” and “a Daniel Boone-type guy.” One, named Marina, remembered his resourcefulness—he carried a selection of the latest camping and survival gear, but also stone arrowheads fitted onto dowel-like shafts, both of which he patiently made by hand. “I don’t believe for a minute this seasoned, smart, adventurous guy went out there with nothing,” concluded Marina. “He is fully stocked, making arrowheads hunting, etc., and looking up at the sky daily with the thought, ‘Wonder what the helicopters are looking for?’”
Maureen created a web gallery of photographs her son had taken that summer: a shirtless self-portrait in the canoe, several staged shots of carefully organized campsites, an image of a stylized chalk rendering of the Masonic Eye of Providence, similar to the insignia that appears on the backside of a U.S. $1 bill. But as the weeks went on, Trask’s whereabouts remained an enigma. His email and bank accounts were monitored; no activity was detected. Missing person reports were filed in registries across Canada. “The beauty, tranquility and spirituality within Temagami and its people captured the hearts of many, including our son’s,” Maureen wrote in one of her almost daily online updates. “We need to remind ourselves this is Daniel’s journey. He is learning as well as teaching us a lesson in life, be strong.”
My own correspondence with Maureen began in January this year, when I gathered the nerve to contact her about writing a profile of her son. She politely declined, explaining that the family wasn’t ready for a story. I followed up several times as the months passed, offering to help with the search, but she remained reluctant. In May, while Don, his oldest son Adam and a group of friends were in the middle of an exhausting three-week stint of cruising backroads, climbing rocky peaks and bushwhacking through swamps and forests from their search headquarters at Camp Wanapitei, I received a surprising email. “I was wondering if you were still on for Maple Mountain long weekend canoe/search and if you could lead it,” wrote Maureen. That was all I needed to start gearing up for a seven-day trip.
Maureen wasn’t naïve enough to see the Maple Mountain expedition as anything more than a body-recovery mission, but after six months on an emotional rollercoaster she needed closure and confirmation that her own impressions of her son were correct—that Trask hadn’t ditched his car and hitchhiked to Mexico, been kidnapped or worse. Maple Mountain seemed like an improbable destination for someone trekking overland with minimal food and gear—the peak is about 40 kilometres as the crow flies from Trask’s abandoned car—but Maureen knew her son had made a special effort to reach the summit in the summer, and believed such an ambitious journey fit with his character. She also had some clues to go on. Poukhlov had gone to Belarus for the winter on October 25, but when he returned to Temagami in late March, he noticed he was missing about a week’s worth of firewood and a few knives. Perhaps Trask had gathered his wits at his friend’s place, then launched a survivalist epic.
Simon Donato, a Calgary-based adventure athlete who has revolutionized search and rescue over the past decade, agreed that Maureen could be on the right track. Donato cuts against the grain of, as he puts it, “typical search and rescue where everyone holds hands and walks through the forest.” He’s convinced that cases involving adept backcountry travellers like Trask require a different approach than the usual grid-search methodology that focuses on a missing person’s last known position. Donato applied his unique, go-far-fast-and-light technique to help resolve two cold cases involving downed aircraft in the American Southwest. His best-known success came in March 2012, when he was part of a maverick team of long-distance runners who discovered the body of ultrarunning legend Micah True, the protagonist of Christopher McDougall’s bestseller Born to Run, in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest.
During the True search, Donato spent a day walking police-established grid lines. “We thought, ‘What the hell are we doing out here? There’s no way he’d be running this stuff,’” says Donato, a PhD geologist and director of Adventure Science, a consulting group that studies the physiological effects of extreme outdoor activities. When the rest of the searchers called it quits for the day, Donato and a few other long-distance runners dashed out to a remote and scenic area they thought would be more inspiring to a world-class adventure athlete like True. They promptly found his body.
For the Trask case, Donato suggested a similar approach. “I’d search what hasn’t been searched. Going back and redoing something is a waste of time.” Still, he underlined the fact that the chances of finding the young man were slim. “With somebody missing in Temagami, there’s so much water, extremely dense bush and a healthy wildlife population,” he said. “Remember, you’re looking for something about six foot tall by two feet wide that’s hiding in that huge area.”
The Temagami wilderness has had a magnetic appeal for wayward souls and adventure-seekers since it was first promoted by fledgling tourist camps more than a century ago. In 1906, an enigmatic Brit named Archie Belaney immigrated to Toronto and quickly found his way north to Temagami, which was then a bustling railway town. Belaney turned his back on a charmed childhood in southern England and took up with the Ojibwa on Bear Island, learning to hunt, trap and paddle canoes. He married a local girl and was adopted into the band under the name Koh-kom-see, “Little Owl.” It wasn’t long before his promiscuous ways and weakness for alcohol forced him to flee Temagami, but later, writing under the name Grey Owl, he would describe the region in glorious detail and become one of Canada’s best-known writers and conservationists.
Grey Owl’s stories played an integral role in inspiring Toronto native Hap Wilson to escape overbearing parents and venture north in the first years of the 1970s. Early on, Wilson barely survived a long, cold winter shacked up with a friend in a derelict logging camp on Diamond Lake. Desiring a sanctuary of his own, Wilson then built a squatter’s shack on a more remote lake at age 22. He scored a government job maintaining backcountry canoe routes, which eventually led him to publish Temagami Canoe Routes, a guidebook that remains a trip-planning staple today. Later he became the caretaker of the 1930s-era cabin on the Lady Evelyn River that he owns today.
