The Way of the Wolf: Getting to the Start Line
You have a dream—a fabulous, scintillating dream. You want to strike out and immerse yourself in a wild experience that isn’t available in a pre-bought package, brought to fruition by an Airbnb or satisfied by the buffet selection on a cruise through the Caribbean. You want to do something unique: a wilderness exploration that you create yourself from the ground up. It will be an authentic, age-old exploit. Wild rivers, forests, lakes, mountains and snowfields abound. It will be rife with uncertainty—where the variables of Mother Nature can’t be controlled, and no safety net exists.
What I’m talking about could be referred to as an expedition, a vision quest or simply a journey. The difficulty in doing, say, a 1,000-kilometre canoe trip, is not the trip itself—it’s getting to the start line. In order to do so, you have to get over the biggest hurdle: your preparation mindset. I’ve done dozens and dozens of these sorts of ventures into the unknown, but the pre-trip song and dance is still the most difficult part for me to overcome. It’s a sort of inertia that you have to break through.
When you initially commit to an expedition that takes you out of the comfort and routine of daily life, there’s a tendency to overthink and overplan the journey. The key is to make the planning process as uncluttered as possible… you need to focus on what you actually need for the trip, rather than what you want. It’s easy to get lost in the shiny objects and baubles that might be nice to have but will not actually aid you in the journey.
I was once invited on a ski trip in the Arctic. It was sponsored and well-funded, so a sort of ‘paradox of choice’ plagued the preparations; we could have had anything we wanted—unlimited in the stuff we desired to create a brilliant film, be famous or simply be glorious explorers. We eventually got to the small community where the trip was to start and literally had a mountain of superfluous gear to sort through. We also had a professional cameraman in tow who had an additional 40 pounds of camera gear. As we packed everything together in the town, we realized we had too much stuff and ended up leaving most of the food and gear behind. What’s truly essential quickly becomes clear when you realize you have to drag it behind you on skis for 500 kilometres.
Once the trip started, the cameraman lasted only a day in the -40 C temperatures. He was picked up by snowmobile, which also took the film and a pile of electronics that wouldn’t operate in the cold. We also ended up getting rid of one of our tents and much of the rest of our equipment. The nature of your trip—and Mother Nature herself—has a way of forcing you to simplify things on a self-propelled journey, so you might as well keep it streamlined from the outset.
So, how to approach your journey? Well, many of us have done weekend camping trips where you head out into the woods for a night by canoe, kayak, bike, ski or on foot. You cook up a meal, sleep in a tent, then break down camp and head back home. A two-month trip in the woods is not much different; you use the same canoe, kayak, bicycle, skis or pair of hiking boots, you use your trusty tent and sleeping bag and you cook over a stove or fire—in other words, you’re already prepared to spend weeks in the bush if you’ve already got your transport and shelter dialed. You have all the gear you need. The only thing you need to do is figure out the food.
In a canoe, I’ve carried up to 50 days of food comfortably. If you’re through-hiking or bike-packing, you can send food ahead or pick it up along the way. Supplementing with easy fishing in remote areas is another option but will slow you down if you rely on it, so plan your timing accordingly. Toilet paper, four types of cameras, five sets of underwear and other gimmicks and gadgets… these extraneous items add up to a mountain of useless stuff that will detract from, rather than add to, your expedition experience.
I’m as bad as anyone—ogling a new headlamp, camp chair or down jacket when I already have all I need (and more). I constantly remind myself to bring just the essentials. Marie Kondo is right: by eliminating a clutter of unnecessary items in my trip preparation, I also de-clutter my mind.
The long and short of it is you have to cut through the crap. There’s no freedom like having everything you need to live fit inside your backpack, your ski pulk or in your canoe. The less you get tangled in the ‘stuff’ of preparation, the easier. Once you take that first stride, paddle stroke or revolution, there’s nothing else to do but give yourself to the experience.
Break your inertia, keep your preparation dead simple and you’ll breeze to the launch. The hardest part is getting to that starting line. Once the journey begins everything will clarify, and the living will be easy.