The program must be getting aired soon.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/sep/13/ray-mears-canada-wilderness/print
Ray Mears: Why I love Canada's Northern Wilderness
For his latest TV documentary, the explorer spent months travelling through the frozen north. Here, he explains how the journey traced the steps of his heroes, the early European adventurers who mapped this vast country
* Ray Mears
* The Observer, Sunday 13 September 2009
History man... 'the history of the nation is firmly entwined with the land, and with the ways in which the land was opened up and explored'
There are places on earth so vast they impress upon us the power of nature, and Canada is one of them. It boasts a seemingly endless list of superlatives – it sprawls over almost 10m square kilometres, making it the second-largest country in the world after Russia; it has more than two million lakes, amounting to about a tenth of the world's fresh water; and embraces the longest coastline of any country. There's a vastness to this country that is almost unimaginable – an epic grandeur to its landscapes, its forests, rivers, ice and snow, its mountains, wildlife and wilderness. No matter how many times I travel here, I'm always staggered by its sheer scale.
It's a land known for the fierceness of its winters. The city of Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories, is so cold that the average night-time temperature in the months of December, January and February is minus 30C. In the province of Manitoba, the city of Thompson – with a population of 13,500 – is so cold that it is only frost-free for about two months of the year.
Every part of the country has a different story to tell – from Alberta, where the fossil records of dinosaurs are in such abundance that the area has been proclaimed a Unesco World Heritage Site, to Manitoba, where a Royal Charter, enacted in 1670, created the Hudson's Bay Company, a firm that was the largest landowner in the world, with a territory 10 times that of the Holy Roman Empire at its height, and still exists today.
But that's not why I love this country. I love coming here because the history of the nation is firmly entwined with the land, and with the ways in which the land was opened up and explored. It's a country that it took a woodsman's skills to explore, and bushcraft knowledge to survive. The first European explorers of Canada came to the country and revealed its treasures to the world, establishing its borders and mapping its wild interior. But they were only able to achieve all of these things thanks to the skills they learned from the First Nations – people who had lived for centuries in harmony with what can be one of the harshest environments on the planet. For my latest documentary, I've criss-crossed Canada's Northern Wilderness in the footsteps of these great men, to demonstrate what they suffered and learned as they walked, sometimes alone, into the deep woods.
Travel in the region remains arduous, and it can be hard for tourists to get to grips with, but one relatively straightforward starting point is Churchill, Manitoba. The town is right on the polar bear migration routes, so many people come here for that and there are regular flights in. But it's what is on the other side of the Churchill River, a short ferry ride from the town, that is really central to my story, and the story of Canada itself. There, in one of the most bleak and barren places you can imagine, is Prince William Fort. Originally a log-cabin built by Hudson's Bay Company (HBC) employees, work began in 1731 to turn it into a fort guarding the entrance to the Churchill River. It took 40 years to complete, and was a statement of intent – the company saying "we're here to stay". Even to this day it is an imposing presence, with metre-thick walls at least five metres high rising out of the wilderness. It feels like the wind never stops blowing there, and it's an eerie place to be. It looks largely as though the people who live there walked out yesterday.
A short walk away, in the rocks at Sloop Cove, where ships used to moor, the sailors and HBC men have carved their names into the rock. And one of the names, beautifully carved beside the date, 1 July 1767, is that of Samuel Hearne, one of the greatest unsung explorers ever to emerge from Britain. His is a name I kept coming across in my studies of bushcraft; in descriptions of preparing animal skins for clothing; medicinal uses of different leaves; and from anthropologists discussing how people used to live in this part of the world. In my study and appreciation of the northern wilderness, Samuel Hearne has become my tutor in so many ways.
After arriving to work for the HBC in 1767, he set out into the unmapped wilderness to the north west, to investigate reports from northern Indians of copper deposits and the potential for expanding the Company's fur trade. His third and most successful expedition was an incredible achievement, a round- trip that took two years, seven months and 24 days, and covered 5,630km. He found copper and opened up the northern wilderness to traders and settlers, but one of the most important aspects of his success had nothing at all to do with the HBC. Where previous expeditions had carried vast stores of provisions, slowing them so much that their progress from the Fort would always be restricted, Hearne proved that by living from the land, as the First Nations people did, by trusting his life as well as the success of his mission to a native guide, and buy adopting the habits, skills and beliefs of the people he met en route, he could travel this inhospitable land with relative ease. Almost every explorer who followed in his footsteps relied on his records, for he achieved something no man had ever done before.
A much later but similarly pioneering figure was Grey Owl. Archibald Belaney was born in Hastings, East Sussex in 1888 and moved to Canada, adopted the culture and identity of the First Nations people he met, and began to call himself Grey Owl. Initially a fur trapper, he changed his views and began to speak out against the destruction of the beaver population, preaching an environmental message 100 years ahead of its time.
In the past, I've canoed to a lot of places he'd been to but on this journey I visited his cabin for the first time. It's on the shores of Ajawaan Lake in Prince Albert National Park, a beautiful setting but not an easy place to reach – you have to hike for two days or canoe to it. To save time while filming, we took a helicopter, landed gingerly on the frozen lake, and completed the journey in snowshoes. Inside there's an old woodburning stove, a table and a bed – it remains much as it was when he died in 1938 (see Park Canada's detailed website about the site at tinyurl.com/npvuwa). Not many people make it there, especially in winter, and it was incredibly peaceful. Nearby we watched wolves playing in the snow.
While making the series we often filmed in extreme cold, but the coldest conditions we encountered were at Kugaaruk, a tiny settlement of perhaps 700 people, right in the middle of the High Arctic. We went in February and arrived to find every Inuit we met had burnt his face with frostbite. I thought "my God what have we walked into". It was the windiest place I've ever been and we filmed a sequence of us building igloos at -40C which, with 40km/h winds, is something like -74C with windchill. I saw an Inuit shiver, something I never thought I'd see.
We were there to trace the journey of Dr John Rae, another HBC employee. If Hearne was responsible for taking the first steps to open up the Canadian north, it was Dr John Rae who completed the mission. In 1846, he embarked on an expedition to fill in the last blanks on the maps of the northern coast, and thus locate the Northwest Passage, a sea route across the top of Canada that would revolutionise sea trade to the Far East.
Like Hearne before him, Rae adopted the ideology of the native people, choosing to live off the land rather than dragging heavy loads of provisions, and quickly making it his business to learn how to build an igloo, which used ice and snow as natural insulation. Rae's first expedition took him to a place they called Pelly Bay, now Kugaaruk. Today, there's one small, Portakabin-sytle hotel (see kugaaruk.com), but in this part of the world surprisingly little has changed since Rae first set foot here. The day we arrived there were children playing in the street, the next day there was a polar bear walking down the middle of it.
In places this remains a barren land – inhospitable and bitterly cold, year- round – but at the same time it is teeming with bounty, in nature and in the cultures of the people who inhabit it. With every step of my journey I came across another story carved into the landscape, stories that will remain there forever.
Copyright Ray Mears.
Extracted from Northern Wilderness by Ray Mears, published by Hodder & Stoughton
http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2009/sep/13/ray-mears-canada-wilderness/print
