A novice adventurer's checklist
One of the hardest aspects of any outdoor adventure is planning what to take.
My family has camped casually since I was five months old, and during each of the past three summers I took my two small daughters on camping vacations ranging from three to six days in length. But with all this experience, I still find myself forgetting valuable equipment. Early during this year's camping trip, our fourth, I discovered I had failed to bring an adequate cutting surface. I spent a week brandishing a paring knife in mid air to prepare meat for our brand new Coleman grill.
This week I face the daunting challenge of a new kind of adventure I've only experienced once in my life, and then I didn't have to do the planning. This time I do. It will be my 10-year-old daughter's first overnight canoe trip.
She has been pleading for it for two years. She doesn't appreciate the work and preparation involved. Neither do I, I'm afraid.
There's a vast difference between camping out of the trunk of a car and camping out of a canoe. A canoe can't lock out raccoons, bears, squirrels and other thieving wildlife. A canoe and all its contents must be light enough to carry over portages.
Our regular camping gear included all kinds of amenities that can't pull their own weight on a canoe trip: a dining tent, board games, that decadent and bulky new grill, and a cooler full of fresh meat, dairy products and produce. Besides, there's one essential item we can't carry along, but must collect and purify along the way: drinking water.
Well aware of my own ignorance about things like suspending a food pack from a tree, nervous that I have no experienced adventurer to literally show me the ropes, I acquired a couple small, inexpensive books on wilderness cooking. They turned out to provide pages of useful tips and advice about the broader experience of wilderness adventure. A few hours of reading has raised my confidence from near zero to about seventy per cent. I'm actually looking forward to picking up our camping permit and heading into the interior of Algonquin Park on Monday afternoon.
The One Pan Gourmet by Don Jacobson (Ragged Mountain Press, 1993) provides recipes of interest to the wider audience, plus an excellent outline of what equipment to include in a portable kitchen and some other useful camping advice. The Wilderness Cookbook by Bonnie McTaggart, Jill Bryant and Chum McLeod (Second Story Press, 1999) is designed for vegetarians, but its suggestions on drying food, assembling elaborate dried dishes before the trip, and equipment checklists, will be valuable to any serious adventurer.
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