March 20 -
Wow, that was quite a gap – time for a little back-filling. It has been a busy few months for us; we have hosted events, encountered a few hiccups and finally got all of our plans down on paper.
One of our biggest challenges over the last month or so has been trying to do what no one has ever accurately done before: predict the weather. The notion that our winter snowshoeing trek through the Appalachian Mountains would end up being a mixed hike with unseasonably warm temperatures and less snow than I’m sure the East Coast has seen in a while, had not passed through any of our heads. Alas, such weather anomalies do occur and we have adjusted our plans.
Where we had originally planned for a food drop from the IATNL half-way through our trip and a sled on which to carry that food and other supplies, we are now looking at carrying all the gear and food necessary for a 7-day mixed backpacking and snowshoeing trek through the mountains. It will be heavy hiking, we will get tired and grumpy; it will be our greatest challenge to date and we’re going to catch it all on film.
We have been kept up-to-date by Paul Wylezol on the snow conditions in the Appalachians; he is the go-to guy for the IATNL and we had been planning with him for a food drop via snowmobile on day 4 of our trip. However, now that the trail has turned into a Morse-code of bare rock and 3-6 foot deep snow, we can neither bring a sled or leave our snowshoes behind and the glorious thought of a food drop has been turfed.
It hasn’t all been fretting over the weather though, in February we held a night of hilarious fun and games at The Landing. Our Valentine’s Day Games – the brainchild of Rene – was an excellent event; we had a good crowd out and everyone was laughing their mid-semester stresses and winter blues away. We had a wide variety of games and skill-testing activities such as potato relay races, blindfolded condom races and one-handed bra contests – all of which came together in a culminating skill-testing team race. We got plenty of footage from our night of fun innuendo which will be posted to our website before too long.
Since the end of our reading week (mid-February) the members of our group have all, on different weeks, taken a 3 day ice climbing and slope rescue course as part of our program with Algonquin College. This was an excellent opportunity to learn new ice climbing and rope-working techniques, but had the added benefit of allowing us each to test out several winter-camping backpack-style meals. We later conglomerated these meals into our final menu with a few tweaks and additions.
The menu came together along with all of our other trip-documents last week to form the Trip Plan which we submitted to the school. This document contained everything that we had planned for with regards to our trip: routecard, itinerary, Emergency Action Plan, local contacts, menu, trip goals, etc. And then there’s the maps. This was our trip plan’s crowning jewel for we not only had full-size NTS map photocopies with route, waypoints and campsites market, but we also included a digital copy of our routecard. Kevin and Rene spent a hair-pulling amount of time using GoogleEarth to produce a day-by-day display of what trail we will be covering complete with altitudes, Lat & Long coordinates and emergency exit routes. This project, combined with Microsoft’s often infuriating tendency to accuse you that you are not quite as clever as you assume to be nearly put Kevin into a psychotic episode, especially since he had to do it twice. Apparently those fail-safe file backup systems are not quite as fail-safe as one would assume ‘fail-safe’ to be.
The exciting news now is that our ‘Initial Planning’ phase is coming to an end – officially that is, planning doesn’t end until we’re back home safe and sound. We now have a framework of an expedition that we can modify and customize as we travel along the path toward completing a successful expedition.
February 10 -
Some of our participants in the Potato Relay Race. Photo: Young, K, 2010.
November 20 -
We have now begun researching the geography and geology that makes up the Appalachian Mountains. Piers Evans from our team has written this short piece on the history of the Appalachians.
“The Appalachian Mountain chain once stood as high and with the same breathtaking beauty as the Rockies of the west, but that was many millions of years ago. After 200 million years of erosion from wind, rain, snow and ice, the Appalachians of North America’s east coast have been reduced to a chain of rolling hills…”
More can be read from the link below
A Brief History of the Appalachians
November 18 -
Using our new map, the group has quickly started figuring out distances, elevation changes and identifying areas of risk in order to start preparing a route plan. This is a short video, explaining some of that process.
November 17 -
Here is a copy of a map that we received from Paul from the IATNL. It highlights existing trails and the surrounding topography. We are now using this map along with Google Earth to complete our route plan.
November 10 -
The first installment of our series of trip following videos is completed and posted by Kevin. It looks great, and can be found here
November 7 -
We received an e-mail back from the IATNL with great news. They have been very helpful in our quest of adventure. Paul Wylezol, the Chairperson for the IATNL contacted us himself and answered our questions excellently and surprised us with sending us some other important information. Its shaping up to be the trip that fulfills all of our needs and wants and that of the college. We’ll see what the future has in store!
November 5 -
The Final Expedition project is designed to be a self-conducted test of your skills and abilities, learned over your two years at Algonquin College. So in order to receive the “OK” stamp for your trip (or test, depending on how you look at it), it must first be approved by our Program Coordinator. The first step in this process is preparing a trip proposal. Piers has headed off that project for the past week and a few days and has finished it for the group’s final overview.
November 2 -
Back to the drawing board… again. We contacted Gros Morne National Park and the park is closed throughout the month of April. The reason being, there are nesting birds in the park during that time and they can’t be disturbed. Understanding that, we moved onto finding different areas we could visit and travel. After many ideas were thrown on the table and we split up some work to research, we found that the Appalachian Trail could suit our needs. We quickly tried to find an outfitter or any organization that may have some answers to our questions and we struck gold with the IATNL (International Appalachian Trail Newfoundland and Labrador). We then sent an e-mail to the IATNL asking a list of eager questions hoping for a reply.
More information on the IATNL can be found on their website – conveniently linked here
October 22 -
The group met once again and discussed some fundraising ideas and devised some clever and effective ways to raise some capital. A large part of our fundraising initiatives is focusing on giving back as much as possible to the local community. Also, we are contacting Gros Morne National Park, located on Newfoundland this week to ask for more information of the park and its services.
Sources:
Parks Canada. (2009). Gros Morne National Park of Canada. Retrieved October 27, 2009 from http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/nl/grosmorne/index.aspx
October 19 -
Our original plans of visiting the Torngat Mountains on the most northern tip of Labrador is put on the shelf for another day. The area in April is too high risk, due to the large amount of Polar Bears in the area travelling north back to the seas for hunting. Having bears around that are just waking up from a winter of slumber that only eat meat is a bit of a risk management issue. After a telephone conversation with Torngat National park and asking some basic questions, it was evident that this trip would not pass the criteria set out by our Program Coordindator.
This bear does not want us around!
Sources:
Parks Canada. (2009). Torngat Mountains National Park of Canada. Retrieved October 27, 2009 from http://www.pc.gc.ca/pn-np/nl/torngats/index.aspx
Treehugger.com. (2009). Polar Bear Photo. Retrieved October 27, 2009 fromhttp://www.treehugger.com/polar-bear-tongue.jpg
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