How a route enters the world

Trailmark 04 · 18 March 2024

Jeffrey
McMurtrie

The official map turned him around one too many times, so he spent eighteen years drawing his own.

Trailmark audio

Episode 04 · 1:10:00

Somebody emailed me Jeffrey McMurtrie's maps before I had any reason to talk to him, and I did what I suspect everyone does with them: opened one to check a single thing and looked up half an hour later. Jeffrey did not choose this life. His father started taking him into Algonquin at eight, his brother six, a week the first time and longer every year after. He would rather have been at home, where it was not hot and buggy and where his friends were. He remembers crying three quarters of the way down a two-kilometre portage until a kind passerby picked up his pack. The map itself entered his life on a rainy day weeks into one of those trips, trapped in the tent and bored out of his mind, when his dad finally showed him where they were. Until then he had just been along for the ride. Oh, we have been here. Oh, I remember that lake name.

In high school he took his partner canoeing in a little-used corner of the park, and the official map came apart in his hands: missing portages, portages on the wrong side of the lake, campsites on the wrong side too, one lake drawn with the wrong number of bays. They had to turn around. He reported all of it to the park, more than once. Nothing changed, and some of those errors are still on the official map today. So he built a better one for himself, a high-school side project with no ambition of selling anything, correcting the wrong things one dragged campsite at a time in a demo program. Then his camping friends saw it and wanted it. That was eighteen years ago.

The newest Algonquin map is version six. It took five years, partly because the park is bigger than Prince Edward Island, and partly because Jeffrey wants the map to be honest. Algonquin has some two thousand campsites and he has not been to all of them, so the map admits it: portages carry a good-condition badge, a poor-condition badge, and a little dashed circle that means I don't have a clue, which he borrowed from the uncollected coins in Super Mario. I design games for a living, and that was the moment in the conversation where I knew we would get along. Creeks are drawn at the width they actually are, so a twisty narrow nightmare looks like one before you are in it, and he taught himself to program because drawing eight hundred portage hill profiles by hand was never going to happen.

The mapping has never eaten the trips. He carries a small GPS, presses a few buttons, and otherwise takes the same vacation he has taken since he was eight, thirty to forty-five days a year when a map is not due. His safety advice is the kind you only earn out there: if the waves say no, the answer is no. The park is not a hotel, and people have died keeping schedules. What he loves most now is spotting a stranger's trip photos online and recognizing a campsite no other map shows, because he knows exactly where they got it from. I told him I still needed to order mine.

Trailmark 32 · 13 May 2024

Jack
Cornish

Bored of the same commute, he started walking every street in London. Then the whole of Britain.

Trailmark audio

Episode 32 · 1:29:00

Listen on Trailmark

Jack Cornish describes himself as a Londoner and a walker. He grew up in suburban southeast London and still lives there; family holidays were beaches in France and the odd local church, and nothing about his childhood pointed outdoors. The walking started as a commute. An hour and a quarter to work, the same way every day, until boredom sent him down the side streets, and the side streets became a project: walk every street in London. Ten or fifteen years in, he has not finished, and concedes he may never, since parts of London are still fields and sheep.

He tracks it two ways: lines drawn on a digital map, and a paper A-to-Z atlas he is colouring in like a picture book, the streets slowly turning red. When he meets friends at a pub he arrives twenty minutes early and walks the blocks around it. It was this habit, not any expedition pedigree, that carried him fifteen hundred miles from Land's End to John O'Groats when his health-service job offered redundancy; he worked out how long he could afford to be gone, and set off. What surprised him at the far end was what he had fallen for. Not the scenery. The path network itself, the extraordinary that's in the ordinary. A job at the Ramblers came up, and he jumped at it.

He is now the Ramblers' Head of Paths and the author of The Lost Paths, and the numbers he works with are hard to hold in your head. England and Wales carry about a hundred and forty thousand miles of public rights of way, nine in ten of them crossing private land; one runs within thirty metres of the Prime Minister's country residence, and Jack has walked it. Another forty-nine thousand miles have simply fallen off the record, many in the 1950s, when the recording was done parish by parish and one parish would remember a path its neighbour forgot, so the right of way still stops dead at the old boundary. To reclaim one, volunteers must show the public used it at some point since 1189. He calls it historical detective work, and more than a thousand people are at it.

The paths carry stranger history than legal rights. There are hollow ways worn ten feet deep by nothing but footsteps and time, and corpse roads that once carried coffins to burial and now lend their names to crime novels and death metal albums. Jack's line is that paths are the oldest part of British history still used for its original purpose, older in service than any cathedral. He had walked twelve miles the day before, listening to podcasts for about half of it, mine included, which I did not pay him to say. And when I asked what he was curious about, he wondered out loud whether the next book might be The Lost Paths of Canada. I know a few candidates.

Trailmark 42 · 25 March 2024

Hap & Andrea
Wilson

The lodge hides in the trees past two kilometres of portage. Every tomato plant arrives by air.

Trailmark audio

Episode 42 · 1:08:00

Listen on Trailmark

Hap and Andrea Wilson spend their winters in Muskoka and their summers running Cabin Falls, an ecolodge in Temagami built around a log cabin from 1931. The property predates the wilderness park that now surrounds it. Hap was a Temagami park ranger decades ago and built what he believes were the first sustainable trails in Canada through this old growth; some of the lodge's twelve kilometres of trail are his own ranger-day routes revived, and some follow portage paths five thousand years old. The lodge hides so well in the trees that paddlers cross the portage over the river without ever seeing it, which is exactly how the Wilsons want it.

They design trails by walking, not by drawing. Before a route goes in anywhere, for a township or a cottager or a provincial park, they walk the property over and over, finding the eagle nests and the sensitive plants to route around and the erratic boulders worth steering a person past. Hand tools, wherever hand tools will do. The method extends to the buildings. One winter they designed a guest cabin from home, bought the materials, flew everything in, and discovered on site that they had forgotten a ginormous boulder and a big pine tree. They rebuilt the design on the spot around both, and Andrea thinks it came out better than the plan.

Everything the lodge eats or becomes is flown in, then paddled and portaged two kilometres downriver. In a normal spring they lash two canoes into a catamaran and raft the lumber down the rapids, but the last two springs the water ran too low, so they soloed sixty loads instead, fourteen-foot two-by-fours riding out over the bow, lining the canoes back up the rapids between runs. They tell themselves it builds character. Once, rather than waste a dead but still sound tree upriver, Hap felled it into the water, towed it to the head of the rapids, sent it through, and had a guest waiting with a gaff hook to catch it before the falls. After one winter their nephew counted eighteen trees down across a single trail. Every tomato and basil plant in the garden starts in a Muskoka greenhouse and arrives by air.

The work keeps a price list. Hap has two replaced knees, and a shoulder replacement booked a month out. Parts wear out, he says, whether you canoe or not. Their December ritual is to sit down, finally rested, and write out what they actually did that year; the last list came to a hundred and four projects. I told them I was moving to North Bay this summer, halfway between their two lives, and they told me to paddle in. And when I asked what advice they had for someone young who wants this work, Andrea did not hesitate. First of all, get yourself a good set of knees.