Essential Wilderness – Living, Travelling and Playing in the Outdoors

Dispatches from the Outdoors

Do you get restless when you spend too much time indoors? Do you start looking at maps, reading about routes, and dreaming of adventures? I totally understand and want to help you with your next escape to the outdoors.

Here’s some reading to help you with your wilderness wanderlust…

PakAlarm for Bear Safety

January 22, 2022
Bears, Camping, Equipment, Wilderness Safety

My Favorite Bear Alarm

Cycling the Coastal Camino from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

July 10, 2023
Cycling, Featured, Trip Reports

Camino de Santiago by

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Recent Articles

Cycling the Coastal Camino from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

Camino de Santiago by Bike, the Coastal Portuguese Route

July 10, 2023

PORTUGUESE COASTAL CAMINO OVERVIEW The Camino de Santiago is a thousand-year-old pilgrimage network all over Europe which converges on the amazing cathedral in the town

Bark, Skin and Dugout – The Three Types of Traditional Canoes

May 8, 2023

Canoes are universal. After all, anywhere that there is open water it’s probably useful to have an open-topped craft that can be easily loaded and

wilderness canoe repair kit

The Perfect Repair Kit for Wilderness Canoe Trips

April 2, 2023

On a longer canoe trip it’s not a question of whether your equipment is going to break but rather when it’s going to break. That’s why it’s not unusual

Open Canoe Roll

The Open Canoe Roll

February 5, 2023

Rolling practice… It’s been 20 years since I last rolled a small whitewater canoe equipped with a saddle, thigh straps, and airbags, so I headed

Adam Shoalts on Wet Weather Gear for Canoeing

Raingear for Canoe Expeditions

February 3, 2023

In this video I chatted with Canadian explorer Adam about rain and cold weather gear for expedition canoeing… Adam normally goes super minimalist, but hypothermia

Intuitive Navigation, Or Why You Shouldn’t Rely On Your GPS in the Wilderness

January 8, 2023

I recently spoke with explorer and author Adam Shoalts about the role intuitive navigation plays in the wilderness. Here’s the video of that conversation, and

An explorer's number one tip for wilderness safety

Your Number One Tip to Stay Safe in the Outdoors

September 27, 2022

Adam Shoalts is an accomplished Canadian explorer with many big expeditions under his belt. He’s been a guest on my podcast (The Strenuous Life Podcast)

Power Oatmeal for Camping

Power Oatmeal for Camping

September 9, 2022

After years of refining the recipe I think it’s time to publicly share ‘Power Oatmeal’… On a recent trip to the Nahanni we ate this

Always do this when you're canoeing

Why You Should ALWAYS Tie Up Your Canoe

September 4, 2022

Lessons repeat themselves until learned… The first time I had a boat float away on me was on the Missinaibi River in Ontario. I had

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Cycling the Coastal Camino from Porto, Portugal to Santiago de Compostela, Spain

July 10, 2023
Cycling, Featured, Trip Reports

Camino de Santiago by Bike, the Coastal Portuguese

PORTUGUESE COASTAL CAMINO OVERVIEW The Camino de Santiago is a thousand-year-old pilgrimage network all over Europe which converges on the

May 8, 2023
Canoeing, Featured

Bark, Skin and Dugout – The Three Types

Canoes are universal. After all, anywhere that there is open water it’s probably useful to have an open-topped craft that

wilderness canoe repair kit

April 2, 2023
Canoeing, Equipment

The Perfect Repair Kit for Wilderness Canoe Trips

On a longer canoe trip it’s not a question of whether your equipment is going to break but rather when it’s going to break.

Open Canoe Roll

February 5, 2023
Canoeing, Wilderness Safety, Wilderness Skills

The Open Canoe Roll

Rolling practice… It’s been 20 years since I last rolled a small whitewater canoe equipped with a saddle, thigh straps,

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Updates and Wilderness Travel Tips

From the EssentialWilderness Instagram Feed...

Canoeing a river down to Hudson Bay is a difficult

Canoeing a river down to Hudson Bay is a difficult undertaking, but running into a pod of beluga whales out on the open water is a HUGE payoff!

Rolling a open canoe in a pool is fun, but it’s

Rolling a open canoe in a pool is fun, but it’s not the end goal; it’s to get out onto a river and do some playboating. And playboating is fun but it too is not the end goal; the end goal is to become super comfortable evaluating and navigating whitewater in relatively safe settings so that you can more safely run rapids on remote trips in the North.

If you can afford the extra weight and space, a ta

If you can afford the extra weight and space, a tarp with mosquito netting sides is one of the greatest luxuries you can have in the North.

How do you anchor a tent in high winds when you’

How do you anchor a tent in high winds when you’re camping on sand? Regular pegs will just get pulled out and your tent will collapse. The answer is to use a “deadman anchor.” Dig a trench about 6-9 inches deep, put a log or a stick in it perpendicular to the direction of pull, tie your line to it (digging a smaller trench so the line can go in a straight line, and then cover up your anchor with sand. This creates a very strong anchor, especially when the sand is a little bit moist.

Sunset on the Seal River, close to the treeline tr

Sunset on the Seal River, close to the treeline transition from boreal forest to open tundra.

After a long day on the river in my tiny 9’ 2”

After a long day on the river in my tiny 9’ 2” whitewater boat…

Northern lights on the Nahanni

Northern lights on the Nahanni

Power oatmeal - perfect for the remote wilderness

Power oatmeal - perfect for the remote wilderness and also for car camping with the kids. Just don’t forget the toasted hazelnuts - they’re the key!

Mix the following in a giant bowl…

2 kg rolled oats
900 g toasted and crushed hazelnuts
250 g sesame seeds
600 g chopped dates
8 diced and dried apples
Salt
Cinnamon

Pack coconut milk powder separately

It takes about 1 cup of mix per morning meal

To cook, put about 1 cup of dry Power Oatmeal mixture and 2 cups of water in a pot, bring to a boil while stirring occasionally, then let sit.

I usually add a bit of extra water to make the oatmeal extra moist, then add a heaping tablespoon of dried coconut milk directly to the hot oatmeal and stir.

It’s food that sticks to your ribs, keeps you going for miles, and actually tastes good!

Three essential exercises that make a nice circuit

Three essential exercises that make a nice circuit for canoeing fitness: kettlebell swings, forward hinging cable pulldowns, and dumbell curl and presses.

A friend read the latest version of my manuscript

A friend read the latest version of my manuscript and said “That sounds just like Wild, but in a canoe.” Time to speed-read another book!

I just published a new comprehensive article on es

I just published a new comprehensive article on essential wilderness describing a potential seven day bicycle trip from Porto, Portugal, to Camino de Santiago, Spain. Let me know if I missed anything that you would want to know about this trip

At the peak of black fly season a large river can

At the peak of black fly season a large river can produce up to 8 billion blackflies per day per kilometer of river. That’s because there can be up to 600,000 black fly larvae per square meter of river bottom.

To cope with this you have to think like an astronaut: an astronaut would not leave his space ship without a space suit, and at the peak of black fly season you would not leave your tent without your bug net and DEET.

It’s never too soon to start training for anothe

It’s never too soon to start training for another expedition. I’m still getting over Covid (3 weeks and counting) but was able to put in a good hour and a half on the water at a moderate pace; now it’s time to refuel and rehydrate and hope that the post-exercise fatigue is less than it was yesterday!

No big deal, just JB Tyrrell back in 1896 doing hi

No big deal, just JB Tyrrell back in 1896 doing his job by surveying in the area of 200,000 square miles by canoe and dog sled over the course of two years. The amazing thing is that his accounts of the rivers and portages are still incredibly useful to today’s travellers

Great message. Source unknown.

Great message. Source unknown.

Having a tent that’s bombproof in stormy weather

Having a tent that’s bombproof in stormy weather is one of the best investments you can make if you want to explore far from home. The Keron series by Hilleberg is one of my favorites, seen here on a tiny beach on the Thlewiaza River in Nunavut during an windstorm.

It’s been 2 decades since I last rolled a canoe

It’s been 2 decades since I last rolled a canoe and the technique is rusty but it’s still in the bones! I’m working on the roll so I can get back to running harder, low-consequence local whitewater in the off season to prepare for the easier but much higher consequence whitewater deep in the bush.

Just posted a new article and video on the Essenti

Just posted a new article and video on the Essential Wilderness site. It’s obviously a huge asset if you can learn to navigate intuitively, which is just reading the landscape and using the sun. It might sound daunting, learning to acquire this skill, but it is relatively straightforward. The more you can navigate intuitively the better it will be – if you study the map before you leave home and have that mental image in your mind, the more you are able to seamlessly transfer it to what you’re actually looking at so you don’t need to consult the map every 10 minutes.

Intuitive navigation is a great skill to have as you don’t have to constantly fiddle with a GPS or map and allows you to cover vastly greater distances as opposed to someone who needs to wait for the GPS to power up. Especially in the wilderness where there are no cell towers, and with the small screens on GPS units that are often hard to see in detail when there’s glare from the sun.

Continued in comments…

Feeling very much out of place in the Soho North F

Feeling very much out of place in the Soho North Face store. Not sure anyone in here has ever spent a night in a tent…

If you can accommodate the additional weight and s

If you can accommodate the additional weight and space in your gear then a tarp with bug netting hanging from the sides can be an absolute game changer in heavy mosquito and black fly conditions. This is the Eureka version, but the one made by Nemo is also very good.

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