Results tagged “Canada” from Intelligent Travel Blog

Andrew Evans confronts his acrophobia on Canada's newest vertical challenge: the Via Ferrata.

I didn't die--that's the short version. The End. Now you can click back to whatever you were reading before.

Not that I wouldn't mind dying in the Canadian Rockies. It's a pretty spectacular place inhabited by friendly locals and mild-mannered grizzly bears. The extreme drop-offs are tremendously beautiful, I concur. I also find them hugely terrifying.  

As a self-diagnosed acrophobic, I try to avoid rock ledges, steep mountain chasms and thousand-foot-high cliffs.  Smart people have often explained that I am not really afraid of heights--I'm only afraid of falling. Reading up on vertigo, I have learned that mine is not an irrational fear. I merely have "vestibular issues" that affect my balance and which are most likely evolutionary. Apparently, my ancient ancestors also suffered from falling dreams.

In Canada, I got to face my fears head on. Travel helps us do that by dropping us into unusual or difficult circumstances and then forcing us to do things we don't normally choose to do. For me, that meant getting dropped off by helicopter onto a mountain ridge some 7,000 feet above sea level.  

Canadian Mountain Holidays (CMH) are better known for inventing heli-skiing, where hardcore skiers can access some of the greatest and highest virgin powder on Earth by helicopter. The same idea works for eager hikers in summertime: the 3-minute helicopter ride lets you skip the ten-hour base climb and get right to the good stuff. Or in my case, the super scary stuff.

Senior Researcher Marilyn Terrell is just back from a trip through the Yukon Territory, and she's thrilling all of us with stories from her trip. You can read her previous entries about her Yukon adventure here and here.

The ultimate destination on my Yukon River trip two weeks ago was Dawson City, just as it had been for the Klondike gold prospectors streaming down the river 112 years ago. To learn more about the Gold Rush, I picked up a wonderfully informative history by Pierre Berton, "Klondike: The Last Great Gold Rush", from Mac's Fireweed Books in Whitehorse to read during the trip.

For the prospectors, the journey started with an arduous slog over the Coast Mountains along the Chilkoot Trail from the port at Skagway, Alaska. Each prospector had to make numerous trips in order to haul 1,000 pounds of equipment and supplies down to Lake Bennett, where the Yukon River begins. The North West Mounted Police were patrolling the Yukon when the Klondike gold rush began 1897, and would not permit any ill-equipped miner lacking the requisite 1,000-lb. "outfit" to start the journey, because there were no grocery stores along the Yukon River or even in Dawson City itself. You had to bring enough canned food with you to survive on for a year, until the next riverboat might bring supplies.

Some hasty prospectors raced to Dawson City in the fall of 1896, traveling light without supplies before the main rush began, and they were congratulating themselves on getting a jump on the competition when a messenger appeared in a canoe from downriver in Whitehorse. Instead of the news they were expecting, that a steamboat was on its way with food for the winter, the early birds got the grim word: no more riverboats would be forthcoming that year, and unless they wanted to starve they'd have to leave immediately, as the river was already beginning to freeze up.

Before I left for my Yukon trip, I'd been following Ed Wardle's considerably more dangerous Yukon adventure "Alone In The Wild" on Twitter.  Ed received training in wilderness survival, medical emergencies, and firearms handling, then he was dropped into the Yukon wilderness with a load of supplies to carry on his back and expected to survive on his own for three months. He had a video camera that he used to film his daily dispatches from the wild, and these dispatches were collected and edited to make a reality TV show on the National Geographic Channel. He ended up lasting 50 days instead of the expected 90, and had to be emergency airlifted out of there. You can watch some of his videos here, and you can see him get progressively thinner as the weeks go by and he had to collect, catch or shoot his own food to survive. 

I didn't realized until I returned that my trip covered some of the same general area as Wardle's, but my experience could hardly have been more different. Instead of shivering in a tent, I lived in a series of rather luxurious heated cabins. Instead of carrying all my gear on my back, I simply zipped my suitcase and it was magically transported by boat, car or floatplane to my next destination. And instead of having to shoot my own food, I got to enjoy delicious cuisine expertly prepared and served in a rustic (but warm) dining room. But even in my comfortable surroundings, I was reminded of how dangerous the Yukon really is. We learned a hunter had died of hypothermia the day before we arrived at one of our cabins, and our guides had to carry guns to be ready for charging bears. Wardle may not have survived the full 90 days, but frankly, I'm impressed he made it as long as he did.

You can watch the latest episode of "Alone In The Wild" tonight at 9pm on the National Geographic Channel. Ed talks about his experience here.

Senior Researcher Marilyn Terrell is just back from a trip through the Yukon Territory, and she's thrilling all of us with stories from her trip. You can read her previous entry about her Yukon adventure here.

The first few times someone on my trip spotted a bald eagle, we all grabbed binoculars and cameras. But after three days of seeing very little birdlife besides bald eagles, trip member Roy dubbed them the "pigeons of the Yukon."

We've seen other species along this Great River Journey from Whitehorse to Dawson. At Lake Lebarge we heard loons on the water and spied fat grouse scratching in the underbrush. Around a bend on the Thirty Mile River we surprised a pair of trumpeter swans who took off, silently, flapping enormous white wings. At Pelly River Ranch, farmer Hugh Bradley pointed out some Yukon turkeys (sandhill cranes) in one of his fields and predicted we'd soon be seeing more. Sure enough, a squadron flew over our cabins next morning, gobbling noisily, heading south.

Senior Researcher Marilyn Terrell is in the Yukon Territory for this week, and she's blogging, and of course, tweeting, whenever she can. She sent along this dispatch:

I spent ten hours yesterday walking the streets and trails of Whitehorse, (pop. 24,000) the capital of the Yukon Territory (pop. 40,000 people, plus 30,000 bears). Ate breakfast at Baked aka Bakerei Kaffeehaus (+1 867 633 6291) where the blueberry scones are wholegrain, the latte foam artfully swirled, and toddlers saute plastic vegetables in tiny pans in the wooden play kitchen.

Down by the Yukon River waterfront at Rotary Peace Park, '60s classics blared and crowds cheered the anchor-leg runners of the 110-mile Klondike International Road Relay as they approached the finish line. The race began at midnight in Skagway, Alaska, and runners carried flashlights over the Coast Mountains through White Pass along the Chilkoot Trail, which originally brought the goldminers in the stampede of 1898. The race officials announced the names of the runners and their teams: the Skinny Ravens from Anchorage, Sole Train from Juneau, CrowsFeet, an all-female masters team from Anchorage, the Chocolate Claim Runners from Whitehorse, the Smokin' Old Geezers, Team Run Amok, Blood Sweat & Beers, Twisted Blistered Sisters, the Molten Lava Tigers of Doom, The Fast and the Delirious. There were 1,200 runners, 700 women, and many junior teams.

The National Geographic Channel's executive vice president for content, Sydney Suissa, has been paddling Canada's Quetico Park over the past three decades. Here's a report from his latest trip; click through for his photo essay.

A four-hour flight delay, a lost bag and a sky of flat gray soup; not an auspicious start to our canoe trip. But wilderness trips are all about improvising and we'll have to make do. There are four of us on this trip -- my longtime friend and fellow canoeist Steven from Montreal, his 24-year-old son Ben, my 20-year-old son Aaron and myself. As we load up our rental car, we know it's going to be one of those trips where we'll use a lot more bug juice than sunscreen.

The wilderness area we're going to is an immense swath of the Canadian Shield carpeted with century pines, spruces, and stands of birch. Dark lakes pure enough to drink from, bogs tucked behind long sheltered bays where moose feed, orchid-lined creeks and small rivers that ebb and flow with the seasons all weave together into ever-changing networks that make this wilderness a haven for canoeists. In Minnesota, this protected area is called the Boundary Waters, and where it extends into Ontario, Canadians know it as Quetico Park.

We drive west from Thunder Bay, cross the Atlantic Watershed demarcation into the Arctic Watershed, and in about two hours arrive in Atikokan, population 700 and falling. It's the kind of town that Neil Young had in mind in his song "Helpless" ("There is a town in North Ontario/All my memories are there...") We go through our equipment and maps with our outfitter and spend the night in the bunkhouse. We rise early and after our ritual breakfast at the Outdoorsman, we load up our canoes and head out to the access point on Beaverhouse Lake. We push off into a stiff westerly wind wet with rain.

Tobias Nowlan had some close encounters of the natural kind during his recent visit to Vancouver Island in British Columbia.

Just as it looked like the plane would perch on a Rocky Mountain peak, it dove into the coastal metropolis of Vancouver. I had arrived in British Columbia to visit Vancouver Island, lured by whales and wolves.

Beginning in popular fishing town of Tofino, I set out with whale-watching company Remote Passages. In sheltered coves, I watched grey whales raking the sand and kelp with their baleen plates. Tofino is a pit-stop along the largest migration of these impressive creatures; this coastline provides vital nourishment en route.

Sea otters, having tied themselves in knots of kelp, floated past islands of bare rock which hummed with breeding Brandt's cormorants, auklets, tufted puffins and a posse of visiting pelicans. Once on the edge of total extinction thanks to an unending desire for their pelts, sea otters are now widespread along the BC coast. I saw ten on this trip. The boat also approached a thrush-sized seabird bobbing on the surface: the marbled murrelet. In summer plumage these micro-mariners are a mottled dark chocolate brown. Researchers were astonished to discover as late as the sixties that the murrelets breed in the canopy of old growth coastal rain forest. Widespread clear-cutting of this ancient habitat has subsequently seen drastic declines in marbled murrelet populations.

IT contributing writer Andrew Evans sends along this post about one of the plus beaux villages in Quebec.

Canada's different. I keep on remembering that every time I go back, and then I slowly forget it until the next time. It's not the language or the money or the license plates. It's just this feeling of openness that probably comes from having a lot of land and not a whole lot of people.    

Traveling in Québec, I found a small town that I will never forget. It's very small--only about 1,200 people live there--but its cinematic beauty and idyllic atmosphere is so enchanting that I began wondering how I might move there one day.  

From afar, L'Anse-Saint-Jean looks like the kind of bucolic scene you learn to oil paint on Saturday morning television. In the distance stand the majestic rock cliffs that border the Saguenay fjord--one of the longest fjords in the world. In the middle ground are the silver-blue waters of the fjord itself disturbed only by a tiny hump of an island named St. Jean. Spotted dairy cows graze between a marshy shoreline and the surrounding hills of dark green pines. A scattered chain of century-old farmhouses follows the dusty road into the foreground with its requisite steeple, happy front yard flowers spilling over white picket fences and a babbling brook to boot. Above the rushing water sits the finishing touch: an old-fashioned covered bridge made entirely of wood, Le Pont du Faubourg.

The covered bridge and the town of L'Anse-Saint-Jean are so infectiously cute, the scene was depicted on the back of Canada's original $1,000 bill. Eighteen years passed before anyone in the town laid eyes on a thousand dollar bill and recognized their hometown on the money. The series has since been discontinued and back in 1996, a terrible flood destroyed the town's famous bridge. The loss of the bridge in real life and on paper was a tragedy for what it represented--the disappearance of a small town.

Greetings, city-lovers! Today we're heading north to Kingston, Ontario, a city Zoe and Don Timperon want recognized for its World Heritage status, and much much more.

Want to see your city on IT? Copy and paste our list of fill-in-the-blank questions into an e-mail, fill in your answers, and send your responses to IntelligentTravel@ngs.org. And if you're still waiting for us to feature yours, fear not! We're going to keep posting as long as we keep getting them (please include photos and links!).

Kingston, Ontario is My City

The first place I take a visitor from out of town is World Heritage site Fort Henry and Kingston's downtown waterfront.

When I crave a delicious and refreshing margarita I always go to Margaritaville.

To escape the stresses of life I head to the waterfront and either go sailing or enjoy a ride on the Wolfe Island ferry.

If I want to relax for a couple hours I go Kingston Mills Locks and watch the boats move along the World Heritage Rideau Canal.

For complete quiet, I can hide away at Big Sandy Bay, a remote shangri-la white sandy beach on Wolfe Island away from everything.

If you come to my city, get your picture taken with our town crier Chris Whyman, ambassador of Kingston.

If you have to order one thing off the menu from Tir Nan Og it has to be shepherd's pie.

Should airlines charge more for people who take up more than one seat? The Canadian Transportation Agency decided last year to stop Canadian airlines from charging an overweight or handicapped person more than the cost of one fare, even if a passenger takes up more than one seat.  Our article about this, in the April issue of Traveler, sparked much debate in our inbox. Our readers sound off:

Jane Bedrosian of Lubbock, Tex., wrote, "Rights for the obese! What about my rights as a normal-size person? I do not want to sit for two hours pressed up against some hot, sweaty stranger! I am very tired of political correctness only being applied to a classified few while the masses must endure and suffer in silence!" Nancy D. Anderson of Urbana, Ill., concurred. "I sure hope U.S. airlines don't do this. If they can't fit into a seat, they should buy two."

Ross Pezzack spoke up for the rights of tall people. "As a flyer of 'excessive' height, I suggest this right also be extended to clients who cannot fit into the small quantity of legroom most seats allow travelers. I would also ask that airlines allow excessive-height clients the right to prevent people in front of them from reclining their seats into their knees (if you are not tall you have no idea how much that hurts)."

Finally, Racheal Galushkin of Medford, Mass., suggested a solution. "While I can appreciate that seat straddlers have been charged extra and that this is a burden to them and the airlines are looking at reducing those costs, perhaps the real issue is a decent seat size. Shouldn't the size of the airline seat be reconsidered so that more of 'today's-sized individuals' fit into them?"

We're sure you have an opinion. Share it with us.

Photo: aslaugsvava via the Intelligent Travel Flickr pool

Friend of IT Tobias Nowlan just came face-to-face with ferocious polar bears. (And no, he's not on the Island from Lost.)

A siren echoes over town. Now gunshots; one, two, three... A Range Rover pulls up beside me, a man leans out: "get inside now--there's a bear in town!" The aurora flickers dimly and greenly above Hudson Bay. Stalactites have formed on the rim of my woolen hat. I wander back inside.

It's my first night in Churchill, Manitoba. It's taken 18 hours to get here. There are no roads to Churchill--only planes and trains can get there. The train journey takes two days, but is cheaper, and may reward travelers with caribou, moose, and wolf sightings. I've come here for one reason: Churchill has been dubbed the "Polar Bear Capital of the World."

Polar bears gather here every fall, waiting for the waters of Hudson Bay to freeze entirely so they can hunt blubber-coated ringed seals on the ice. Trapped on land for months, the bears are starved. They would kill me in a second given the chance. Due to climatic warming, the bay now freezes later, reducing the bears' hunting season (their hunger increasing each year). The species is literally starving to death.

Driven to come to Churchill by a "see them while you can" motive, tourists are trundled over tundra by Tundra Buggies, weaving them between hungry bears. The leviathan trucks will approach bears for a while and stop: Tundra Buggies stick to a policy of not chasing bears and interfering as little as possible. Vehicles follow set tracks closely, and specific areas are designated for specific trucks, preventing Masai Mara-type situations of 12 trucks watching one animal. I found little ethical fault in this thriving industry, and saw that each season, thousands learn of the polar bear's climate change-induced demise firsthand. This doesn't account for the regular occurrence of photographers oblivious to the disturbance of their own volume and of the bears' superb hearing.

I see a mere 70 polar bears this weekend, including sparring (fighting) males, and a mother with cubs. I also watch a huge male try the ice out in the bay, his rear half collapsing through with every other step. He groans as he breaks the ice, falling into freezing water. He cannot afford to get this wet now without the promise of food any time soon. As our world warms, and Churchill's "polar bear season" is likely extended, this scene may become a more frequent one.

Traveler researchers (and Francophile foodies) Ashley Thompson and Kristen Gunderson embarked on a long weekend getaway to Montreal, and offer up a few highlights as they quite literally ate and drank their way through the city. First up: A snack bar with class.

Before my all-too-quick weekend jaunt to Montreal, I was skeptical about sampling the region's staple snack food, poutine. French fries, gravy, and cheese curd? I now admit shamefully that I imagined white creamy sausage gravy spooned over wilted, greasy fries and clumps of gooey cheese. Boy, was I wrong.

For some of the best poutine Montreal's Latin Quarter has to offer, La Paryse is your place. Don't let the hole-in-the-wall (albeit eclectic and colorful!) appearance and inevitable lunchtime lines deter you. And don't fear the poutine here. Mellow brown gravy with shredded mozzarella topped nearly grease-free fries, nothing at all like the scary concoction I had stirred up in my head.

Take the advice of our friend and host Anna, who's living and studying in Montreal for the semester, and sample more than just La Paryse's poutine perfection. Several dozen varieties of burgers and sandwiches greet upon entering the self-proclaimed "snack bar," including three gourmet veggie burgers. I noshed on the delicious mushroom-flavored patty topped with finely sliced peppered potatoes, romaine lettuce, tomatoes, and blue cheese, all nestled between toasted wheat buns.

As a multi-year vegetarian and a fake meat "expert," I can say with confidence it is the best I've ever had. Down the deliciousness with a glass of locally made beer (Boréale pictured to the right), and you just may consider becoming a Canuck. Don't say I didn't warn you.

La Paryse is located at 302 rue Ontario Est in the heart of the Latin Quarter. Most burgers are under $7.

Photo by Ashley Thompson