“You will love it. You will hate it. You will feel powerful. You will want it to end. Then, when it’s all over… you will crave to do it again.” Inside the punishing Wilderness Traverse. Words & photos :: Kristin Schnelten
Evan Edgell, Thomas Douglas, Carson Blackwell and Gabe Sims haven’t seen another human in nearly four hours. The team of 17-year-old rookies has spent a sleepless September night squelching around the Ontario wilderness, heaving and dragging their bikes in thick and thorny underbrush, over ankle-rolling scree, through concrete-thick muck up to their axles.
Rain is falling in relentless sheets, and solid cloud cover has choked every ray of moonlight. With nothing but a map and compass to guide them past the collective pool of their headlamps and exhaustion bringing them to their knees, they’re pretty sure they are truly done. Lost, even.
Maybe?
The group does have a GPS unit. And four cell phones. But they’re sealed in tamper-proof bags, stored deep in soggy backpacks. The team is physically and mentally depleted, and the temptation to throw in the towel is high. Thoughts of an escape route glimmer like the promise of a steaming pepperoni pizza set before a roaring wood stove.
Gabe digs out the plastic bag. Defeated and deflated, the athletes stare down at his hands. After weighing their options (are there others, really?), all four nod their heads in agreement: It’s time to break the seal.
He reaches for the tab, but the bouncing light of approaching headlamps freezes him: People! A brief greeting proceeds the heads-up that saves them: Yup, you’re going the right direction. The next check-in point should be just around the bend.
An instant frozen in time, a team’s fortune turned 180 degrees. The boys repack bags and surge ahead in a sleepwalking daze. In the mere minutes before they reach that check-in, the sun begins to peek through the trees. The maddening rain ceases. They leave the station reinvigorated, determination doubled.
Finding the strength you didn’t know you had, sharing encouragement, overcoming gargantuan hurdles—this moment of truth is what Wilderness Traverse is about.
An overnight multisport competition established in 2010 by internationally recognized racer and organizer Bob Miller (a Collingwood local and bona fide celebrity in the adventure-racing world), Wilderness Traverse has developed a reputation as the most prestigious race of its kind in the country. This slog of a bike section is one of three disciplines, along with paddling and trekking, in the 150-ish-kilometre event. It all began well before sunrise, a short (or excruciatingly long) 24 hours ago.
Saturday was a dewy morning, with mist-shrouded trees in full autumn colour. Yawning and stretching, fresh and clean, spandex-clad racers—more than 200 of them—milled about the starting area just west of Algonquin Provincial Park, stacking bikes and schlepping plastic bins large enough for at least one corpse. Hastily labelled with tape and Sharpie, they bore team names both ominous and amusing: This Is A Terrible Idea, We Signed The Waiver, No Truck Home, Sober And Confused.
Inside each bin: A change of shoes, dry socks, extra layers, bike helmets, piles of food. Racing nutrition like energy bars and gel packs, yes; also Ziploc and paper bags stuffed with cold pizza, drive-thru burgers and convenience-store candy.
Organizers will spend much of the day shuttling these bins and bikes to transition areas (TAs) throughout the course. Each TA is staffed by volunteers who fill water bottles, answer questions, encourage and uplift, call for help when needed. Finding their way to each TA—and the piles of checkpoints (CPs) in between—is up to the racers. The course is entirely unmarked.
By 8:00 a.m. that first day racers and volunteers have made their way inside, where Miller delivers a welcoming pep talk and rundown of the event. While he chats, volunteers make their way through the tables and chairs, handing a single, sealed envelope to each team. When he’s finished speaking, racers are hovered and ready.
Miller gives the okay, and they tear into envelopes. Prior to this moment, teams knew the starting point, length and the three disciplines, but very little else. What they have now is scarcely more: a few printed topographical maps, marked not with routes but dotted with tiny circled CPs and TAs.
The Wilderness Traverse is open to teams of three or four, and typically each team has one navigator. They’re easy to spot in the muffled flurry that follows: Each is at the centre of a team huddle, hunched over a table littered with maps, compass in hand, pointing at landmarks and making notes. Teams have roughly 90 minutes to make their plan before they pack up and head to the start line.
The course begins with a short 2 km running race around headquarters, each team choosing their strongest runner to toe the line. An adventure in itself, racers report bogs, bugs, tight turns and fallen logs.
The object of this leg race is simple: Avert the chaos of 100 canoes entering the water at once. And it works. The five-minute spread between first to last runner carries through to the shore, where paddlers mostly have enough space to jump in and dig in.
The saga from this wet and frenzied point to the far-off finish is as varied as the teams themselves. Some will complete the course before the cutoff time of 30 hours. Others will skip a short section or two, completing a slightly shorter course. Nearly a quarter will call it quits from pure exhaustion or befuddlement, or be forced to DNF (did not finish) along the way. At least one team won’t even make it to the end of this first paddling leg.
Although the venerable Wilderness Traverse is known in the adventure racing world as the de facto Canadian championship, part of its appeal is that it welcomes all levels of athletes, from rookie to elite. But it’s tough. Very tough. Making multiple attempts over many years, taking one DNF after another, isn’t unheard of. The course location changes every year, making the finish line an ever-changing goal that keeps racers returning, hoping to eventually reach.
Margaret Stefels of Team NARly There admits her first attempt, in 2020, was “a disaster.”
“Our navigation went awry,” she says. “The first leg was a trek. We were at a stream, filling up water, doing foot care, and we bumped into a canoe team coming by on a portage. One of the racers looked at us and said, ‘Wow. You’re a rookie team, and you’re doing an amazing job. Well done.’ And then he realizes we have no canoe.”
Team NARly There had managed to veer so far off the intended trekking route that they wound up in the path of the second, paddling, leg. After seven hours of bushwacking and an unplanned full-kilometre swim, they eventually threw in the towel.
“We started wandering around in the dark, and at the end we were sitting on a rock by a lake, with no clue where we were…”
On her second attempt, Stefels and her team made it through one full day and into the night. “We were crushing it on the mountain bike leg; we felt so good. We got onto the trek, and everything fell apart again,” she remembers. “We kind of started wandering around in the dark, and at the end we were sitting on a rock by a lake, with no clue where we were on the map. We just couldn’t make sense of anything.”
Calling headquarters for help meant the end of the race—or so Stefels thought. She later realized they could’ve made the call, found their way back on course and feasibly completed the race as an unranked team, a designation that simply means you can’t say you came in Xth place. But she admits, “I don’t know if we would have been in a position at that point to continue.”
It’s these nuances in rules and regulations that Barb Campbell, longtime racer turned invaluable volunteer, coordinates. Sitting behind flickering screens at race headquarters, it’s Campbell who answers the calls for assistance and monitors the tiny dots that jump around a digital map (every team is equipped with a send-only GPS tracker that organizers and spectators view in real time, on the edge of their collective seats, online).
“Usually people are dropping out because they’re tired, they’re cold, they’re discouraged. They just can’t quite make it to the end,” says Campbell. “They’re usually not dropping out because of an emergency.” Besides being monitored via their tracker locations, racers are required to carry emergency supplies, such as reflective blankets and fire-starting tools, to thwart dire situations.
Bob Miller, as captain of the second-place Team Canada Adventure at the 2019 World’s Toughest Race: Eco-Challenge Fiji, knows firsthand, “Positive attitude is everything. Even as very experienced racers, we struggle with attitude. The sport is mentally taxing, and people break down mentally before they break down physically.”
“Everyone knows it’s going to get hard at some point, but knowing you’re going to push through, setting up your mind ahead of time helps,” he says.
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Miller is adamant that it’s not necessarily the teams with the greatest fitness levels who podium at adventure races. It’s the teams with the best navigators and the best attitudes.
At transition areas, he says, “You’ll see the happy teams and sometimes a grumpy team, and the chances of the grumpy one finishing are way less than then the teams that are having fun or just maintaining a positive outlook.”
At each of those TAs, the frontrunner teams fly in, make the gear switch, grab food and scarf it on the way out. But as the hours wear on, teams further down the leaderboard stroll to the parking lot, sit on the pavement and hang out for half an hour—soothing blisters and savouring cold burgers.
Two co-ed teams were neck and neck for first place at nearly every checkpoint, but Collingwood-based Peaks and Trails Running Series is the first to emerge from the woods at the finish line, taking first place at 3:01 a.m. with Raid Pulse hot on their tails, just 24 minutes behind.
Later, at the awards ceremony, Peaks and Trails will take home $1,500 in cash and other prizes and will proudly accept a three-foot-high carved beaver, the coveted travelling Wilderness Traverse trophy.
But first the remaining teams need to find their way to the finish line. They continue to trickle in through the long night and hot day, and just before 3 p.m.—an hour before cutoff—the final team walks beneath the archway, limping and dazed. They collapse into the grass at headquarters, having paddled, portaged, biked and trekked for nearly 29 hours.
A few participants and volunteers are there to congratulate with claps and cheers, but for the most part it’s an anticlimactic moment. Months (and sometimes years) of training and planning wrap up with little more than some high-fives and an ice-cold carton of chocolate milk.
They collapse into the grass at headquarters, having paddled, portaged, biked and trekked for nearly 29 hours.
Team Unknown ETA, the first all-youth team to sign up for the Wilderness Traverse, came back from that low point on the bike leg to cross the line just shy of 1 p.m.—and at least one of their grandmas was there to greet them.
“I think that was the first time we had grandparents at the finish line,” laughs Campbell. “And the boys didn’t just finish, they came in 30th out of more than 60 teams.”
Miller was blown away by the rookie team. “Honestly, beforehand I gave them maybe a 10 per cent of chance of finishing the race. I was like, There’s no way. But they totally crushed it,” he says.
Carson Blackwell was conflicted when he crossed the finish line: “I thought, Wow, that was really impressive that we were able to finish. I’m so tired. I just want to sleep. I don’t really want to go through that again anytime soon. But in the back of my mind I thought, But maybe I would like to try, now I know what I’m getting into.”
Blackwell echoes the words Miller delivered to competitors that first morning: “You will love it. You will hate it. You will feel powerful. You will want it to end. Then, when it’s all over and you’re back to your regular day-to-day life, you will crave to do it again.”
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