Of Trails and Roads- "among the trees" versus travelling through country

The first time I drove down the Alaska Highway in 1997, large sections of the highway between Watson Lake and Fort Nelson were narrow two-lane highway, slipping through the trees in curving pathways, up rises and down. It was not a high speed route, but the highway ran along in the aspen and spruce woods, giving a real sense of the nature of the place. I felt like I was there, had been there. When I drive there now, the improved high-speed highway punches through the landscape, in a wide swath, topography muted by big road-cuts and fills, the trees cut back so that one glances at the forest on either side, rather than travelling among the trees.

The cleared highway right-of-way is mowed annually, features exotic grasses and legumes used routinely to vegetate highway roadsides, and has incidentally been recognized by the re-introduced bison as a nicely maintained bison pasture that attracts them and creates serious road hazards for motorists. A broad swathe of artificial low herbaceous vegetation now transects the boreal forest for the length of the Alaska Highway. This broad and straight expanse of pavement facilitates the transport of people and goods from one end-point to another. The pavement itself is expanded by the sloping cut banks and the fill slopes to create an entity of substantial area that extends many thousands of times its width to create wide corridors of disruption and disturbance from whose familiarly similar pavement we view many kinds of landscape and cityscape. That we pass through without actually being there. Yet somehow we still think of roads as lines, in the geometric sense, having length and trajectory, but not extent. We bracket them out of our imagining of the places we've seen.
 I began to think about the difference between roads and trails again this past week, walking in the faux natural urban greenspace (at this season, snowspace) by my home in Edmonton, Mill Creek Ravine. In the time I've lived here, the city has consistently expanded the width of its trails, widening pavement of the paved bike trail, now kept plowed all winter long, and heavily gravelling the official walking trails until they are in fact single lane gravel roads, used as such by Parks and Recreation, which drives maintenance trucks on them. The roadside vegetation is religiously mowed back more than a meter on each side of the gravel edge now, obliterating wildflowers like the lovely star-flowered solomon's seal, Canada violets and wild lily of the valley, (Maianthemum canadensis), and promoting disturbance tolerant weeds like dandelions and bladder campion. They also cut back the stems of the fruiting saskatoons with brush blades, to create a neat corridor through the aspen woods and gallery forest along Mill Creek. Dog walkers, joggers, strolling friends, and cyclists make use of this easy route. Few stop to pick fruit, or watch birds. Some sport ear buds, or talk on cell phones.
 I often take the unofficial side trails, created by human feet (and mountain bikes), about a shoulder's width to the trail bed, winding their way among the trees and bushes, pausing for views, anastamosing, looping both sides of the main trails of the official net, and creating shortcuts between major routes. I feel that I am, as Dene speakers would say, among the trees when I walk on these trails. With the degree of traffic, one does need to look for roots that might trip a walker...the flowers along the trail are intact. Wild sarsaparilla grace the trailside in summer, highbush cranberries heavy with fruit in fall. I rarely encounter dogwalkers in these places (but sometimes have to step aside for mountain bikers). My feet are at home, finding their path where others have walked. Gravel does not crunch underfoot.
 In winter, as now, there is rarely a sheet of ice along the path, as the traffic is less. I am really there. The pathways are marked by the tracks of those who have walked, inscribing the trail through the act of walking itself. These trails, of course, are tame, as they are created by urban recreationists in a large city. I do not have to glance around for bear scat, or tracks. I have no fear of becoming lost. For trails are routes. They choose where to travel in going from one place to another. Or rather, they instantiate the choices of many who have travelled from one place to another. Even these trails require maintenance; natural processes work to obscure and disrupt trails. We had high winds a week ago, and many trees and branches fell across the trails. People moved them aside, to re-establish effective walking.
 In more remote and unsettled places, trails can feel like lifelines. They need more maintenance there, where washouts, bank erosion, treefall, and brush growth can erase signs of the route, or make following it nearly impossible. In Northwest British Columbia where I used to live, and have worked with local First Nations for nearly 30 years, the network of traditional trails was crucial. For trails of regional significance, work to create them beyond the mere passage of feet was required. These often required a fair amount of construction, leveling trail beds where they ran along sidehills, pecking foot and handholds where rock walls needed to be ascended, even construction of timber bridges to span impassable rivers in this dynamic mountainous landscape. Routes were marked by blazes (at least once steel axes were acquired), or by bending over branches. Brush had to be cleared so it would not spring up and cause injury when it was walked on when bowed down with heavy snow. Lore detailing routes, details of ownership of territories and location of boundaries, and how to cross hazards like avalanche slopes without excessive danger were passed in families, along with accompanying place names. These trails required skill in walking, balance, the ability to cling to a steep slope or to cross a cottonwood log over a rushing creek, and to avoid being caught up in brush. They required route finding. Trails led to resource areas, and were named by the type of use (berry patch trail, mountain goat hunting trail, and so on).
 Some of the Indigenous trails because roads. Others became disused, as settlement patterns changed, ways of making a living were altered and resource use shifted. These fade from memory, as people cluster in the valley bottoms and the Elders who ranged these lands are gone.

This is an image of an old blazed Kaska trapline trail in the Yukon.

The word atane means 'trail'; you can indicate a moose trail, for example with keda 'tane.

Another Kaska trail between a gravel truck trail and a fishing site is clearer and more currently used.

Trails themselves offer a network of human spaces on the land. Walking on land with no trail is a highly skilled activity. One must choose a path, assess the footing, dodge bushes and branches, step over logs and downed trees, look ahead to decide which pathway will lead to the clearest route with least effort– and still get where one desires to go in the larger scale (e.g. go up the correct ridge, not slip over into the next valley, arrive at the lake and so on). One must also return without getting lost or arrive at the next camping place as anticipated. When we went walking with my Manhatten-bred niece many years ago, the fact that traversing country requires skill was brought home to me. Deb had literally never had to decide which side of a clump of bushes to walk on before.

 My colleague Rob Wishart wrote a piece about the Gwich'in skill of walking...this resonated with me, because years before I had been travelling along the Dempster highway with my Gwich'in elder teachers and had commented that the rolling alpine made me want to just go running across the land....William looked at me and commented that it isn't easy to walk across the land. I thought about it and realized there are sedge-tussock marshes, exhausting to negotiate, wet ditches, low tangled dwarf willow, and deep soft sphagnum. It may look like one could run across it like a farmer's pasture, but this land takes much more skill than that.

Forested landscapes have their own set of skills. And walking on winter landscapes, assessing snow quality, ice safety, and deciding if snowshoes are needed is a whole different set of skills.

The packed trail or blazed path offer comfort and security, welcoming. Others have been here. Places and destinations are known.  Cross-country traversing, trail walking, and driving on roads all reflect different levels of intimacy with the land, different sets of skills, different scales of concern and different perception of grain.  Finally, the bird's-eye view offered by air travel gives yet another distinctive set of perceptions of pattern and land while being literally removed from the landscape one contemplates.

Of Lowbush Blueberries and Memory

Lowbush blueberry photo taken at Seeley Lake August 26, 2011


Lowbush blueberries (Vaccinium caespitosum) are sweet and delectable, with a tinge of apple to their flavour. They grow on low bushes (hence both the common and scientific names) some 15 cm (6 inches) in height, and the tiny berries are a bright blue, hiding under the waxy spoon shaped leaves. I have encountered these lovely berries rarely, as they are easily overgrown by bigger, faster growing species, but the memories of the places I have found and tasted them are sharp. The first time was now thirty years ago on a rocky alpine ridge just above timberline on the Seven Sisters in northwest British Columbia. I was hiking with my friend Joan while our husbands were canoeing on the Stikine River….we decided to take an overnight trip up the old Magnatron Mining Road to treat ourselves to something special. On the flank of the ridge above the trail in a rocky fell field were tiny blueberry bushes sheltering among the stones…. these minute bushes were not above 3 or 4 inches tall, but the berries were sweet. I remember my sense of wonder at their hardiness and tiny size. I remember our camp on a bench overlooking the Flint Creek basin below, our pup tent pitched in a flat grassy patch beside a tiny pond among the rocks, the northwest flank of Weeskinisht (Wii Ska’niist, the Big Mountain) with its small remnant glacier and snowfields above us.

My next real encounter came on another trip in the Coast Mountains, this time about 1985. My then husband and my daughter Rose and I hired a floatplane to take us in to a pair of lakes in the subalpine just below Telkwa Pass. We camped with another couple, Sheila and Peter, and the plane hauled our canoes in as well so we could explore the small lakes. Access to these with a canoe is impossible any other way, as the Burnie Lakes empty by way of the totally impassible Chlore Canyon, draining west into the Copper (Zymoetz) River near Terrace. The rugged glacier clad peaks of the Howson Range soar above the lakes, which are a milky blue with rock flour. Fishing for trout (camo-coloured a grey blue on their backs) was noteworthy, because you couldn’t see the trout until it was nearly landed, though the water looked clear enough. After a hike up to the snout of a glacier above the upper Burnie Lake, we moved camp to the second lake, walking by trail the short distance between the two. Here in the more sheltered woods along the little stream were mega-lowbush blueberry bushes, nearly a foot tall, and loaded with their delicious sweet berries.

In the years after those initial encounters, I began to study Gitksan and Witsuwit’en ethnobotany, and I learned that these little blue berries were ‘mii yehl in Gitxsanimax, and yintimï in Witsuwit’en. People used to manage the encroaching brush and grass by landscape burning, ensuring abundant and productive fruit. The area in the valley bottom between 2 Mile and Hagwilget was “just blue with berries” Alfred Joseph, Gisde We told me in 1987. People often used toothed berry pickers to strip the tiny fruit, and I could see why. But in the time I lived in the Skeena, lowbush blueberries were scarcely ever encountered. Berry patches became pastures, gravel pits, or were brushed over. Trails up the mountains to berry patches were overgrown or truncated by logging cuts. The little bushes linger in some places, but, in common with most blueberries and huckleberries, don’t fruit well when shaded.

On a visit home this past month, I was restless for places to walk. My friend Shari’s place is amazing and beautiful, nestled beside the Bulkley River between Hagwilget and Bulkley Canyons, with eagles perching across from her dining room window…. and bears walking casually through the yard in search of berries or heading down to the beach to fish. August is the “hyperphagous” stage when they are putting on fat for winter…. so walking the trails along the river seemed ill advised. However, driving down the Skeena toward Kitwanga, I decided to stop at Seeley Lake, a beautiful little lake right under the towering flank of Stekyoodin, known officially as Rocher de Boule. (Seeley Lake has its own stories, of the supernatural aquatic grizzly Medeek, and how it punished youth for failing to respect the beautiful fish of the lake- see Men of Medeek by Will Robinson as told by Walter Wright, Northern Sentinal Press, Kitimat 1962. The story is also briefly recounted on one of the Ksan 'Hand of History' signs at the shore of the lake.)

There is a little provincial park on the lakeshore with campsite and picnic area, and after enjoying the view down the valley, I noticed a sign for a hiking trail. Here on the rocky knoll by the lake and in a campground I was less likely to interrupt a foraging bear, so I set out on the trail…. and realized that one of the better stands of low bush blueberry I’d seen in years grew under the open tree canopy on the thin soil over the rock…. I began to scan for fruit, and picked a couple of small handfuls, reveling in their remarkable flavour. I mused that if I came back with a container, I could probably pick enough to take home. Because the knoll is so rocky, lusher brushy vegetation does not thrive, but the tough little blueberry bushes spread well.

A couple of days later I was back, enjoying the opportunity to walk and botanize again…and I remembered my yoghurt container to pick into. I realized that there was actually quite a lot of fruit in some areas, though it was hard to see as it was under the low leaf canopy for the most part. As I picked, I thought of my Elder friend Lavender, and her stories about picking lowbush blueberries some 65 years before. Lavender is from Fife in Scotland, and came to Kitwanga with her decorated Gitksan war hero husband Ray in 1945, a fiery and diminutive 18 year old. In 1945 the village was still quite traditional in many ways; the last longhouse was still standing, and the road had only been in for a year or two, though the rail line had run down the Skeena since the Great War. In summer of 1946 Lavender was recovering from the birth of her first child Naomi. She spent a lot of time sitting on the ground in the sunshine picking lowbush blueberries. Her mother-in-law Martha suggested she prepare the fruit in the traditional way and give it to the Elders. They were so delighted the Frog Chief adopted Lavender, and gave her a name that reflected her wonderful gift of berries. I think it was translated as something like “bringer of gifts from Heaven”. Lavender is 85 now, and stopping by her place in Kitwanga a couple of hours before I had just learned that she is in the clinic in Houston, frail and debilitated. I decided that I would give the berries to Lavender when I stopped down to see her later that afternoon, and redoubled my focus on picking.

We sat on her bed in the late afternoon sun, and Lavender lay back savouring the tiny berries one at a time, perhaps thinking back to happier times when she and her late husband were young and her little daughter was by her side. And I reluctantly headed East on the highway in the morning, returning to the city where I now live.