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.

Snow

Snow- pillowy, enveloping, muffling, softening the world and making it new, making it another place, inviting exploration, transfiguring the ordinary and enticing the eye with plays of light and shadow, curves and edgings, hiding shadows and erasing the surface beneath. Or perhaps amplifying it with echoes in ways to make it mysterious and challenging to read. Negotiating snowy landscapes- new ways of locomotion, the potential of skis, snowshoes, and sleds. Some paths become easier, some much harder. And snow has myriad textures depending on wind, air and surface temperatures, intensity of sunlight, and history of the snowpack. Today the first heavy snowdump here at -11°C or so inspired me to dig out skis for the first time, rush to the ravine and ski down the [paved, multiuse] trail [the bike highway which denies winter to enable wheeled communte transport to downtown Edmonton] and set tracks in the openings in the valley of Mill Creek below. If they didn’t normally plow and sand this long grade I would ski it daily all winter long.
Skis are very practical ways to move over country under winter conditions. They enable the human user to take advantage of reduced friction and surface roughness to multiply the propulsive impulse of his or her muscles; the pointed poles provide traction where needed. Saami invented skis as a way to move through the taiga with their herds of reindeer.
In North America, a different solution to cross-country movement in a snow covered winter landscape was invented: the snowshoe. Traditional snowshoes are bent wooden frames netted with babiche (stretched rawhide) or other hide cordage, or sometimes apparently with plant material. These are affixed to the wearer’s feet to enable floatation, permitting the walker to avoid sinking down deeply in deep soft snows. I recall once a gruelling traverse across a snowy slope in the West Kootenays across deep soft snow coming back from a long cross country hike begun on the frozen weight-supporting spring crust of morning…..the return journey, though downhill, was exhausting, and very slow. We were down off the mountain close to midnight, having descended most of the way by starlight and feel. There are First Nations tales of the discovery of snowshoes. These enable winter hunting, moving from camp to camp, and greatly extend the range of human travellers in the Canadian forests. Not only do the shoes enable the human walkers to move over the snow, but they create trails over which dogs can pull toboggans, enabling the transportation of camping gear or other cargo, such as the meat harvested by hunters. In the winter in the North the swamps, lakes and rivers are converted into open trails and highways once they freeze sufficiently. Impassable alder thickets become open meadows, easy to traverse over top of the tangled stems.
Snowshoes come in many designs and webbing patterns, enabling travel over different types of snow conditions, in different terrain, and utilizing different locally available materials. My first encounter with Native made snowshoes was in the mid 1970s just after the birth of my daughter. One of the women who worked at the college where my then husband and I taught was the daughter of a skilled snowshoe maker. Percy made shoes for me and my husband out of local Rocky Mountain maple (Acer glabrum var. douglasii) and webbed them with caribou (Allen’s shoes) or deer (my shoes) babiche for the fine filling in the front and rear sections of the shoes, with heavier cow hide strips in the centre under the foot. The shoes had almost parallel sides, like the form of “Sherpa” snowshoes, and were decorated with red and black coloured woolen pom-poms. Do I have to have these, I asked Percy. Yes, he answered. He later commented that these coloured balls help to prevent snowblindness. He showed us a binding which allowed one to slip into the shoes without buckles. Some years later after I began ethnobotany research I was able to visit Percy in his home village of Kispiox and interviewed him about snowshoe making. I was permitted to photograph him doing fine filling.

Percy commented that the rounded toe of the distinctive Gitxsan design allows the toe of the shoe to ride high to avoid toeing in (and falling) while avoiding bruising the shin and knee, which pointed toe designs may do. The balance of Percy’s snowshoes is amazing; the shoes pivot to bring toe up, and short tail down at each step.

This photo (left) is one of my snowshoes showing the binding and my canvas boot. If snowshoe crampons are needed, as often in the mountainous terrain of the Gitxsan homeland, a short length of spruce stem with spike branches pointing down into the snow is lashed under the pivot point. Below is a shot of me and my daughter snowshoeing on our land in the late 1980s.

The neighbouring Witsuwit’en also make these round toed snowshoes, but more often make a traditional Dene style of pointed snowshoe. (see a pair photographed in Ron Sebastian's Hazelton Gallery in 2005 below)

I learned words for these types of snowshoes, and for the fine and coarse filling. I also learned about how to make emergency snowshoes of a hoop of red willow.The excellence of the local small maples for snowshoe making is reflected in the fact that the Witsuwit’en word for snowshoe, ‘ayh is also the name given to the maple. Maple shoes are strong and won’t break, but they are heavy. A tough small pine will make lighter snowshoes and the “fuzzing” of the softer wood will make them less prone to slipping, though they must be replaced more often.
Travelling to the Yukon in the early 1980s Allen and I encountered snowshoes with birch frames and quite a different webbing pattern. These were of the pointed toe overall shape, but the webbing under the foot was an open rectangular pattern, and the webbing was a distinctive cured caribou hide. We stopped in Teslin where the best snowshoes were said to come from and interviewed two snowshoe makers about how the snowshoes were made and the hide for webbing prepared. We ordered a pair of Teslin snowshoes to enable us to repay those we spoke with, and also to possess a pair of these remarkable shoes.
Some years later, in winter of 2000 I had the opportunity to see and to try Gwich'in snowshoes, intended for the fine powdery snows of the low Arctic taiga and alpine tundra. Wonderful snowshoes of large area, high upturn with rounded toes, and very fine filling. I found them remarkable to walk in, enabling good steady gate across or along the frozen river.

The photo of Gwich'in snowshoes was taken in the band office at Fort McPherson in December 1999.
In Edmonton, skis are usually more sensible than my snowshoes. I’ve only really used them two or three winters out of about 23. Now I see people wearing snowshoes that are high tech creations of completely different design and intent, like my cross-country skis, something for urban recreationists to use for outdoor exercise and fun.