Maine Woods
-23 degrees and blowing on Chesuncook Lake, Maine
As the indigo night slowly gives way to the pale rose wash of dawn, I’m standing amidst a fringe of ragged black spruce mantled with fresh snow. Out on Chesuncook Lake a slashing north wind sweeps last night’s snowfall into serpentine trails of powder hissing above the surface. And then something extraordinary happens: the crimson sun bursts above the horizon, igniting the mile-high buttresses of Mount Katahdin with a startling flare, and then splits in two.
Astonished, I turn to see if anyone else is there to share the miraculous sight, but no; when its twenty-three degrees below zero, most people aren’t foolish enough to hang around outside, waiting for the sunrise.
Actually most people wouldn’t be here, deep in the Maine Woods in the dead of winter, at all. But then most people never see an arctic refraction shear the sun into twin fireballs. They never watch, awestruck, as the ghostly banners of the aurora borealis unfurl across an icy firmament. They never see brilliant snow crystals dazzling in the sunshine like a field of diamonds.
“Traveling like this is perpetual romance for me,” wrote Elliott Merrick of snowshoeing with Labrador trappers during the winter of 1930. Merrick’s classic narrative of that experience, True North, is filled with humorous, lyrical descriptions of journeying through the trackless wilderness at fifty below zero. For Merrick, that winter provided the adventures of a lifetime.
Another early twentieth-century Labrador traveler, William Brooks Cabot, was enraptured by the winter wilds. “So it is that those of us, white and Indian, who have seen much of the interior, have always turned toward the winter trips,” he wrote. “If one goes mainly for the trip itself, for the being out, there is nothing quite like the northern winter. There is the region of the elemental, there the keen air and the flash of the low sun on snow; there the rhythmic crunch of snowshoes under the northern lights and the high winter moon, the long trail that knows no willing end –i-shipits-nan, the Indians call it –their immemorial winter road.”
But talk to many people who have spent a winter night outdoors, even under the guidance of an outdoor leadership school, and they aren’t likely to describe the experience as “perpetual romance.” More likely you’ll hear about the “challenge” of “surviving” the “brutal conditions.” Understandably, these brief, unpleasant excursions into the cold and dark usually aren’t repeated. This is unfortunate, for the often-crowded wildlands of summer revert to expansive wilderness in winter. If only there were a way to explore those crystalline landscapes without employing the high-tech siege tactics of Himalayan climbers –methods completely out of place in the Northern Forest.
Well, there is another way, and its practitioners call it “snow walking.” Snow walking is a winter travel technique that evolved over centuries among the native peoples of the North. And that’s why I’m here along with six others: to learn classic winter trail skills from Garrett and Alexandra Conover, Maine guides and heirs to this rich wilderness tradition. Personally, I’m especially pleased with the deep cold and snow we’ve encountered these last few days because I want to put their methods to a rigorous test. I figure if I can use the skills they teach me here, in the North Woods of Maine where the temperature can ratchet down to forty below zero or lower, then I can use them anywhere.
For days, weeks and sometimes even months at a time, Stephen Gorman sets off into the North American outback in search of striking images of the natural world and the men and women who live and work upon the land.
