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magazine / ja12
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July/August 2012 issue |
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EDITOR’S NOTEBOOK
New (and familiar) frontiers
People explore our world in many different ways.
A few dozen intrepid Canadians are avid cavers. Men
and women like Adam Walker spend their
weekends and vacations squeezing through pitch-black passages
and venturing into cathedral-like caverns, driven onward by the
allure of the unknown. Speleology, the study and exploration
of caves, started to spread from France in the early 1900s. It
became very popular in Britain in the decades after the First
World War but didn’t gain a solid foothold in Canada until
the mid-1960s. Today, as Bruce Kirkby writes in “Subterranean
trailblazers” (page 34), there are about 100 regular participants
in this country’s caving clubs, compared with nearly 10,000
registered alpinists. Yet despite the underground nature of the
pastime, western Canada’s karst terrain is home to some of the
most promising leads on the planet for explorers in search of
uncharted frontiers. “Caving is the antithesis to the instant gratification
upon which our modern age is built,” says seasoned
speleologist Chas Yonge. “It simply takes time, which is something
in short supply these days.”
Countless Canadians canoe, but few of us do it as much
(or as well) as Hap Wilson. Best known as the author of several
classic and indispensable canoeing guidebooks and as an expert
on the natural history of Ontario’s Temagami region, Wilson
was asked by Trans Canada Trail Ontario to map out a new
water link from Lake Superior to the Manitoba border to help
complete the monumental cross-country route. Wilson, whose
story and photographs about this adventure can be found here,
is at home when navigating rushing rivers and root-riddled
portages with a canoe on his head. During his 35 years of pathfinding,
he has been savaged by some incredibly intense storms;
last summer, while scouting a remote lake in northwestern
Ontario, he was struck by lightning. But Wilson shrugged it off with an explorer’s aplomb: “That’s the immutable truth about
wilderness travel — the more time you spend out here, the
greater the chance of being struck by lightning.”
Not all exploration is that risky, of course. As award-winning
sustainability writer Chris Turner discovers in “This is your city
on foot”, there is “Wildness” close to home. Turner’s
sauntering through a cross-section of Canadian cities was
inspired by a couple of great thinkers: Henry David Thoreau,
whose essay “Walking” includes the line “in Wildness is the
preservation of the World,” and Italian physicist Cesare
Marchetti, who came up with a scientific constant holding that
for more than 10,000 years, people have spent about an hour
in transit every day, and for all but the last century or so, we’ve
spent that hour on foot. So Turner set out on a series of atypical
hour-long walks — in urban Calgary, Ottawa, Montréal,
Kitchener-Waterloo and Toronto — and found a new frontier.
“The wilds of automotive Canada have barely begun to be
explored,” he writes. “In mapping them out, we can find a part
of ourselves we’ve nearly lost.”
This issue of Canadian Geographic wasn’t envisioned as
a reflection of the contemporary spirit of exploration. It simply
evolved this way. And beyond the aforementioned three stories,
even smaller articles — such as our look at the first Canadian
to traverse the Northwest Passage and our account of Canada’s
first satellite — revolve around the same thematic axis. People
explore to experience and better understand our world and to
help us find our bearings on it.
— Dan Rubinstein
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