Lessons Learned in the Wilderness

Full show notes at everydaymarksman.co/5 This episode of Everyday Marksman Radio is a bit more improvised than what you’ve heard so far. I’ve been doing a lot of writing, talking, and interviewing about the guns and shooting side of the house. For this session, I wanted to pivot a bit more towards the survival and skillset side of things. In this episode, I’m going back into some of my adventures to talk about two in particular. One was a fantastic three-week canoe trip through Northern Canada, the other was a jaunt along a section of the Appalachian Trail. I chose these two because they are different kinds of outdoor endeavors, and each taught me different lessons. In some cases, lessons learned in one actually contradicted the other, which is what led me to the importance of planning for the environment and situation. McLennan Lake Canoe Route As a young boy, I participated in the usual boy scout things. We did the weekend jaunts around local campgrounds, small canoe trips, and the summer jamborees. In hindsight, though, nothing was really that serious compared to what I would do later in life. After graduating from high school, and just before starting college, a few friends and I took off to do a canoe trip in Saskatchewan, Canada. We arrived in Saskatoon and drove up to the McLennan Lake complex. There, we met up with our guide and hit the water. For three weeks we paddled for 6 to 8 hours per day, found an island, pitched our tents, and rested up for the next day. It was an incredible experience, and I don’t want to give you any impression otherwise based on some of the things I’m about to say. This is about the lessons I learned from that trip, and that means I have to focus on the things that didn’t go well. Lesson #1: Paddling is WORK To be honest, I wasn't prepared for how much work goes into canoeing well for that many hours. Not only the physical part, but the teamwork as well. Lesson #2: When it’s Gone, It’s GONE On this particular expedition, we had no resupply points. The only supplies we had for the entire three weeks was the buckets of stuff we could fit in our boats. The first supplies to start running out was, of course, our food choices. We still had enough food for the entire trip, but the “favorite” items like cheese and dried meat were the first to go. My takeaway from this was that any future trips required me to bring all of the food. That was actually a bad take, and I paid for it in another trip. Lesson #3: Safety is NOT a Joke Two major accidents on the trip taught me the importance of being aware of what's going on around me. It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye, literally. The Great Smoky Mountains For this trip, which happened towards the end of college for me, a few of us set out to hike a leg of the Appalachian Trail. Having done the aforementioned canoe trip just a few years before, I thought I was good to go and didn’t need to prepare. Again, I was wrong. Lesson #4: Test Your Gear The first of my failures started months before we even hit the trail. Lesson #5: Plan Your Load We made a lot of mistakes with the amount of stuff we carried with us. From food to shelter, we really needed to plan a lot better.