Brazeau Loop

A few weeks ago I hiked the Brazeau Loop with my friend Jen. It's an 80 km (50 mile) trail through really rugged and beautiful terrain in the Southern end of Jasper National Park.

I'm sure that doesn't tell you much, so here are some resources to get your oriented:

• A trail description (we did it in five days, not seven)
• A not-bad re-creation of the route using Gmaps Pedometer
• My Flickr photo set from the trip
• Satellite view of the Columbia Icefield (visible for start and end of the hike)

The high/low point of the hike came two-thirds of the way through second day when we saw a bear sitting near the trail a few hundred feet in front of us. I don't think I've ever felt so vulnerable, even though a) I've been much closer to bears while in a car, and b) I had bear spray. We were two days' walk from any kind of help, so a bear encounter would have been truly a life-or-death situation.

Luckily for us the bear wasn't that interested. He looked up from his bush, took a couple of (scary) steps forward, and then decided to amble down the valley. We went straight up hill, and powered through the hardest climb of the whole hike in about half an hour.

A couple of nights later, at the fantastic Brazeau Lake campground, we were reading through the camp register. (The register is a log book for campers that stays at the campground.)

In the register we found a half-dozen stories about bear sightings, a couple of them in the same area we saw our bear. And, in fact, it probably was the same bear--interrupted hunting gophers, neither interested nor bothered by people.

Anyway, I was struck by the total amazingness of the register. People write about their hike, where they're from, where they're hiking to, what animals they saw, the weather, and anything else that's interesting. Wardens and trail crews record the campground conditions. Some people write silly stories (like the guy who said he saw a liger). All together, it gives you a picture of your environment that couldn't have otherwise (as well as being an example of, um, distributed asynchronous low-fidelity collaboration... or something like that). In the backcountry local knowledge is pretty scarce, which makes the register a valuable resource. But it's also a history of the place, told in half-page chunks by hundreds of different people who mostly stay just one night.