Walking the Big Wild: From Yellowstone to the Yukon on the Grizzly Bear's Trail by Kasten Heuer
246 pages
Published 2004
Read from April 1 to April 2
Rating: ★★★ out of 5
As
a young teen, I loved the empty spots on the map. I filled them with a
hash of speculative routes and symbols denoting possible basecamps,
kayak adventures, and massive, continent-spanning bushwhacks. I traced
lines along the mountain spines of the west and the white reaches of the
north, naively figuring the terrain would be both easily traversable
and utterly deserted. Water access never once crossed my mind.
One
of my more ambitious routes roughly paralleled Heuer's path in this
book: Beginning in Yellowstone, forging north along Montana ridgelines,
clambering through the Canadian Rockies, fetching up in the Yukon.
Heuer's account of Canada's backcountry amplifies that of Cassandra
Pybus in The Woman Who Walked to Russia, dismembering my naive
notions of the unspoiled blank spaces on the map. It's disheartening to
realize that, despite Canada's positive reputation down here in the
States, they're really kind of terrible at conservation; timber and
energy conglomerates seem to win every time. Heuer's log of oil
development and clear cuts and abandoned extraction roads rife with
snowmobilers was nothing short of depressing.
This book reminded
me of all the conservation-minded adventure books I read in the '90s,
which used fairly banal adventure to generate sympathy and interest for
naively optimistic conservation initiatives. Like those authors, Heuer
is positive that grassroots education can overcome the PR campaigns of
international corporations and their bottomless pockets. Looking back
from these grim latter days of Western capitalism, it's like a window on
a far more innocent time, even though it was just nine years ago.
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