Saturday morning, bright and early, Chris and I met in Steinbach ready to start our hiking trip down the Mantario Trail. The Mantario Trail starts just north of West Halk Lake and ends on the north east side of Big Whiteshell Lake. At sixty km’s long it is Manitoba’s longest hiking trail. After our breakfast at McDonald’s (where all serious hikers eat) we drove by Tim Hortons, Chris and I both new that various public servants indulge themselves at Tim Hortons every so often but we still thought it a bit strange seeing the entire fire department, police force and more than one ambulance on the parking lot. What was stranger still was the billowing smoke coming from Tim Hortons itself. If Chris or I had been more spiritually minded at the time we might have taken it as a sign that we would always have a fire for cooking on our trip.
Once we had been hiking down the trail for a few hours, and after getting lost about six times, we were a bit nervous that this trip might be a little more difficult then we thought. The fact that the first day of the hike was the only part of the trip that Chris and I had both done before did not in anyway convince us that the days to come would have any less confusion.
After about an hour down the trail we met a man running past us, and as he said, “away from a bear,” the man seemed quite friendly, calm, and apparently very familiar with the trail. He also mentioned that we had some how turned around and were heading back to the start. We very quickly decided that we were going to turn around and go on anyway, despite the bear. We never did see that bear, however we did encounter another two days later, at that point I don’t think I could have run even if my life depended on it. But the bear never followed us, thankfully.
The first real issue that we encountered was the fact I had brought my camp stove but not my camp stove fuel. Every single one of the meals that we brought required some level of cooking. I only realized that I had forgotten the stove after already walking about one third down the trail, twenty km’s. But, as before, we decided not to turn back, it had been raining intermittently since we left, so we were a bit nervous that the seven campfires that we would have to make during the hike would not all be possible.
The second issue that I faced was the ferocious pain in my feet. The first day we walked for approximately seven and a half hours. During the last half hour, my feet started hurting, and burning, by the time we finally got to camp I could hardly walk. Taking off my socks and shoes I was able to find ten or so of the largest blisters I had ever seen. I took care of them the best I could and spent the next two days popping Advil every few hours just to get on my feet. Piece of advice, never hike with wet socks and shoes, EVER!
But in the end we triumphed, in three (very long) days Chris and I had walked across four beaver dams, caught fish, built seven fires (two in the rain), ate chicken fajitas, burritos, spaghetti, porridge, hot dogs, beans, bannock, fish, fell in one river, climbed thousands of feet, witnessed spectacular views, saw snakes, a bear, beavers, a wood chuck, deer, hiked sixty km’s across the Mantario Trail.
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