Servant of the Maps

Winter 2009

This is an article from WaveLength Magazine, available in print in North America and globally on the web.

To view a copy of the entire magazine online, click here: WINTER 2009 WAVELENGTH MAGAZINE

by Neil Schulman

Rain puddles spill across the street. Pedestrians outside my window duck like Quasimodo, trying to hide from the rain. My short bike commute gets me soaked through my raingear, and by 4:30 p.m. I need a headlamp to open the garage. Putting my bike away, I trip over two bright yellow sea kayaks – an expedition boat and a shorter play boat, both annoyed at me that they’ve been sitting in the garage so long.

It’s not that they don’t get used in winter. Winter in Oregon is a great time to paddle inland waterways, see bald eagles and big rafts of ducks, and brave the wind in the Columbia Gorge. But it involves layers of fleece under the drysuit, gloves, a neoprene hood and a thermos of hot tea. And when it’s raining and dark before 5 p.m., camping loses a lot of appeal. So the expedition-worthy Explorer sits in the garage while all I manage are day trips.

Of course, there are other ways to get a wilderness fix. I could fly to Baja or Belize, but airfare runs more than I’m ready to part with on a non-profit salary, let alone the cost of renting boats. So I stay local. But as the rain drives me indoors, I’m doing something else: looking at maps and charts, and pondering dreams.

The cartographic coma

While my bank account may balk at Baja, time off allows the imagination to roam. Visions dance in my head of pushing off for two weeks or more next summer when the light lasts late into the evening. And while flipping through guidebooks in the winter may seem like idle daydreaming, it’s where the genesis of the next trip lies.

I spent much of one winter staring at charts of the north end of Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland, trying to glue together an island-hopping route across the edge of Queen Charlotte Strait. I started where the guidebooks stopped giving much information, and started seeking past travelers and emailing locals. Mostly I got responses like “hmm, not a lot of people go there, but I’ve always wondered about it.” Of course, the fewer people who go there, the more I want to go myself. That’s where the charts and maps and the daydreams come in.

I love maps, atlases, charts – anything that shows me the visual landscape of places I haven’t been. They’re addictive. I can stare for hours at the outlines of a coast, the topographic lines of a mountain range I’ve never seen, or the sinuous curves of a river. It’s all fodder for the imagination. I can imagine gunkholing along some island-strewn coast next summer with my vacation time. Or should I plot a long river trip? Cart my kayaks up to some long, glacial-sculpted, deep blue mountain lake in the far north? For the map addict, a world atlas is a dangerous thing.

Dangerous, but also essential for trip planning. Over the last winter I organized a trip across the edge of Queen Charlotte Strait. At the time there were no good guidebooks to the area, so my map addiction came in handy – pouring over the topography of glacier-carved inlets, looking for flat areas that could hold a tent, spotting narrow areas that would likely hold tidal rapids. I figured out where we could pick up a food drop (half of which didn’t show, but that’s another story), plus alternate routes if the weather got bad or if our ambitions to cover miles sagged.

The group thing

If you’re planning trips, winter’s a great time for the most critical part of the whole endeavor: building the group. Despite living in the midst of a large community of skilled, fun and amiable kayakers, getting a good group of people together can be a challenge. And it’s not just finding dates that work for everyone’s calendar. It’s also finding paddling partners whose skill and judgment you trust, and who enjoy similar styles of paddling. I’m a gunkholer by nature, preferring to poke into every nook and play at every surf wave I can find, rather than beeline from one point to another. And then there’s that intangible quality: are they a good person to be stuck in a tent with during a three-day storm? So in winter, as the idea of a trip forms in my head, I’m also scoping out friends.

Building the right group is more art than science. I have friends I’ve logged enough miles with that we know how we’ll respond to the inevitable changes of plan, bad weather days or not accomplishing a set goal. But if this isn’t the case, there’s nothing better than a shakedown cruise to get a sense of the dynamics.

Choosing a group also means choosing group size. Larger groups can decrease risk (thus the phrase “no less than three upon the sea”).

They also build more camaraderie, and give everyone a mix of energy. But the bigger the group, the more complicated the decision-making and the slower you’ll be to break camp. And in vertical, glacier-carved landscapes where flat spots are small and far between, keeping the group to one or two tents can be a major advantage.

That winter, as our group put our plans together, we did more than clog tables at the local pubs with charts and calendars. We put on our warm clothes and went out in the Columbia and paddled together, practiced rescues and made sure we were comfortable with each other on a long trip with complex currents, long mileage and potential bad weather – all of which, it turned out, we encountered, and laughed our way through around the campfire.

The ‘unusual’ trip

Obviously, the first place you’ll look will be guidebooks, physical and online. But I’ve done a lot of trips that guidebooks haven’t covered, or where they’re noticeably out of date. Once, during an attempt at a winter trip up a flatwater section of the Grand Canyon, we found that a “camping spot” was dense with ten-foot tall trees that had grown up since the guidebook had been last updated. If you’re traveling off the beaten path, finding information will be hard, and you’ll need to take that as part of the fun. And sometimes – like on one trip to British Columbia – we found our route altered by the fear of covering twenty miles to a camping spot that we weren’t sure existed.

The path less traveled means you’ll need to rely on the centuries-old craft of seamanship: interpreting the features of the landscape and sea bottom and the movement of water and weather to anticipate the paddling conditions. Narrow passages usually can produce strong tidal currents and shallow rocks can produce minefields of breaking waves as the tide drops. How to hone this skill? Next time you go out, watch the weather. Then guess from the movement of the clouds and the sea what the weather forecast will be the next day. Then turn on the VHF and see if the forecasters agree. This will help you hone your prediction skills.

And in the age of the internet, you can research historical weather patterns for an area. Want to know what the average wind speed has been for Neah Bay, WA, on July 10th? It’s only a click away. This is especially handy for trips where the weather forecasts aren’t in English.

Another place you can turn is the old hikers’ standby: the topographical map. Unfortunately, many charts contain relatively little topographical detail about landforms. As a backpacker who learned how to stay found by relationships to peaks and ridgelines, I seek out the landform detail of topographic maps to accompany the chart datum.

And then there’s the latest technological marvel, Google Earth. As soon as it came into vogue, I looked up the locations of past trips where not being sure of places to camp had caused me to abort. While its data is often unclear (especially for areas with a daily change in water level) it’s another resource for being able to peer at a landscape to find campsites or streams to replenish your water supply.

Once I have this info, I write it all on my chart so it’s in one place. I also write in other things that may pop up during a trip: current stations, water sources, alternate routes if it’s windy or the surf is too big, bailout spots if it gets truly nasty. I also plot the courses of likely crossings so I don’t have to do it on the water if the fog rolls in.

The real McCoy

The best information comes from folks who have been there before. Of course, if you’re dreaming of a less-traveled spot, it will take you longer to find someone who has, but that can be part of your winter project. I’ve found some great campsites over the years that someone has told me about that aren’t in the guidebooks. A longtime resident once told me exactly how some tidal currents worked for which no tables existed – and, of course, he was exactly spot on. Sometimes asking the locals for the secrets of their back 40 may seem like asking a fisherman to share his best fishing hole, so I ask as humbly as I can, and I figure they’ll share what they want to.

So now I’m trading ideas with my friends, as we go on our increasingly rainy off-season paddles. Hakai Pass to Port Hardy? A long trip along the soggy, ice-laden coast of Alaska? What about a long river trip, somewhere in the far north? Or should I spend two weeks closer to home, paddling the coast of southern Oregon and northern California? It’s time to start finding out.

And of course, I may hear “hmm, not a lot of people do that.” They may not. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t and that I won’t. It’s part of the appeal. Roll out the charts, and start dreaming. Next summer’s coming right up.

Neil Schulman lives in Portland, Oregon, where the charts, are, unfortunately, up-to-date. When he’s not staring at maps, he does conservation work, paddles, photographs and tries to stay out of trouble.