jackets get thoroughly soaked inside from sweat and outside from rain or snow. During these times I have felt myself slipping into the first stages of hypothermia, well knowing the consequences should I allow it to progress to the point where I can no longer make a rational decision, or carry out even basic tasks. At this juncture there are few options. It is here that my own welfare supplants that of the client and the decision is made to stop, erect a temporary weather shelter, make a fire, brew a pot of tea, and get out of wet clothes. I am the first to tend to my needs. Usually by this point others in the group are also in need of a warm-up. The guide cannot benefit the group if debilitated; it’s the same principle extolled while flying in a jet with your children — you are always instructed to put on your own oxygen mask before assisting your kids.
I was hired one winter to guide and instruct a large group of high-school students who were stationed at a well-known outdoor school. The directors had assured me that all students had been well-trained in basic winter survival skills. Our destination was Temagami where we would trek in and set up a base camp using large canvas prospector tents equipped with wood stoves. It had snowed heavily overnight but the temperature hovered just above freezing and the snow was wet and sticky. I had instructed everyone not to bring skis because the conditions warranted travel by snowshoe. When I arrived at the base camp it was raining, the buses were parked and waiting, but the students were all standing out in the weather without their outer gear on — the instructors were nowhere to be seen. Thoroughly soaked, the students then sat in the heated bus for three hours for the ride to our start point. When they unloaded the bus there were no snowshoes — just skis; to add to the complexity of the expedition, one of the leaders had a severe cold. By the time we had everyone harnessed to their respective toboggans it was mid-afternoon and it would be dark by the time we arrived at our prospective campsite. The snow stuck to the bottoms of the skis like cement, everyone was cold from the start, and progress was interminably slow. I dropped my own load several times and went up and down the line encouraging the students (and leaders) to keep moving until we reached the campsite. Fortunately, I had brought a large thermos of coffee which was rationed out to the neediest along the line. I broke a trail to the campsite and began excavating a spot for one of the tents and gathered enough firewood to last a couple of hours. The group was in a sad state by the time they reached the campsite and few were able to carry out chores with any efficiency. We set up the one tent and ignited a fire in the stove and everyone huddled inside to get warm. This could have been a routine winter camping expedition with no hitches; instead, the directors of the group were negligent in preparing the group for the outing. The students were also incapable of setting up camp and lighting fires with any proficiency, even after I was told by the staff that they had already received extensive training.
One of the inherent mistakes made by winter trekkers and often those in a leadership capacity is to treat a winter expedition like a summer trip. A summer kilometre is two or three in the winter if the conditions are bad, and those beautiful summer campsites on the lake could be a winter camper’s nemesis during a storm. Judging the distance you can walk on snowshoes pulling a toboggan, or skiing with a backpack in the winter is more difficult, especially travelling with a large group. Students are notorious for not dressing appropriately and they often don’t factor in the consequences; to them, rescue is always close at hand, until something happens and the reality that they are in the wilderness sinks in.
One of the classic cases of a mismanaged expedition was the Lake Temiskaming tragedy of 1978. It was my first year as a ranger and the headwater of the Ottawa River was in my jurisdiction. I had paddled down this wide section of river on two occasions before; it was legend amongst the residents of the established canoe camps on Lake Temagami who made the crossing regularly, that this body of water was to be respected. On June 11, the St. John’s School headed out with thirty-one paddlers in four brand new canoes. They were eighteen-footers, not quite freighter or voyageur canoes, the leaders put eight in three canoes and seven in the other. Overloaded, the boats laboured in the rough waters. One canoe swamped, and then a second that went to help the first, then a third canoe went over. The fourth canoe did its best to shuttle kids and teachers to the Ontario side of the river but it wasn’t enough to save twelve kids, aged ten to fifteen, and one teacher. The river water temperature was seven degrees Celsius; a body loses heat twenty-five times faster submersed in water than on land. The kids never survived much more than an hour before succumbing to hypothermia.
St. John’s School of Ontario was an Anglican boys’ school whose tenets supported corporal punishment; students were to endure pain and hardship to develop stronger character. Since the accident there have been several documents produced, critiquing the misguided expedition, including James Raffan’s book Deep Waters, published in 2002. And through my own experiences as a park ranger and guide, having observed school and church groups in the wilds, there are obvious logical conclusions we critics can hypothesize about the tragedy: that the guides (or teachers) made fatal decisions based on their collective inexperience in big water crossings. I’m surprised that there haven’t been more accidents like this one. Proper jurisprudence by the guide/ teacher would have included a risk management strategy that included precautions travelling over large bodies of cold water. On my trips I’ll raft two or more canoes together to make crossings or run big rapids that can be kilometres long. Dumping on big lakes or on long rapids can be tough to remedy, not to mention life-threatening. In 2004, there were twenty-three canoe-related deaths and three kayak-related deaths in Canada.
The modern body of medical knowledge — a clearly ethical issue — about how the human body reacts to freezing to the point of death is based almost exclusively on experiments carried out in 1941 by the Nazis in Germany. The Luftwaffe conducted experiments on prisoners to learn how to treat hypothermia. One study forced subjects to endure a tank of ice water for up to three hours; another study placed prisoners naked in the open for several hours with temperatures below freezing. The experiments assessed different ways of re-warming survivors. These morbid tests were carried out by the Nazi High Command at Dachau and Auschwitz, selections made of young healthy Jews or Russians. The experiments were conducted on men to simulate the conditions the armies suffered on the Eastern Front, as the German forces were ill-prepared for the bitter cold. The two-part freezing experiments established how long it would take to lower the body temperature to death, and how to best resuscitate the frozen victim. Test subjects were usually stripped naked for the experiment. An insulated probe which measured the drop in body temperature was inserted into the rectum and held in place by an expandable metal ring which was adjusted to open inside the rectum to hold the probe firmly in place. The victim was put into an air force uniform, then placed in a vat of cold ice-water and allowed to freeze.
One of the regular occurrences I’ve come across in the Far North where hypothermic conditions have no seasonal boundaries is paradoxical undressing. Almost 50 percent of hypothermic deaths are associated with this phenomenon. It typically occurs during moderate to severe hypothermia where the victim becomes disoriented, confused, and combative. The victim may begin discarding clothing, like mitts or hats or even overcoats, which in turn increases the rate of temperature loss. There have been several documented case studies of victims throwing off their clothes before help reached them.
A late, good friend of mine, Victoria Jason, in her book Kabloona in the Yellow Kayak describes her adventure up the coast of Hudson Bay with explorer Don Starkle. Starkle ranks with other Canadian adventurers, like John Hornby, who pushed their limits well past their ability or knowledge to survive. Starkle sat in his kayak in a hypothermic state, in sight of rescue, but had removed his mitts which allowed his fingers to freeze solid.
On Arctic canoeing expeditions, where inclement weather and wind conditions prevail and clients often get wet, hypothermia is a constant concern. The guide is subject to wet conditions, always, on shallow rivers where clients continually get hung up on rocks and need to be assisted. There is often no shelter except for the tent which is pitched at the end of a day. Clothing, damp from sweat inside, or soaked through by snow and rain, waterlogged boots, and general malaise and flailing spirit, all add up and can easily culminate in a serious hypothermia climax. To say I’ve had tough days on the trail is an understatement; clients need constant attention,
