Like many other strapping, red-blooded Canadian youth, I spent my teenage years participating in the Duke of Edinburgh’s International Award program. This is an award program dedicated to finding and recognizing outstanding young Canadians, so that they may be spared the next time Prince Philip comes around to consume a child from one of the colonies in order to sustain his unnatural life.

I may have an incomplete understanding of the role that the Monarchy plays in modern-day Canada.

Like other awards for overachieving youth, the Duke of Ed awards require that participants show exemplary community service, skill development, and involvement in physical activities or team sports. Unlike other awards for friendless nerds with over-involved parents, however, the Canadian version of the program also requires that all participants go right the fuck out into the wilderness and survive for a couple of days, because this is Canada, goddammit, and no amount of hours volunteering at the SPCA is going to help you when the bears come.

Pictured: Canadian geometry class.

As a young high school student, I had no interest in participating in the Duke of Ed awards. The closest I came to joining a sports team was being the token girl on my school’s under-performing Reach for the Top team, and the only adventurous journey I was interested in was an adventurous journey to the basement, so I could be left the fuck alone while I listened to Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashups and stared forlornly into space. I had home-dyed pink hair, I wore fake ties to school, and I was trying to successfully navigate an emo phase while living an 11-hour drive and one international border away from the nearest Hot Topic. I already had a lot on my plate, and the last thing I needed was the additional stress of trying to figure out how to tromp moodily through the woods in platform boots.

Gaze upon what my parents had to deal with from 2005 – 2009.

My perspective on the great outdoors changed, however, at the start of the 11th grade, when my school got a new principal.

And also The Hunger Games had just come out.

When I started high school, the principal of my school was a man who had such little involvement in the day-to-day operations of the place that there was a distinct chance he was an inflatable prop brought out only to decorate the stage during graduations and assemblies. The summer after my 10th grade year, he decided to make his disinterest in us official, and suddenly retired. His replacement was a man named George. And if there were two things George liked, it was student engagement and outdoor activities.

Pictured: George, in the shorts that he wore 85% of the year.

Our high school’s overall performance was somewhat disappointing at the time, and George was apparently tasked with turning our school from a warehouse of teenage failure into a functional institute of secondary education where learning occasionally occurred. And so when George looked out upon his new charges for the first time, he realized, with some distress, that he did not see any Duke of Ed medals gleaming back at him. That was when he decided that he simply could not rest until the lot of us were basking in the warm glow of Prince Philip’s approval.

Which is actually the heat that he gives off as he eats your inferior, underachieving classmates, but I digress.

Completing all of the Duke of Ed requirements is more difficult than it sounds. Getting students to volunteer at the homeless shelter and sign up for intramural soccer was easy enough, but the part of the Duke of Edinburgh awards that most students found difficult was the Adventurous Journey requirement. As sheltered, middle-class suburbanites, most of us required a compass, a lifeline and an adult’s soothing words to venture through anything more rugged than a carefully manicured lawn; sending us out into the wilds of Alberta by ourselves was a recipe for death and dismemberment. Since adults were allowed to tag along on these trips to keep the body count to a minimum, George decided to arrange a vast array of possible Adventurous Journeys and started hunting down students to go on them, no matter how doughy, pale and pathetic they may be.

Case in point. 

In order to maximize participation, a variety of Adventurous Journeys were arranged, in order to accommodate all levels of skill and comfort with large land predators. For beginners, there were several scenic summer multi-day hikes and camping trips. For intermediates, there were mountain biking trips and canoe adventures in the stagnant waters of Lac la Biche. And for the types of people who looked good in Spandex, there was a 25km uphill cross-country ski trip through the mountains in the dead of winter.

I was unmoved by any of them.

This is the closest I wanted to get to exercise from ages 16 – 24.

My friends and classmates did not share my disdain for the outdoors, and began signing up en masse. I was horrified. At the time, the only thing I was more afraid of than my favourite shade of Manic Panic being discontinued was finding myself being left out by my peers. Eventually, my desire for social inclusion outweighed my desire to spend the rest of my life inside a climate-controlled geodome, and I ventured into one of the Duke of Ed trip meetings, pen in hand, ready to sign up for the first trip that seemed halfway interesting.

I think you can see where this is going.

Hint: nowhere good.

At the meeting, George explained to us that the beginner trips were recommended for people who’d never been on any kind of significant outdoor excursion before. People who regularly went camping could try the intermediate trip. The advanced trip existed mostly as a challenge for people who choke-slammed bears in their spare time and feared neither God nor oblivion – it was not intended for beginners.

I looked down at myself.

I had the physique of a butternut squash, the muscle definition of an overcooked s’more, and the skiing ability of a confused marmoset that has only been cross-country skiing twice on a pair of its dad’s old skis. And goddammit, none of that was going to keep me from conquering a mountain.

Although, spoiler alert, it should have. It absolutely should have.

If George was surprised by my decision to take on a trip that was well outside my athletic means, he didn’t show it, and as the weeks ticked by, I began to believe that signing up for this trip was a good idea, rather than a foolish and possibly-fatal mistake.

That is, until the morning of the trip arrived.

As luck would have it, the trip was scheduled to leave the morning after the school’s 48-hour Bike-A-Thon for cancer wrapped up. This was an event where students spent a full 48 hours pedaling a stationary bike in teams of 10, making sure that the pedals never stopped moving, with all pledges and donations going toward cancer research. This was also one of the only athletic events of the year that I actually looked forward to, because I wholeheartedly embrace any form of exercise that can be done sitting down and while eating a bag of Cheetos. Choosing between Bike-A-Thon and the ski trip was not an option. By God, I would do both.

You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

The clever thing to do in this situation would have been to take all my Bike-A-Thon shifts on the first day of the event. That way, I could have had one day to rest before lugging myself and eight pounds of trail mix halfway up a mountain. Unfortunately for me, however, I was the president of the A/V club and reigning Queen of the Unfuckable Nerds at the time, and so my presence was required before, during and after the event, in order to set up, take down and generally babysit a great deal of expensive audio/visual equipment. By the time my parents came to pick me up, several hours after the closing ceremonies had finished, I had been awake for more than 72 consecutive hours. I was approximately 2/3rds Monster Energy Drink by volume, I could talk to stars and taste numbers, and in approximately four hours I would need to be on a bus to British Columbia with 60lbs of hiking gear in my lap.

I was a minor at the time, and now I wonder if it’s too late for me to retroactively report myself to Child Protective Services.

I have no actual memories of any part of the bus trip, because I’m fairly sure that I astral-projected into another dimension from sheer exhaustion. When I returned to my mortal body, however, I was at a youth hostel in the Northern Albertan wilderness, being told to put my gear into our shared room and then get the fuck outside for a late-night nature hike.

Up until this point, I had been coasting along with a toddler-like combination of overconfidence and naivety, but that started to wane a little as George led us further and further into the dark woods. But it wasn’t until George stopped and started passing out burlap sacks and whistles that I realized I was truly out of my depth.

“From here on, we’re going to walk in silence,” he explained. “Every hundred or so feet, one of you will stop and stay where you are. When we get out of sight of that person, the next person will stop, and so on. For the first time, you’ll each get to experience what it’s like to be completely alone in the woods, with no trace of civilization to be had.”

“What are the burlap sacks for?” someone asked.

“Sitting. I want you to sit down on the ground and stare up at the sky. This is a dark sky preserve, with no light pollution – for the first time in your lives, you’ll be seeing almost the same sky that your ancestors saw hundreds of years ago.”

“What are the whistles for?” asked someone else.

“Oh, those? Those are for the cougars.”

Not this kind.

George helpfully explained that mountain lions had been sighted in the area, and that if we were attacked by one, we should blow the whistle as loudly as we could.

“So that you can come save us?” one of my classmates asked hopefully.

“Oh, no,” George laughed, “I’ll be way too far away to reach you in time, and there probably won’t be much I do. But it’ll give the rest of your classmates a chance to run.”

“How will we know a cougar is coming?” one of my classmates asked, looking significantly less enthusiastic about this nature hike than she had five minutes before.

“Oh, you probably won’t,” George explained cheerfully. “They like to wait silently in the trees and drop down from above. You won’t even know it’s there until it’s already on you.”

And with that, he promptly abandoned each of us in the woods, one by one.

The skies were clear that night, and when I looked up, I was treated to the most incredible view of the night sky that I’ve ever seen before or since.

Or at least, I would have been, if I hadn’t been too busy staring at the undersides of the trees, waiting for a cougar face to come looming out of the darkness like the goddamn Cheshire Cat.

Somehow, I managed to survive our late-night attempt to be puma food, and after a few hours of restless sleep haunted by dreams of cougars telling me that I wasn’t cool enough to sit at their lunch table, we were back on the bus and heading for the mountains. Or at least, my classmates were taking a bus to the mountains. I was on a bus to an appointment with Death itself.

The first signs of disaster appeared before we had even left the parking lot. As we were standing outside the bus, getting our gear and equipment ready, I came to four increasingly horrifying realizations:

1. I had the wrong type of ski boots. I had been cross-country skiing a handful of times before with my parents’ old skis, which used NN three-pin bindings, and those were the type of boots I’d brought with me. This was apparently the same type of ski bindings that my ancestors used to frantically ski away from dinosaurs during the late Cretaceous period, because it turns out they had been phased out of use decades ago. The school was providing the skis, which all used modern NNN bindings that clipped into a metal rod on the toes of NNN boots. So if I was going to make it up this mountain, it was going to have to happen in a pair of borrowed, ill-fitting boots. Awesome.

2. I had the wrong type of backpack. We had been told to bring external-frame backpacks to pack our gear, so my mother went spelunking in the darkest reaches of our basement and emerged with a steel-framed backpack that hadn’t been used since my grandfather picked it up as a consolation prize on his way home from the Korean War. It carried up to 50lbs of gear, and 45 of them were the weight of the backpack itself. It was also much too large for my body, as it was clearly intended for an adult man, and I was a teenage girl who had to stand on tiptoes to be allowed passage on most rollercoasters. My classmates were strapping on lightweight, ergonomic packs made from space-age materials, while I, on the other hand, would be schlepping up the mountain with what was essentially a small hospital cot strapped to my back. Double awesome.

3. Thirdly – and as it would turn out, most dangerously – I was wearing the wrong clothes. My family understood that mountain = cold, and so I’d been sent off in generous layers of warm cotton and wool clothing. What I didn’t know then – but certainly know now – is that cotton and wool are a terrible choice for any sort of adventurous, outdoorsy activities in the wintertime, because once they get wet, it’s virtually impossible to get them dry again without hanging your clothes out over some kind of fireplace. My savvy classmates had decked themselves out in head-to-toe spandex and polyester to wick their sweat away, but I was about to find out just how heavy and damp a cotton sweatshirt can be.

We trudged to the edge of the cross-country ski trail that would lead us up the cabin where we would stay that night. Everyone clipped into their skis – something I found excessively difficult from the get-go – and we lined up like we were about to have the world’s most uneven and anti-climatic ski race.

How did that go for me? You’re going to have to find out in the next post, because this got incredibly long and I can only draw so fast.

Click here for Part Two. 

***

If you want to read more about terrible situations I got myself into, check out the time I accidentally caused $3000 in damages to my college dorm in a single night. 

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