In-your-face adventure travel
Two Springs, One Summer: a year inside the life of a chronic adventurer
by Frank Wolf
Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2024
$28 / 9781771606844
Reviewed by Theo Dombrowski
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What does the average reader expect of a book of wilderness expeditions? For starters, of course, geography—lots of geography—often dished up with weather, some hair-raising physical challenges, at least some wildlife—and group dynamics.
All of these can be found in spades in Two Springs One Summer, by North Vancouver lifelong adventurer, prolific writer and filmmaker, Frank Wolf. However, these are just the foundation of this memorable, three-part, autobiographical travel book. Consider the evocative words of the book’s subtitle: “A Year Inside the Life of a Chronic Adventurer.” The three key words? “inside,” “life,” and “chronic.” Why? As much as this is the account of three long expeditions, it is also a frank and supercharged self-portrait. Holding back is not something Wolf does. On the contrary.
The most frequently asked question of astronauts at public events apparently concern how they manage basic physical functions—everything from sleeping and eating to defecating. If Wolf were an astronaut (as, in effect, he is) he would be the star speaker. More than just delivering unexpected information (too much at times!), the author accompanies it with emotions, thoughts, and opinions—lots of opinions. The misery produced by snoring tent mates, the best underwear to avoid chafing, the merits (or otherwise) of smoking pot, and the diabolical misjudgement of bringing toilet paper on an expedition—on all of these, and many, many more topics, the author has much to say.
As for the language, expect much of it to be in full technicolour: “we don’t fuck with morning coffee” he assures the reader at one point; at another he says of a partner that he “always seems to have his shit dialled a bit better than us.” And so on. His language is not that of the tea party.
Add to this a vast range of topics—some of these, as we might expect, about the rights and wrongs in preparing for and running an expedition. Others, though, are about such a range of topics as cultural and social problems, profit-driven companies, technology, marriage, and, most important, his “chronic” need for adventure. Wolf’s traveling companions, too, are far from immune from his turbocharged judgements of good—and not so good—behaviour.
Primarily, though, many readers will be drawn to this book in hopes of experiencing a healthy dollop of vicarious adventure. They won’t be disappointed. They will be immersed, first, in a skiing and hiking expedition across Baffin Island during an icy spring. Second, they will experience an even more epic summer trip by canoe (chockablock with portages and mosquitoes) along a sequence of unpredictable rivers and lakes in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut. Both of these Wolf chose in part for their scenic beauty and challenge. The third trip is markedly different: this time the author has been hired as photographer and writer to retrace the comparatively unscenic route of nineteenth century Arctic explorer, John Rae.
The first two, along routes occasionally travelled by other contemporary adventurers, stimulate some radiant postcard writing. Awestruck by the sight of a particular mountain, for example, Wolf writes, “the scale of this mountain is staggering.” It “hooks prominently over the valley, the monolith seemingly a gargantuan vulture looking over us as we pass below its immensity.” His descriptions of tumultuous rapids and lake crossings in the second trip are likewise charged. More typical of the third trip, in contrast, is his writing of one dire vista as a “monotonous, flat, and windblown piece of ice.”
In addition to scenery, Wolf makes sure armchair adventurers can experience at least some wildlife—a distant wolverine at one point, a ghostly Arctic wolf at another, and most memorably, a herd of caribou appearing almost out of nowhere (on Wolf’s birthday, no less) and disappearing like a fading vision.
And, into this natural setting, enters Wolf himself. When the going is easy, as it often is, the author, not content with “easy”, provides his own challenges. “Addicted to moving”, he pushes himself to cover distance and yet more distance (and, to boot, to report his exact daily distances). In a different, deeply personal way, he writes a “haiku” daily to crystallize the adventure into images and moments.
The going, of course, is not always easy. Most readers relish challenge—at least from a distance. When not struck by the author “freezing my ass off in this desolate land,” readers can experience some vicarious exhaustion at the thought of skiing up and over a 6,500 ft high point, or get an adrenalin rush from passages like “We fight sudden whitecaps…chased by bolts of chain lightning.” Running rapids, the most expected challenges of a river adventure, can be scary—Wolf describes the occasional “close call”—but they can also be exhilarating. For Wolf, though, they are more than exhilarating. For him, running a rapid is “as creative as any painting by Picasso or Dali…Once the rapid has been run the art is visible to no one, but stays within your soul for the rest of your life.”
Some challenges, though, are inadvertently self-inflicted. When Wolf and his exhausted companions drag their equipment-laden sleds far off course, for example, he pulls no punches: “We are idiots.” A badly prepared and tangled “bear fence,” is, he mutters, “unacceptable.” As for an air mattress that disintegrates on the first trip, a companion on the second who, though forewarned, brings hypothermia-inducing clothing, or, on the third, badly-chosen sleeping bags whose zippers break and become “sodden,” Wolf knows how to make such challenges even more heart-stopping than the description of a howling wind.
Add to these health challenges. Worryingly, his paddling companion, for example, suffers so much shoulder pain that, for many days, he can paddle on only one side. Likewise, the overladen cameraman on the third trip, crippled by a bad foot, has to quit the expedition. By far the most horrifyingly fascinating of these health issues, though, is that which the author himself suffers. His detailed account of the excruciating pain he endures (silently) from increasingly damaged feet in the third expedition may well linger longer for many readers than any excited description of a wolverine. Hacking holes into his boots to make room for horrendously swelling feet—in icy conditions sometimes thirty degrees below zero—he is driven to sound one of the most compelling notes of the book: a “mission can go as planned, or it can come to a slow-moving crash.”
Weekend warriors and gearheads in particular take note: It is not just such grisly details, but also practical details that Wolf uses to ground his wilderness experiences (as, in fact, he has done in magazine articles). When not writing about exactly what a particular freeze-dried meal he is eating (Pad Thai is his favourite), for example, he is letting us know about the merits of Starbucks instant coffee, or, (canoeing enthusiasts pay attention) unequivocally recommending a particular make and model of canoe and paddle. As for the advantages and disadvantages of boots (Baffin Boots can be wonderfully comfortable), or coats (Skreslet parkas are overpriced), for example, or the best stove for melting snow (an MSR XGK), who wouldn’t want to know?
Other practical details, though, provoke firestorms (or ice storms, perhaps) of Wolf’s rhetoric. The author has views—strong views—on technology. Not a purist about rejecting all technology, he documents carefully how he uses some. Most readers will know about GPS, but may be fascinated to learn about “inReach,” the gizmo that, Wolf carefully explains, allows him to connect with this wife and collect information about weather or changing icepack conditions.
Such, we learn, is justifiable use of technology. Woe be to those, however, who lean on the other sort. Woe be, most prominently, to his canoeing companion, Ryan, whose heavy use of his phone for entertainment enrages, or at least, distresses, the author. In his passages on Kurzweill’s predictions of a computer “Singularity” he inveighs against “our addiction to technology.” Darkest for him, though, is seeing Inuit youth depending utterly on snowmobiles, a “version of the Singularity.” This is quite the “opposite” of a state where “man and wilderness are intimately intertwined.” The daily blogs of the leaders of the third trip, he finds equally disturbing: “This expectation of constant communication is one of the most distasteful things about modern expeditions.”
More than technology, though, it is people, and Wolf’s intense reactions to them, that make his travel journals buzz.
He cannot meet anyone, it seems, without reacting. Even casual encounters—with a 70-year-old Australian canoeing couple, for example, or an Austrian solo canoeist—provoke immediate judgements. He likes them. It is the Inuit whom he particularly likes, however, both those he chances upon in the course of a trip and those he sees in a community, both the youth, and, even more, the Elders. Amongst these towers one Elder called Jacob: “He’s someone to aspire to in these modern times, a man rooted in the ancients who is a lighthouse in the storm that often gathers in these isolated communities with their myriad problems.”
Then there are those he doesn’t like. He doesn’t like many city folk: those, for example, at weddings “milling around chit-chatting,” the kind that “would drive me completely, batshit mad.” He really, really doesn’t like his (named) boss at Mountain Equipment Coop after it decayed into a cold, profit-driven business. A “Stalinist at heart,” he is “the perfect hatchet man.”
In addition, though—and this is even more surprising in a book of this kind—he occasionally delivers brutal views of his team mates. Poor Ryan. Ryan, Wolf grumbles, is not just a “chronic pothead,” but also a “stubborn bastard.” Worse, he is obsessed with his phone. “He seems to have little interest or curiosity about nature.” On the third trip, he is angry with both companions: “I curse Richard as I hobble along. It’s like every man for himself on this trip, it seems, or at least Richard and David versus me.”
Frank with his emotions, though, the author can be equally warm. By trip’s end he says of Ryan, “I appreciate what we’ve done, where we are, and how Ryan is an equal part of all that.” Likewise, on the third trip, in agony, he admits, “My misery really is making me irrational” and repeatedly says that the other two “are decent fellows.”
This same emotionality penetrates other parts of Wolf’s writing. Even his appreciation of nature can flame up: “I feel part of this great wilderness we’re moving through, everything intertwined with the ancient pulse of life.” But it isn’t just nature that stirs him. A line of Inukshuks is much more than a curiosity: “It tumbles over me like a collapsing wave, the fact that life is ephemeral and fleeting, all of us passing through” until “the three of us are merely scattered dust in the wind….” More stirring, in a way, are the many times the author’s thoughts go far beyond what he sees, to the point that he questions the very validity of the journeys that demarcate his whole life: “The futile, arbitrary nature of what we’re doing…rolls over me like a tidal wave.” It matters that, in a recent TEDx talk, the author reveals a major shift toward writing, increasingly, of the environmental imperatives faced by Canada’s north.
Even after his most destabilizing drifts into fundamental questioning, though, Wolf grounds himself in nature: “I return to where I am again.” Similarly, upon ending a journey he feels compelled—and that is not too strong a word—to set out again, and yet again. In a kind of meta confession he describes the genesis of “this very book you hold in your hands.” “It will be…about the past year of trips, but also the searching and drudgery of existing between the trips—a look into existential purpose and the drift and discontent I feel in society as compared to on a trip.”
It is hard for a reader, for whom Wolf’s writing has created a vividly memorable world, to accept fully what Wolf says near the end of the book: “These journeys were sharp and clear as broken glass when they were happening, but like the steam that rises ghost-like from the rocks in front of me, they’ve dissipated into nothingness.” What readers will accept, though, and understand, is that they, like the author, have had a remarkable experience. It will be long before it will be “dissipated into nothingness.”
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Born on Vancouver Island, Theo Dombrowski grew up in Port Alberni and studied at UVic and later in Nova Scotia and London, England. With a doctorate in English literature, he returned to teach at Royal Roads, UVic, and finally Lester Pearson College in Metchosin. He also studied painting and drawing at Banff School of Fine Arts and UVic. He lives at Nanoose Bay. Visit his website here. [Editor’s note: Theo Dombrowski has written and illustrated several coastal walking and hiking guides, including Secret Beaches of the Salish Sea (Heritage House, 2012), Seaside Walks of Vancouver Island (Rocky Mountain Books, 2016), and Family Walks and Hikes of Vancouver Island (RMB, 2018, reviewed by Chris Fink-Jensen), as well as When Baby Boomers Retire. He has reviewed books by George Zukerman, Robert Mackay, Genni Gunn, Eric Jamieson, Adrian Markle, Tim Bowling, for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster