Crashing through dense brush with a canoe on my head and a cloud of black flies chewing liberally on my face, I realized this was not the portage trail used by most to get from Embryo Lake to Upper Hatchet Lake. In fact, there was no trail at all.

Poplar and spruce saplings competing for ground space lashed my shins and fallen logs made me stumble as I worked toward an opening in the canopy where the lake had to be. Mere steps before the water released me from my burden something in the forest caught my eye- a reflecting light that stood out from the browns and greens of the Boreal.

I dropped the canoe abruptly and rushed to the shiny bauble like a Northern Pike to a minnow. The empty whisky bottle was half-buried in the loamy earth, reclining casually on its side. I pulled it up and inspected it. There was a faded cigarette wrapper inside upon which someone had scrawled a message. Turning the bottle, I read the note through the glass,

'Celebrating 50 days on trip,
July 12th 1967,
Bill E (rest of name illegible)
Harry Harvey.'

Exactly 40 years earlier, these two fellow canoe trippers passed the same way as us- long before the area had been turned into a park. They were most likely carrying out one of the many canoe expeditions launched that year in celebration of our centennial. At that moment I was struck by the fact that our wilderness waterways have not only been travelled by trippers for decades, but by voyageurs and first nations people for centuries before that.

Ambling off the beaten path toward adventure is a Canadian tradition, one that needs to be preserved. On that day in Woodland Caribou Provincial Park, Taku and I felt part of that tradition as we met Bill and Harry, their legacy forever preserved in a time capsule that now sits proudly on my mantle at home.