Cutlines, Muskeg and the Long Haul to Kakwa

Every truck in this city with a trailer hitch is making a quiet promise. Most of them never keep it. The trailer sits in the driveway from April to whenever, the sled under a tarp that has become a seasonal ecosystem, and the owner tells himself he'll get out next weekend. I know because I have been that owner, and the tarp is still out there.

So consider this less a guide than a nudge from someone who has finally pulled the tarp off.

Start with the obvious truth. The country around Grande Prairie was not designed for recreation. It was designed, if that's the word, by forestry and oil and gas, and what that leaves behind is an enormous web of cutlines, lease roads and haul roads running through the aspen and spruce. For anyone on a quad or a sled, this is both the gift and the catch. There is more ground to cover than you will cover in a lifetime. Some of it ends in a fence, some in a pipeline right-of-way, and some in a slough that looked frozen and was not.

Muskeg deserves its own paragraph. Summer quadding in the lowland bush north and east of the city is mostly a negotiation with wet ground, and the ground usually wins. Go in a dry stretch of late summer, or better, in September, when the bugs have given up and the poplars have gone yellow. Go with a winch. Go with a friend who owns a winch and has forgiven you for last time.

The good riding is south. Head down toward the Wapiti and keep going, and the land starts to fold and rise into the foothills. Two Lakes Provincial Park is the name people say first, and it earns it. The drive is long and the last stretch is gravel, but the snow comes earlier and stays later than it does around town, and the terrain finally gives a sled something to do besides go straight. Musreau Lake, off Highway 40, is the easier day, closer and more forgiving, with ice fishing shacks for company.

Beyond that is Kakwa. Kakwa Wildland Provincial Park sits up against the B.C. border, and the country around it is the reason serious sledders in this region own serious sleds. It is high, remote and beautiful in the cold, hard way the mountains are beautiful. It is also avalanche terrain. That isn't a footnote. Anyone heading into the alpine near Kakwa or toward Grande Cache should be carrying a beacon, shovel and probe, should know how to use them, and should have read the avalanche forecast that morning. The people who die out there are rarely beginners. They're usually the ones who stopped checking.

A few unglamorous facts. Off-highway vehicles in Alberta need to be registered and insured. Riding on the highway itself is not on, and ditch riding has rules that vary by municipality. Haul roads carry logging and industrial trucks that will not stop for you and could not if they wanted to. Crown land is not a free-for-all, and some of what looks like open trail is someone's lease.

None of that is meant to talk you out of it. Fifty kilometres of empty trail on a minus-fifteen morning, the sun barely clearing the spruce, the engine the only sound for miles, is worth every one of those caveats.

Bring a thermos. Tell somebody which cutline.