What happened and Why am I Blogging

So there I was, knee deep in the thick of things, conquering a trail I had my eye on for a while. It was an 88km loop trail in a provincial park in central Ontario, Canada, when all of the sudden at the end of a grueling 13km leg in my journey I had come across a couple who had set up camp at a site I had booked. I must admit, on day 7 of my trip around this loop trail I was not too impressed to see someone set up camp in a place I had been relying on to rest and recuperate, but instead of showing aggression and asking them to leave I politely asked what was going on. They asked very nicely if they could share my campsite because they were too tired to carry on with their intended route. There had been a pretty bad thunderstorm the night prior and I could see that they did not handle the previous night very well so I said yes they could share the campsite with me. After situating my kit and grabbing some water to filter we began to talk about the trail and where they were supposed to go instead of my campsite, the woman(i'll call her miss) took out her map and began to show me their intended route and sites they had permits for, their next campsite was the one I had just came from 13km's away across the more difficult terrain this trail had to offer. I explained to them that I had just came from that way and for them to reach the site they had planned after that would be a very difficult day to go almost 28km's to their next scheduled site, the man(i'll call him Jones) asked me what they should do, and what they should do about the mosquitoes, to which I replied that if I was them I would try to make my way back to the start point or beg another person to use share their campsite, and as far as the mosquitoes went there isn't a whole lot you can do besides bug spray and a thermacell combined with a smokey fire as the biting bugs were in an absolute feeding frenzy probably due to the previous nights storm. At this point I had been deciding whether or not to go home the next day as I had two more campsites booked that were less than 20km's away from my car, I could see in their faces that they weren't certain of what to do next and after talking with them for a while I had discovered that Jones was from eastern Asia and hadn't been backpacking before and Miss being from the United States had done backpacking across Europe and some novice mountain climbing in years past but had come to underestimate the terrain they were up against. After observing their struggle to get a good enough fire going so they could cook dinner I had decided to give them the permit for my last two campsites and carry on home the next day.

I am not telling this story as a slight against miss and jones, they were both not from Canada and didn't know fully what they were getting into. But this situation could have ended very badly from them, as the route they wanted to take was my exact route and in the first 5 days of my trip I had seen four people, one man leaving the park, and the other three in a group moving passed me on the trail and on top of that there was little to no cell phone reception from the moment you stepped onto the trail. If there had been an emergency situation no one would have known or even thought to look for them days after the fact and since their backgrounds were both in science and had been in school for the majority of their adult lives I didn't think they would have enough experience between them to handle a survival situation based on their difficulty with starting and maintaining a fire.

I am starting this blog in the hopes that I can maybe help people prepare better for a trip/experience like this, or even provide tools for the already experienced persons tool box that they can use in the future, if one person takes something from what I have done in the past or what I have to say on here then I will happy. I have to say I do enjoy writing about my experiences and I hope you find them helpful in some way.