Clairissa Carter remembers how scared she felt the night of her first solo canoe trip in the summer of 2001.“I was kind of freaked out,” Carter said. “I ended up going to bed pretty early and slept with a little hatchet beside my head, waking up at every sound and noise that I heard.”
Since that night near Ragged Lake in Algonquin Park, Carter has become more adapted to sleeping alone in the woods. She has completed over 20 different solo wilderness treks. She’s hiked the snowy mountaintops of Nunavut and New Zealand and she’s camped in the Borneo jungle in Southeast Asia.
Carter described how she has progressed as a solo tripper.
“When I first started, I brought a lot of comfort stuff ... Lots of food and one of those foam collapsible chairs,” she said. “But nowadays, the last time I did a solo in Algonquin, I didn’t even bring a tent with me; I just brought a tarp and I slept underneath my canoe.”
Matt Howell, adventure director at Missinaibi Headwaters Outfitters in Chapleau, Ont., finds that talking to people about their intentions is the first step towards a successful solo trip.
“The best question that we ask people is, ‘What do you want to get out of your trip?’” Howell said. “If one of those things … is to be comfortable on their own and to face that challenge, then are they in the right mindset to face it.”
Ecopsychologist Betsy Perluss, who leads wilderness programs with the School of Lost Borders in California, echoed Howell's approach.
"Being alone in the wilderness triggers a lot," Perluss said. “You're susceptible to all kinds of ideas and feelings and thoughts that perhaps one would rather avoid."
Carter can relate. A solo hike in the Ruahine Mountains of New Zealand - a trip she expected to be a relaxing getaway - unexpectedly served a greater purpose.
"When I started walking up there, it got a lot tougher than I thought," she said. "It was a harder climb and there were more obstacles in the way. Then the snow started falling and it was getting colder and it just brought out a lot of anger in me.”
By the end of the trip, she realized the meaning of her anger.
"I hadn't really got past the death of a friend of mine," she said.
Her friend had died back home in Canada while she was in New Zealand. Not being able to grieve with her friends and say goodbye to him took its toll.
"I bottled it up ... I'd really locked it away to such a point that I'd sort of forgotten about it," she said. "I dealt with those emotions and I was able to make peace with that.”
At the School of Lost Borders, Perluss often sees people coming to terms with personal struggles.
“Being in a world full of so many distractions, it takes time to begin to peel away the layers and to get to the core of oneself,” she said. “That can be painful at first.”
When it comes to why some people prefer to be alone, Perluss said it’s a matter of personality.
“Some people really find their energy and juice from being around others,” she said. “Some people much prefer, just by their temperament, to be alone.”
When going alone on an outdoor adventure, Howell listed a few items that trippers sometimes forget: Fire-starter for wet wood, a bear banger, a satellite phone and a first aid kit.
Howell acknowledged another problem solo trippers overlook on a wilderness canoe trip.
“A lot of people overestimate their abilities,” he said. “Trying to advance your abilities is not necessarily what you should be doing on solo trip.”
Although Carter has paddled Smoke Lake in Algonquin Park numerous times, one time, a severe storm nearly forced her to give up.
“The rain was pouring down; it was freezing cold ... The wind was so strong that for the most part I was losing ground," she said.
But she had friends waiting to meet her at the other end of the lake and she knew they would worry if she didn’t show up.
"That's probably the closest I've come to hypothermia," she said. "When I got to (my friends) I was uncontrollably shivering. They threw me in the shower and brought me hot cups of tea."
One of the hardest nights for Carter happened in the Borneo jungle after she ran out of water and drank from a nearby stream.
That night, she battled severe stomach illness along with fever and hallucinations.
To add to her confused state of mind, she woke up the next day to find bearded pigs gnawing at her backpack.
“I didn’t even know they existed,” she said.
But they do - and they were hungry.
“I had granola bars or something in the backpack, so they were just trying to bite at it and stomp at it,” she said. “I had to grab my backpack and pull it away from them.”
Among her many ordeals, Carter has also had some enlightening experiences.
A few days before the bearded pig incident, an orangutan was foraging amidst the trees nearby. She inched her way closer to the wild animal, sat beneath the tree and enjoyed a moment near the animal.
“Life seemed so simple; it was just eating fruit from a tree, there was no packaging,” she said. “Nothing other than pure nature.”
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