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INTRODUCTION

It's the single most iconic vista in all of Newfoundland, all the more prized because it's so hard to reach. By the time we clambered over the final set of boulders to get there, we'd been climbing for more than six hours, accompanied by clouds of voracious and seemingly waterproof blackflies that were undeterred by the steadily falling rain. We turned to look back at the route we'd traveled: the sinuous, glacier-carved fjord two thousand feet below us, the billion-year-old cliffs that hemmed it in, the jumble of rocks and rain forest that led steeply up to the plateau where we now stood. This view of Western Brook Pond is a staple of the island's glossy tourism campaigns; we've seen the pics, but on that particular day it was nothing but a blanket of mist.

We didn't have time to linger anyway. It was nearly noon by the time the boat had dropped us off at the head of the fjord, then climbing up the gulch had taken twice as long as we'd anticipated. We were barely halfway to the alpine pond where we'd hoped to camp that night. As the mist thickened, finding landmarks was becoming increasingly difficult. Muddy game trails carved by the area's ubiquitous moose and caribou led in every direction through the boggy grass, frequently disappearing into sinkholes filled by several days of nonstop rain. No matter how often we stopped to orient ourselves, we were turned around again within minutes.

I felt panic rising in me. We were already a day behind schedule, because the waters of the fjord had been too choppy for the boat on our scheduled departure day. That had forced us to burn a day of food while camped by the dock waiting for our ride, leaving us with just four days to complete the hike instead of the planned five. And while my wife, Lauren, and I were capable of hiking as long into the night as we needed to, we couldn't ask the same of our daughters, Ella and Natalie. They were just 8 and 6, respectively—and, aside from being exhausted, they were being driven bonkers by the flies, despite their full-body bug suits. But there were no exits from this hike. No roads traverse this part of Newfoundland. The boat was gone, and so was our cell signal. The only way out was onward. In that moment of maximal uncertainty, a puzzling thought nagged at me.

"You know," I said to Lauren, "this isn't bad planning or bad luck. It's 'exactly' what we asked for."

We've been backpacking and canoeing with our kids since they were a few months old, and have put a lot of thought into the routes we choose. We want challenge and adventure, but also safety and pleasure and variety and natural beauty, titrated each year to the kids' steadily expanding capabilities. They had already canoed in Algonquin Park, hiked in the Rockies, backpacked on the Bruce Peninsula. So when we planned our 2022 trip, we were looking for something with a twist—something that would feel like a voyage of discovery as much for Lauren and me as for the kids.

We found the twist on Parks Canada's official website for Gros Morne National Park, on Newfoundland's sparsely inhabited western coast. The park is a major tourist attraction—but like most such parks, the visitors generally stick to a few easily accessible places. What Bill Bryson wrote about U.S. national parks tends to be true around the world: "98 percent of visitors arrive by car, and 98 percent of those venture no more than 400 yards from their metallic wombs." In contrast, the Long Range Traverse—"an unmarked and rugged backcountry route," according to the website—cuts across the park's interior. It covers twenty-two miles as the crow flies (or at least as the mapmaker, sitting in a comfortable room with a piece of string, calculates) between the head of an inland fjord called Western Brook Pond and the base of Gros Morne Mountain. The difficult terrain, impenetrable vegetation, and challenging navigation make it impossible to follow the shortest path, so most hikers cover at least 50 percent more distance than that. Only three groups, with a maximum of four people per group, are allowed to start each day. The day before you start, you have to attend a safety briefing and demonstrate your navigational skills. Rescues along the route are extremely challenging but all too frequent. "We are, therefore, encouraging visitors to opt for less risky adventures," the Parks Canada site warned.

That's the line that lured us in: rather than singing the praises of their beautiful hiking route, the park was begging people to stay away. We understood the risks, but we figured that our prior backcountry experience would enable us to do it safely, and that a hike billed as three to four nights was within the physical capacities our kids had already demonstrated. The idea of a hike with no actual trail, where we would have to use our own best judgment to pick the optimal route through a swath of untrammeled wilderness, was irresistible. And it was perfectly in keeping with the way Lauren and I had approached our vacations ever since we started dating, nearly two decades earlier.

When we met, I was living in Washington, D.C., and Lauren was living in South Bend, Indiana. We went on our first date just after Christmas in 2003, while we were both visiting our families in Toronto. I visited her for a weekend in Indiana a few months later; she spent Easter in Washington. By then we were already planning what was effectively our fourth date: a ten-day backpacking trip in Alberta. We'd been contemplating routes in Banff and Jasper national parks when my cousin told us about the Willmore Wilderness Park, an obscure protected area north of Jasper that's about 50 percent bigger than Yosemite. It has no official trails, no rangers, no facilities, and is hundreds of miles from the nearest airport. It's the same awe-inspiring mountains as the crowded parks farther south, just much harder to get to and to find your way around.