We just arrived back from an incredible early season experience out at Hollow Water in the Heart of the Boreal. With Paul along as my volunteer sidekick, we went and visited Raven's Creek to plan our upcoming community garden project, and then traipsed through the forest up the East Side of Lake Winnipeg, along the Rice River following old aboriginal trails.

In B.C., working community on gardens and trail building together has offered great opportunities for Wilderness Committee volunteers to make connections with First Nations communities. We were really looking forward to meeting Rob Raven at Raven's Creek, and starting to plan for the coming summer. After discussing and visiting for a while, Paul and I headed further North up to the Rice River to camp, in preparation for exploring the following day.

I don't think I've went camping this early in spring before—usually there is too much snow on the ground to make a trip worthwhile. The previous week I was ice fishing on a frozen lake with six inches of ice under us, and now the Rice River was flowing past our campsite. In the evening around the fire, we could hear tinkling and breaking of ice chunks as they floated downstream past us. Just before we crashed for the night, the sky flamed with a Northern Lights more vibrant than I had witnessed in a long time.

When the sun rose next morning, I was given a harsh reminder that it was still early April. The temperature fell below zero overnight and as I tried to pour water for coffee, I found the water was frozen in the jug! We began our adventure hiking up the Rice River soon after the coffee was finally finished. Gary Raven had talked about this trail the previous fall, saying that it was a route his father took him on when he was young. We traversed over rock ridges and around lowlands, searching for the path through to Manominnekan Falls. The going was really quite easy as most of the swamps were still frozen, allowing us to take shortcuts across. We also found it easy to see routes to higher rock ridges where the trail would be easier because there were no leaves on the trees yet. After a few hours we found our way to our destination. Along the trail we were lucky to find two separate shed moose antlers, one small fork from a young bull and one massive shovel over two feet long. As the light began to fade in the evening, we made it back to our vehicle, tired and thrilled at the first trail work on what will eventually be a network of wilderness trails through the greatest intact forest in the northern hemisphere.

- Eric Reder

Paul carrying antlers at Manominnekan Falls