Outdoors

TOM VENESKY

March 1, 2009

Toss a log, call a moose to cure real cabin fever TOM VENESKY OUTDOORS

I’ve read a lot about the wilderness trappers in the 1800s and I can understand how, for so many of them, their biggest enemy was cabin fever.

Spending long, bleak winters in isolation in the middle of the mountains oftentimes was the undoing of even the strongest, most cunning wilderness trapper.

But cabin fever isn’t a condition relegated solely to those wilderness trappers of long ago. It hits all of us even today in the modern age.

And you don’t have to be barricaded behind several feet of snow and frigid temperatures to be stricken with the syndrome.

At least I didn’t think so.

For years I assumed I had cabin fever each winter when February rolls into March.

The landscape persists as dull, lifeless shades of gray and brown, everything that migrates has yet to return and anything that blooms is still reluctant to do so.

All of the major hunting and trapping seasons are over, ice fishing is a sketchy endeavor and trout season seems eons away.

A walk in the woods serves as a brief cure, but the arrival of spring is really the only antidote. When I read recently how people in a place to our north – our far north, deal with cabin fever, I realized that I really didn’t suffer from the affliction at all.

My so-called cabin fever had more to do with impatience.

Real cabin fever can be found in The Pas, a small town in central Manitoba near the border of Saskatchewan.

Temperatures in The Pas routinely dip into the minus-30 to minus-40 range and the average snowfall is 67 inches. The lakes and ponds in The Pas stay frozen from November until mid-May, and the winter days are long and the nights even longer.

If there is any place where cabin fever can strike, The Pas would be it.

And not surprisingly, the residents have found a way to overcome cabin fever.

Every year since 1916 The Pas has hosted the Northern Manitoba Trappers’ Festival. Dubbed a “cabin fever reliever,” hardy Canadian trappers brave the frigid Manitoba cold to compete for the title of King Trapper.

They compete in 21 events that reflect what the original wilderness trappers did as part of their routine. The events include typical wilderness activities such as trap setting, ice fishing, moose calling, ax throwing, fish filleting and a snowshoe race.

But there is plenty more that really sets this group of trappers apart.

There’s the flour packing contest where trappers strap flour sacks on their backs and race. The sacks must total a minimum of 700 pounds and the contestant must carry them 20 feet. The heaviest load wins.

In the log throwing event, trappers toss a 100-pound, 10-foot log end over end and the farthest distance gets the points.

And then there’s the brutal Ice Chop contest where trappers use an ax and a chisel to chop through four feet of Saskatchewan River ice in sub-zero temperatures (the winner typically has a time of less than three minutes).

Some of the events in the King Trapper contest sound like something more fitting for a high school home economics class, not Manitoba trappers. But there is a catch.

In the Tea Boiling contest, for example, contestants are given a pack of matches and a pail filled with snow. A whistle blows and the trappers race to get firewood, return to their pails and build a fire to melt and boil the snow. The first pail to boil wins.

The winner of the three-day event is awarded $1,000, but all of the contestants and the entire town of The Pas come away with a brief respite from cabin fever.

The next time I grow a little wary of our lifeless winter landscape, I’ll appreciate the fact that all I have to do is go for a walk to cure my cabin fever, and not toss logs or carry a half-ton of flour.

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