Photo stories from the Arctic winter, extreme dog sledding and much more...

Bannock and bunkers, winter trail food

For me one of the greatest pleasures of winter travel is food; cold and labour conspire to create raging appetites quite unlike anything I ever experience at home. Taste is accompanied by a total awareness of food as fuel – a palpable sense of sugars dissolving into your blood stream and surging around your weary body- food never felt so good.

…and what could be better than freshly baked bread, this is bannock an exceptionally simple bread. It’s made from flour, baking powder, water and a little salt, mixed into a dough and cooked in a frying pan. A thick chunk slathered in melty butter tastes so good that’s it’s a wonder that it’s not more widely eaten beyond the campfire.

…and these are Alexandra’s Conover Bennett’s bunkers, a slightly sweat, crispy frybread, totally evil and I cannot get enough of them. They taste so, so good, think of something close to a fresh hot doughnut miraculously produced on a camp stove. They are made from the same dough as bannock but with the addition of a little sugar and spice, nutmeg or cinnamon work well, and then they are fried in oil, in this case the rendered fat from our crispy bacon.

Bannock is highly improvisational by nature and has many variants that reflect its rich history. Traditionally eaten right across North America by Native Americans, trappers, lumberjacks, prospectors, in fact anybody with a fireside seat and a hungry tummy.

The basic proportions of an American bannock are:

1 cup of flour

1 tsp of baking powder

a little salt to taste

a good slurp of fat, perhaps 1-2 tbs

Water – enough to make a dough

You’ll need a 3 or 4 cup mix for a large frying pan sized loaf – mix together the dry ingredients and fat and then add enough water to make a soft dough. Flatten the dough into a hot lightly oiled frying pan and move off the heat a little, the addition of a lid at this stage will help the dough to rise higher and make a lighter bread. Make sure you are not burning the base of your bread, but aim to flip the bread over after 10 minutes and then cook uncovered for another 5 to 10 minutes, or until you get a nice hollow ring from tapping the crust and the bread is no longer doughy. When ready tear off chunks and enjoy with melted butter!

Variants and refinements are many and recipes sometimes add sugar, powdered milk, powdered egg (for more of a cake-y batter), flavourings, meat, veg, deep fry the dough, wrap it on a stick and hold it over the fire, it’s a broad church.

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Hand hauled toboggans in the boreal forest

A post this time not from Alaska, “the last frontier”, but from what English settlers would have considered the first frontier, New England. Alaska and New England not only share a pioneering heritage but Maine, in the north of New England, marks the southern extent of the boreal forest – a vast swathe of trees that extends across Canada, north to the Arctic and west for over 3,000 miles to Alaska.

Ever since reading childhood staples like The Call of the Wild, northern forests have played deeply across my imagination. Not just the forests themselves and their charismatic cast of bears, wolves, beavers, lynx, but the stories of the people who traditionally made these forests their homes, the Innu, the Cree, the Ojibwa, the Gwich’in and many others including the hunters and trappers who followed in their trails.

Garrett Conover and Alexandra Conover Bennett must have gotten the call of the wild at a very young age and they have made a life out of it. Piecing together loose threads of information spread across books and aural accounts, and with a reassuring amount of trial and error, they have relearnt the traditions of travelling lightly through the winter forest.

Perfecting not just the use of hand hauled toboggans, but a whole supporting web of knowledge that makes camping and travelling in the icy cold not just pleasant but a profoundly rich experience.

Hand hauled tobbogans

The Conovers are dedicated sharers of their knowledge and some of the funniest people I have had the pleasure of meeting. Not a lunch or an evening went by without a hilarious exchange of great anecdotes, much laced with the evocative language of the trail, bannock, bunker, babiche, wanigan, mukluk, slush scoop, even familiar words like anorak regained much of their cultural flavour. For your own taste of their wisdom I can highly recommend their book: Snow Walker’s Companion, Winter Camping Skills for the North.

Breaking trail down Pine Stream heading to Chesuncook Lake.

Camp for the night amongst the hushed calm of snow ladened pines, firs and spruces.

Ben McNutt of Woodsmoke collecting a “stick” for the stove. Part of the nightly activity of laying in a pile of neat logs for cooking, drying and pleasure.