Canada is having a record-breaking wildfire season, with an astounding 4,241-wildland fires breaking out since the beginning of 2023. More than 12 million hectares of land has burned so far, according to the Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Center (CIFFC), which mobilizes firefighting resources across the country.

In June, the majority of fires were impacting the eastern provinces, with more than 14,000 people evacuated in Quebec province alone. As of the end of July, the fires in the east are largely contained, but British Columbia, on the west coast, is now seeing an increase, with 440 active fires. Three hikers were rescued from the summit of Mount Bruce in southeastern B.C. by a passing tour helicopter Monday after a fire started on the peak.

Sadly, the end is nowhere in sight. Canada’s wildland fire season typically continues into October, and 1,074 fires are currently active coast to coast.

“Since the start of the season, we’ve experienced hot, dry, and windy conditions in many parts of the country,” says Jennifer Kamau, communications manager for CIFFC, of the conducive conditions. “We expect these conditions to persist.”

Yet there is a silver lining: the vast majority of Canada’s epic national park system has been untouched by wildland fires. Besides British Columbia, the majority of active fires are in the remote northern sections of Canada—such as the Northwest Territories and Nunavut —while most units in its national park system run along the south and central portions of each province.

According to Parks Canada, there was only one active fire—a small one in Wood Buffalo National Park in northern Alberta—within a Canadian National Park at press time. Fire bans are only being implemented on a localized, case-by-case basis across the parks.

“It’s business as usual for us,” says Jorg Wilz, owner of , a guide company that leads multi-day adventures in Banff, Jasper, Glacier, Kootenay, and Yoho National Parks, all in the Rocky Mountains. “Even the air quality has been good. We’ve had summers in the past where fires were close to the parks and the smoke was difficult, but that’s not the case this summer. We haven’t had any bad air quality days or road closures. We haven’t had to cancel or alter any trips.”

All of that is good news if you’re planning to explore one or more of Canada’s national parks this summer, as long as you remember the fickle nature of wildfires. “Fire highly depends on the weather, so the situation on the ground can evolve quickly depending on the conditions,” says Kamau. Winds can shift and alter a park’s air quality overnight as well.

Keep on top of the situation—according to CIFFS, nine new fires started across Canada today—by monitoring CIFFS’s of the wildfires across Canada. also offers updated smoke forecasts and fire-related weather info. Each park’s home page has a link to alerts and restrictions like campfire bans in the park you’re planning to visit.

Where to Go in Canada Right Now

Looking to explore our neighbor to the north and need some inspiration? Canada’s park system is expansive, with 47 different units spread across 13 provinces and territories. Here are three suggestions to get you started.

1. Jasper National Park, Alberta

The largest national park in Canada, Jasper encompasses 2,774,500 acres of the Rocky Mountains, including the Columbia Icefield, a 125-square-mile collection of glaciers split between Jasper Banff national parks. Drive the Icefield Parkway, between Lake Louise and the border of Jasper, for great views of the spectacle. Or check out the backcountry hike, a 2.8-mile loop hitting a handful of ponds amidst the evergreen forest.

2. Cape Breton Highlands National Park, Nova Scotia

Forested canyons drop to the sea at , which protects a rugged mix of mountains and coast on the seafaring Nova Scotia province. Sample the 180-mile Cabot Trail, a mix of roadways and short hikes with non-stop views of the coast and fishing villages surrounding the park.

3. Bruce Peninsula National Park, Ontario

envelopes the Niagara Escarpment, a tangle of forested ridgelines, caves, cliffs, and the turquoise water of Lake Huron in southern Ontario. There’s plenty to see inside The Bruce, but head straight for The Grotto, a collection of carved limestone rocks and caves that extend down to Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay. Plan ahead and make for parking.

Campfire Safety

Be a good guest in Canada’s national parks. Parks Canada recommends campers bring an emergency kit, know how to exit the park in an evacuation, and note the local or park emergency number for reporting a fire. No fireworks or sparklers; make sure safety chains on trailers are off the ground; and never drop or throw matches, cigarettes, or any other burning substance on the ground. See campfire safety tips  and information on fire bans

Graham Averill is șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű magazine’s national parks columnist. He lives in the very wet Southern Appalachians, where wildfires are rare, though they occur on occasion. He understands they’re no joke; while living in San Diego years ago, he saw the flames of a wildfire on the horizon west of the city, and watched ash fall like snow in his front yard. He’s hoping for safe outcomes for people in Canada.

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It’s 12:56 a.m. and I’m spiraling down a rabbit hole of fear. There are the yellow ATTENTION: BEARS IN THE AREA. USE CAUTION signs plastered everywhere. Through my tent flap, lightning is illuminating swaying pines, which are bending with such ferocity that they sound like crashing waves. But my biggest worry lies a 15-minute walk away, down a mossy forest path—Lake Superior, a body of water with an average yearly temperature of 40 degrees, notoriously strong currents, fickle weather, and 25-foot waves that can sink massive ships.

I grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, within five miles of the world’s largest lake by surface area, and it has always seemed bipolar to me—sometimes serene, sometimes ­deeply destructive, always unpredictable. Summertime is as hospitable as the lake gets, and for the past few days it has been exceptionally mellow. I’m on the lake’s northeast shore exploring , hiking empty backcountry trails, eating smoked trout on sand beaches backed by wave-sculpted granite, and camping at Hattie Cove Campground. Tonight’s electrical storm came out of nowhere.

Morning brings relief. I zip out of my tent and greet an unusually hot and calm day. For the next few hours, three park employees, author Ruth Fletcher, her husband, Ward Conway, and I follow the 84-mile park shoreline in a powerful 30-foot search and rescue boat. It has shock absorbers on the front seats to withstand a pounding from waves. Today, however, the water is so placid that we’re speeding effortlessly past fjords, thunderous waterfalls, empty beaches, and defunct lighthouses.

“You can’t get here unless the lake lets you,” says Fletcher when we land on a crescent-shaped beach at the mouth of the . This is Lake Superior’s most ­remote point. There are no roads for 50 miles in any direction. It’s also the site of ­Fletcher’s book, , an account of the 1920s logging camp where her ­father lived as a boy. More than 200 residents logged thousands of cords of timber in this area, until the stock market crashed in 1929 and the camp was abandoned. All that’s left is a decaying log cabin ­surrounded by daisies, disintegrating leather shoes, discarded glass bottles, and mounds of bear scat.

Fletcher is here to familiarize the park’s staff with the area’s history. As she and Conway search the bush for a memorial plaque, installed by the park in honor of her father, I wade up to my knees in water so cold that it makes my calves spasm. I’ve felt that chill since I was a child splashing around on Park Point, a seven-mile sand beach in Duluth. I’ve spent the past 20 years writing about far-flung places, from Tasmania to Bhutan, and here I am awed by one of the most pristine, wild, and hard-to-reach regions in my own backyard.

“If someone were to live here now, in some ways it would be even more remote than in my father’s time,” Fletcher tells me. “The only way out in the winter would be to dogsled 70 miles inland to White River.”

Pukaskwa is the only wilderness-designated park in Ontario, an impressive distinction in a province that has about 1,000 polar bears, more than 250,000 lakes, and one person per square mile in its entire northwest region. With a single road in, surrounded by backcountry so dense that few people other than its have seen it, the park is a favorite of expert kayakers who paddle Pukaskwa’s raw coastline and backpackers who know they need at least ten days to hike the out-and-back 37-mile coastal trail.

That kind of toughness sums up the steely character of most folks who have lived along Lake Superior over the centuries—from the Ojibwe to the French voyageurs to Nordic immigrant fishermen.

Everyone except, perhaps, me. I can count on two hands the number of times I ventured off Lake Superior’s shoreline growing up in Duluth. In the winter, when the air temperature dropped below zero, steam would rise from the lake, shrouding the city in magical puffs of white. But on the dreariest days, the lake would reflect the lightless, bruised sky, so dark and heavy that I felt like it was crushing my spirit. My family didn’t have a boat big enough to safely navigate such a dangerous body of water. Its inaccessibility made Superior that much more mysterious—like a giant mood ring reflecting the temper of the universe. Even on the most benign summer days, its power was omni­present. Once, while landing my sister’s kayak on a rocky beach in five-foot waves, I capsized and hit my head. It made me wonder if the lake was a living entity, actively trying to kill me.

As an old high school buddy told me before I set off, “Looking into Lake Superior is like looking into the eye of God.”

After 20 years living out west, I re­cently moved home to Duluth, and I’m fi­nally ready to embrace Superior, no matter her mood. I plan to spend three weeks circumnavigating the lake, driving clockwise up ­Minnesota’s north shore, camping in the national and provincial parks along the Ontario coast, then driving Michigan’s south shore back to ­Duluth, for a total of 1,300 miles. I’ll camp, kayak, and catch rides on sailboats, research vessels, fishing skiffs, and powerboats. It’s more than geography that drew me back north. I also missed the rugged authenticity of the people. No one can fake a love for the outdoors in a region where temperatures dip below zero for weeks each year.

and would agree. Before leaving Duluth, I meet up with them on a drizzly, 50-degree June morning. They’re in Wilkie’s Volkswagen bus in a parking lot at the mouth of the Lester River, waiting for a storm to firm the soupy chop into rideable waves at the Rock, a popular left break. But the chop isn’t cooperating.

“Surfing on Lake Superior is a spiritual experience,” says Wilkie, a contractor who grew up in Anaheim, California. “That’s why I registered my surfing page on Facebook as a religious organization.”

“The best waves are in the winter,” he says. “I’ve surfed in December in ­negative-30-degree weather with windchill. We had icicles on our beards. As soon as the water hits, I get ice cream headaches and feel like I’m going to die.”

It’s reasonable to question these surfers’ sanity: I’ve seen the lake shatter skating-rink-size slabs of ice against the rocky shoreline in winter storms.

The volume of the four lesser Great Lakes plus three more Lake Eries combined, Super­ior may be only 10,000 years old, but the bedrock along its north shore dates back 1.2 billion years. The Anishinabek and their descendants have been living around the lake almost as long as it has existed, mining copper deposits from Isle Royale to the ­Keweenaw Peninsula, paddling in birch-bark canoes, and trading furs with the Euro­peans soon after arrived around 1622. Today fewer than a million residents live within its basin. By comparison, Lake Michigan’s has a population of more than 12 million.

Because it’s so pristine, Lake ­Superior is increasingly valuable—for both its water and its recreation potential. With 2,726 miles of shoreline (including islands) stretching across three states and one Canadian province, it borders five national parks in the U.S., one in Canada, and ­roughly two dozen state and provincial parks. , is the least visited national park in the lower 48. In ­Ontario, the , approved in 2015, will place 13 percent of Lake Superior water­—including the fish and more than 600 islands—under protection.

Lake Superior’s shoreline contains every­thing from thousand-foot cliffs, miles-long white-sand beaches, and vast, empty wilder­ness up north to deciduous forest and caves carved from 500-million-year-old limestone on its southern side. All ­together it’s a giant, world-class playground for hiking, trail running, mountain biking, kayak­ing, sailing, backcountry camping, and open-water swimming (for anyone crazy enough to try).

“Duluth has a legend that Lake Superior doesn’t give up its dead,” Isaacson tells me.

Actually, it isn’t legend. It’s scientific fact. Lake Superior is so cold that if a person dies in it, his or her body is unlikely to resurface. The bacteria that makes a body float grows too slowly here.

July and August are Lake Superior’s most serene months, so I pull out of my driveway at 5:01 a.m. on July 14. As I drive north on Scenic Highway 61, the lake is flat. That’s good, because at 5:30 I meet fisherman Stephen Dahl at the Knife River Marina, and we putter a half-mile out in his 18-foot, handmade, steel-hulled fishing boat powered by a 25-horsepower Yamaha.

Dahl has a robust build and a bushy beard that makes him look like a Viking in flame orange waders. He holds one of only 25 highly coveted commercial fishing licenses for the lake’s 189-mile-long Minnesota shoreline and has been net-fishing for herring and lake trout seven days a week, from April through December, for the past 28 years.

There are 34 native and 18 non-­native fish species in the lake, and the fishery is strictly managed. Dahl had to ­lobby multiple government organizations for years to get his 5,500-per-year lake-trout quota. In the off-season, Dahl, who studied Scandinavian literature in Copenhagen, builds harps for his wife and writes poetry in his log ­cabin. The only technology he carries in the boat today is a globelike compass patched together with electrical tape.

“I don’t use a GPS,” he tells me. “It’s just another electronic piece that’s going to get wet and smashed.”

We’re out here at dawn because it’s the calmest time of day. The wind and waves will soon pick up, which is why now is a good time to internally review the one-ten-one rule of cold-water immersion. People wearing flotation devices who are submerged in water colder than 59 degrees have one minute to recover from the shock, ten minutes before losing effective use of their limbs, and one hour before losing consciousness due to hypothermia. Twenty percent of submerged people die in that first minute—with or without a personal flotation device. Luck­ily, there’s no fog today. If I was to fall out of the boat, I figure my chances of surviving a swim to shore would be 50/50.

Dahl can haul in up to 1,000 pounds of herring in one of his two 300-foot fishing nets—a technique that hasn’t changed since Norwegian immigrants started fishing this shoreline in the 1880s. Lake Superior’s herring stocks fluctuate, but the lake trout have recovered nicely since a sea lamprey infestation almost decimated the fishery in the 1960s. Dahl’s livelihood depends on his daily catch. Today, after an hour, he has hauled in a single foot-long lake trout that he categorizes as “tinier than tiny.”

“I have some crazy Nordic genes running around in this body,” he says. “Some days I come out here and get beat to hell, but it gets in your blood. The beauty of Lake Superior is the cold. It’s a real simple fishery because it’s so sterile. Being cold doesn’t scare me. What scares me with Lake Superior is the warming planet.”

That has a few people worried. Before leaving Duluth, I spent a day on the Blue Heron, a research vessel for the , which could be considered the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution of fresh­water. The boat is structurally identical to the Andrea Gail, the Massachusetts fishing vessel that was lost in the Atlantic and memorialized in . But the Blue Heron has been retrofitted with state-of-the-art scientific instruments.

“The good news is that the largest lake on earth is not too terribly messed up,” Robert Sterner, the observatory’s director, told me after we chugged under the 227-foot-tall Aerial Lift Bridge in Duluth and into the great steel blue expanse of water. “The bad news is that it is the fastest-warming lake on the planet.”

Sterner and a few fellow scientists were on the cruise to gather data to apply for a $6 million, six-year grant from the to do long-term ecological research. Also on the boat was Jay Austin, a physicist who earned his Ph.D. in oceanography at MIT and Woods Hole. His , shows that, while individual years vary, since 1980 Superior has been warming by an average of two degrees every decade. No one knows how that will change the lake and its ecosystem.

“We’re still going to see years of ice on the lake, but we’re going to see less of them,” Austin said. “We’re trying to improve our ability to predict what will happen as the lake gets warmer.”

It still feels invincible as it starts to toss Dahl and me around like a toy. After two hours, the current becomes so strong that Dahl decides not to pull up his second net. When we return to the marina, an old-­timer fisherman named Royce is sitting in his truck, waiting for the daily report. He gives me a quizzical look and asks Dahl, “What did you catch out there, a mermaid?”

Like thousands of northern Minnesotans, my great-grandparents emigrated from Nordic countries in the late 1800s to fish, farm, and log. Minnesota and the larger lake region are famously ridiculed by non­locals who love to crack Sven and Ole jokes. But one of the most refreshing traditions they brought with them is the sauna culture. Saunas are everywhere—in my sister’s Du­luth backyard, on rocky outcrops behind lake cabins, and on Thompson Island, a provincial nature reserve, located 14 miles south of my next stop, for passing sailors and kayakers. Thunder Bay has the highest concentration of Finnish residents per capita in all of Canada. Sweating it out in a 200-degree wood-fired sauna is the best way to work up enough nerve to jump into Lake Superior.

The Canadian border is less than 200 miles from Duluth, but it has taken me three days to arrive. There are too many distractions: a break for a breaded whitefish sandwich and beer-battered fries at , and eight Minnesota state parks, with ­waterfalls as high as 120 feet and trails that feed into the 310-mile-long Superior Hiking Trail.

In Ontario, the vast emptiness of the lake’s coast sets in. In the 443 miles between Thunder Bay (population 108,359) and the eastern gateway city of Sault Ste. Marie (population 75,141), there is no town with more than 5,000 people.

Everything feels wilder here. The Sleeping Giant cliffs rise 1,200 feet straight out of the water on 32-mile-long Sibley Peninsula. To get a closer look, I hitch a ride with Gregory HĂ©roux, owner of , on his 40-foot boat. A former amateur hockey player, HĂ©roux trained three years on Lake Superior before he sailed out of Thunder Bay, across the Great Lakes, to the Atlantic, over to the Mediterranean, and back again.

“Lake Superior is known as the Everest of freshwater sailing,” he says. “You do something wrong out here and you’ll be cryogenically preserved.”

There’s a cool breeze that causes the boat to heel, and the vastness of the lake makes me feel about the size of a water molecule.

After camping, mountain biking, and hiking for a few days at , I drive 305 miles east to Wawa, a community that has been continuously occupied for at least 700 years. The original inhabitants were the Anishinabek, whose Ojibwe descendants still live here among the environmentally minded kayakers, biol­o­gists, and park employees. One resident is Joel Cooper. He retired years ago from the and lives with his wife, Carol Dersch, a naturalist for Lake Superior Provincial Park, in a log cabin with no indoor toilet that overlooks a beach.

“I’ve lived here for 35 years and do what I do out of sheer love and respect for the lake,” Cooper says. That includes ­prefabbing and installing ten “thunder boxes” along a 50-mile stretch of public land between Pukaskwa National Park and Wawa, so that passing kayakers will have a more comfortable and concentrated place to answer nature’s call. He also monitors peregrine falcons with his wife and volunteers to shuttle people in his 19-foot powerboat for ­ that offers paddling expeditions along the whole Ontario coast.

Today the lake is glassy enough to water-ski as we speed past one beach after another on our way to the Dog River, a Class III–V whitewater playground that ends in 131-foot-high Denison Falls in Nimoosh, a roadless provincial park. Canadian canoeist Bill Mason filmed Waterwalker, the original 1980s whitewater film, on the river. “This type of recreation is for real introverts,” Cooper says. “Out here you’re on your own.”

Before I cross back into the U.S. through Sault Ste. Marie, I spend a night at Agawa Bay Campground in Lake Superior Provincial Park. The Trans-Canada Highway bisects the park, but it’s still beautiful, with aboriginal pictographs—such as the lynx-like creature the Ojibwe call the Spirit of the Waves—painted on a high cliff and a coastal trail that runs 40 miles along its 60-mile shoreline. The trail demands all my powers of concentration to pick my way through slippery boulders, deep sand, and smooth slabs of rock. In four hours I encounter no one. When I finally pitch my tent, the sky is a granite-colored smudge and a storm is brewing on the horizon. I’m excited to see it coming—after two weeks of unusually warm, placid weather, I’m ready for Lake Superior to unleash its rowdy side.

How long can Lake Superior remain so pure? I keep thinking about that question during the six hours it takes me to drive from Ontario to Whitefish Point, Michigan.

“This is some of the best and most strategic water on the planet,” John Downing, the director of the , part of a NOAA-funded network of college programs focused on marine research and education, told me on the Blue Heron. “Wars have been fought for thousands of years over water like this.”

In addition to climate change, threats to Lake Superior include the development of sulfide-ore copper mines in northeastern Minnesota, where a byproduct known as acid-mine drainage can contaminate lakes, rivers, groundwater, and everything living in them; proposed concentrated animal-­feeding operations in Wisconsin, whose untreated liquid manure could run off into the lake; invasive species like zebra mussels that have infiltrated other Great Lakes bodies; and the prospect that arid U.S. regions might soon need Great Lakes water.

To prevent this, in 2008, George W. Bush signed into law the Great Lakes Compact, part of a binational agreement between the eight Great Lakes states and two provinces. But exceptions have been made. Last July, Waukesha, Wisconsin, a Milwaukee suburb 17 miles west of Lake Michigan, became the first municipality outside the Great Lakes basin granted permission to divert water from a Great Lake. The town is allowed to take 8.2 million gallons per day from Lake Michigan, with the stipulation that it return the same quantity of treated water to the Root River, a tributary of the lake. There is concern that this could open the door for other towns and cities.

“We’re waiting to see if environmental organizations or neighboring communities are going to file suit,” says Peter Annin, author of, who lives on Lake Superior in Wisconsin. “The nightmare scenario would be that some climate-change-induced, long-term drought would lead to the country going for a run on Great Lakes water.” Hopefully, that’s a scenario that will never play out.

On the southern side of the lake, the deciduous trees, cliffy dunes, limestone outcrops, and sandy beaches feel almost gentle. But that’s a dangerous fallacy. From the top of Whitefish Point lighthouse, I can see the , the 80 miles of coastline that, thanks to heavier ship traffic, poor visibility, and storms that gather strength over nearly 250 miles of fetch, is the final resting place for more than 200 shipwrecks. Among them is the infamous Edmund Fitzgerald, a 729-foot freighter carrying 29,000 tons of taconite pellets that went down in a storm with 80-mile-per-hour wind gusts and 25-foot waves in 1975, killing all 29 sailors on board. Expert divers wearing drysuits can explore 30 well-preserved wrecks in the 376-square-mile .

One hundred and sixty miles west is the , which pokes 80 miles into the lake like a fat thumb. At its pinnacle in the mid-1880s, this peninsula produced 90 percent of the nation’s copper. These days it’s more and mountain biking. Copper Harbor, the former mining town at the tip, is , thanks to 35-plus miles of singletrack that climb 500 feet, an impressive ele­vation change for the Midwest. During one raucous festival over Labor Day, locals built a jump at the end of a dock that launched riders into the water.

The man largely responsible for the town’s renaissance is 48-year-old Sam Raymond, a former Colorado ski bum who spent summers here as a kid. “I got hooked on mountain biking in the nineties, but when I moved out to ­Colo­rado, I realized I missed Copper Harbor,” he says as we sit in Adirondack chairs in front of his ­. Raymond dug dirt and helped found a trails club that allowed Copper Harbor to eventually pay local trailbuilding guru Aaron Rogers to take care of the rest.

The singletrack here is fun and fast. On a Trek Fuel Ex 29er, I ride up the , avoid insane-­looking jumps on , and finish off on ­, a curvy shot of perfectly bermed whoop-de-dos. Raymond credits the lake for Copper Harbor’s popularity.

“There’s a certain kind of energy here,” he says. “The big lake is like a magnet.”

I know what Raymond means. By the time I reach Bayfield, Wisconsin (population 746), I’ve traveled almost 1,300 miles and I’m 85 miles from home. The lake has become like a security blanket, an assurance that humans haven’t yet tamed or destroyed everything wild.

If Superior has a Riviera, Bayfield is it. The town anchors the and is full of rehabbed Victorians and streamlined yachts moored in its harbor. I decide it’s time for a little immersion ther­apy. The best way to do that is by kayak.

Three miles north of Bayfield is owned by Gail Green and her husband, Grant ­Herman. Green spent years whitewater paddling in Sun Valley, Idaho, and photographing humpback whales in Hawaii. Herman has legendary boat-handling skills and practices water ballet in his canoe.

“Lake Superior isn’t easy,” Green says as she hands me a fresh apple-cider donut from a nearby orchard. “That’s what makes the reward so big.”

Our safety briefing includes a wet exit, which made one of my fellow kayakers, a nurse from Illinois, so nervous that it gave her heartburn. All six of us in the group pass the test, so we set out for two nights, paddling five miles toward Oak Island, a 5,078-acre forest that once had one of the highest densities of black bears in the region.

“It’s fucking beautiful out here,” says Victor Kasper, a former Marine from Milwaukee. The lake is warm enough—a relatively balmy 58 degrees, with air temperatures rising higher than 80—that we’ve stowed our wetsuits. We paddle past sandstone caves and a tugboat shipwreck, landing on a beach with time to set up tents and take ­iPhone time-lapse video of the sun dropping like an orange bomb. At dinner our guide, a ­Texan named Shane Walston who has paddled in Oman and Belize, cooks us flaky whitefish over a fire.

“Where I’m from,” Walston says, “most people couldn’t point out Lake Superior on a map. When I tell them I’m in Wisconsin, they ask why. It’s the people.”

As we set out for a 12-mile crossing the next morning, the lake is still dead calm, but the wind could whip into a frenzy at any moment. Miraculously, the ­water remains so placid that we cross in time to . We paddle through the maze, taking care not to touch the ­water-eroded arches, which look delicate enough to topple with the push of a finger.

On the return paddle, I eyeball the mainland and dread that I can almost see ­Duluth. I’ve been on the road 20 days, and I’m not ready to give up this ambulatory life of sleeping in my tent and stopping whenever the spirit moves me. I’m chagrined that it’s taken me so many years to fully grasp the wonder of my own backyard.

At dawn the next morning, I pad down to the beach and wade up to my waist. The chill creeps into my neck. I dive into the shallows and swim toward the flat horizon. The water feels so clean that I linger as long as I can in the cold, awake to the thrill that Lake Superior has finally let me in.

Contributing editor Stephanie Pearson () wrote about Swimmer Diana Nyad in May. 

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If you’re the type who likes to prepare for all eventualities, then the by Canadian clothing manufacturer Garrison Bespoke is for you. Gone are the days of having to sweat under the weight of a heavy bulletproof vest in order to feel protected. In the Bulletproof Suit, you’ll turn heads and, if necessary, hot lead.

Garrison Bespoke didn’t mess around when they developed their Bulletproof Suit last year, partnering with those who know what it’s like to get shot at: the U.S. 19th Special Forces Group. The suit uses nanotechnology, with tubes embedded in the fabric that harden when pierced. Added bonus: the suit’s materials are 50 percent lighter than Kevlar. 

So take no chances during your next adventure. Head into danger in the first bullet-protected three-piece.

Starting at $20,000,

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No one ever wins in conflicts between cars and bicycles, but a recent story from such an incident in Ontario ranks as one the most senseless and ugliest altercations of its kind.

On October 28, 2012, around 1:30 a.m., 17-year-old Brandon Majewski and his two 16-year-old friends, Richard McLean and Jake Roberts, were riding their bikes on a rural, two-lane road on the northern outskirts of Toronto. That’s when a car, driven by Sharlene Simon, 42, struck them from behind. at a local hospital several hours after the accident, while McLean suffered multiple broken bones, including his pelvis, and spent extensive time recovering.

Six months after the accident, Brandon’s older brother, Devon, died at his family’s home from an overdose. The family says the 23-year-old , but simply succumbed to a potent mix of drugs and alcohol that he was using to dull the pain of losing his brother. In the aftermath, the Majewski family sued Simon for $900,000 to cover the expenses of putting their child to rest. And the McLeans filed another suit against her for an additional $1.4 million to recoup Richard’s medical costs.

Now, Majewski’s estate, as well as the other two boys, for $1.35 million in compensation for the difficulties the incident caused her. According to a story in the Innisfil Journal, Simon’s claim states that the children “did not apply their brakes properly,” and that “they were incompetent bicyclists.” In the suit, Simon says that the accident has caused her “psychological suffering, including depression, anxiety, irritability, and post-traumatic stress.”

Perhaps this will sound cruel, but it hardly seems unreasonable that Simon should endure a little “stress and suffering.” Majewski’s family might—might!—be able to offer Simon absolution and closure, but they certainly shouldn’t be required to pay her a portion of the $1.35 million. After all, she was driving 55 in a 50-mph zone, and she’s the one who struck the cyclists, so her proficiency is as much in question as the teens’.

I’m sure it’s heartbreaking for Simon to contend with what she’s done, and the countersuit is likely about self-preservation in the face of the financial realities. But the fact remains, Simon killed someone, and by hiding behind a lawsuit she’s shrugging off accountability and refusing to face the human reality of her actions, which is behavior that’s more despicable than the accident itself. 

Other details of the story don’t reflect well on Simon, either, including the fact that she left the scene of the crime. Apparently, Simon’s husband, Jules, an off-duty police officer, was following his wife in a second car at the time of the accident, and after checking on the scene he escorted his wife home—before the police had arrived. And while officials say that alcohol isn’t suspected in the crash, because Simon wasn’t at the site, no breathalyzer was given, so there’s no evidence to exonerate her either. 

That said, Simon isn’t the only one to blame. What were three teenagers doing riding their bikes down a dark country lane at 1:30 a.m. in the first place? A Toronto Sun story says the boys had gone out for hot dogs, and it quotes Majewski’s father, Derek, acknowledging that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. “I know they should not have been out there that late,” his father said. “But they are good kids.”

Good or not, the teens shouldn’t have been riding on a wet road in the middle of the night. According to Simon, the trio was also riding three abreast, wearing dark clothing and no helmets, and none had bike lights to warn oncoming traffic of their presence. The bikes were equipped with reflectors, but of course that’s horribly insufficient for riding on a dark motorway with cars traveling up to 50 miles per hour. All of which is to say, the cyclists, as well as their parents who allowed them out, bear some responsibility for the accident.

These sorts of incidents tend to get painted in black and white, and opinion usually divides along predictable lines, with cyclists maintaining that they don’t get fair treatment on the roads and motorists insisting that bikes don’t belong on the roads at all. But most situations are messier and more complicated than that, especially this one. 

Motorists must realize that cyclists have a right to be on the roads, and we all have to figure out ways to coexist. I see so many drivers get angry at cyclists, cutting them off, gunning their engines around them, slamming on their brakes as if to try and cause them to crash. Last weekend while out riding on the roads around Santa Cruz, the group I was with had two separate vehicles throw empty soda cans at us.

It always makes me wonder: Do drivers really want to kill cyclists? Because riders are vulnerable and exposed on the roads, and causing one of us to crash could very well result in a death. So if you’re a driver, before you get aggressive with cyclists, consider how you’d feel—how you would live for the rest of your life—if you caused someone to die.

Likewise, we cyclists must realize that with the right to be on the road comes responsibility. I see so many riders fail to stop at intersections, pass cars on the right, and act as traffic menaces. But by ignoring the rules of the road, we cyclists confuse drivers, incite their anger and scorn, and sometimes even precipitate accidents.

We must be proactive about our right to ride, and that includes making ourselves as visible as possible, adhering to all traffic regulations, and, basically, riding defensively. We are vulnerable and, like it or not, collisions or altercations are likely going to be worse for us as cyclists than for drivers. 

Brandon Majewski’s death is a tragedy. I feel sorry for his devastated family and friends, and I hope they find peace. But I also pity Sharlene Simon, who, as the mother to three children herself, surely never intended to hit those boys, much less kill one. And I have to believe that Simon is countersuing out of anger and hurt and even financial self-preservation. That wouldn’t make it right or any less repugnant, but it would at least make it comprehensible.

I still believe that no one wins in conflicts between cars and bicycles, but perhaps a tiny bit of good can come from this awful story. The next time you’re out on the road, whether you’re a driver or a cyclist, think of Brandon and Sharlene. Obey the traffic laws. Move deliberately and with caution. And most importantly, have some empathy for your fellow human beings.

The post Killing a Cyclist—and Then Suing the Family appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

Last March, Charles Komanoff, a New York City-based statistical analyst and consultant, rode his bike from his home in Lower Manhattan to the Flatiron District to engage in some light vandalism. Looking fit, rugged, and energetic, Komanoff stopped his bike near the corner of 23rd Street and Madison Avenue to meet some co-conspirators. Everyone was on a bike, though unlike many city cyclists, everyone was wearing a helmet, and had travelled to the site in strict observance of their rights and responsibilities on the road: always riding with traffic, on the right side of the street, and obeying stop signs and traffic lights along the way.

Ten days before, a woman riding her bike east, towards this intersection, had been struck and killed by a private dump truck pulling out into traffic. After seeing video footage from a nearby security camera, Komanoff and others in the concluded that the cyclist had had, well, the right of way. Knowing that no arrest had been made or summons served by the police officer investigating the collision, but believing that there should have been, the Right of Way-ers unloaded some pieces of cardboard from a trailer behind Komanoff’s bike, taped them down to the ground, and set about spray-painting a message onto the pavement.

A few members acted as lookouts on either end of the street, while others used their bodies and their bikes to shield the spray-painters from public view. In a similar demonstration near the Barclays Center in Brooklyn a few months before, the group briefly co-opted a pair of traffic cones that happened to be sitting on the street, unused, and narrowly avoided a confrontation with police officers on their way to the Long Island Railroad station nearby. Then, as now, the phrases “NO CRIMINALITY SUSPECTED,” and “WHY RAY WHY?” were neatly painted onto the blacktop when they were finished.

“Ray” was Ray Kelly, then the Commissioner of the NYPD; pointing to the fact that no charge was filed, the other stencilled message referred, ironically, to a phrase frequently used by the police to describe a collision involving a non-motorist, including those in which the motorist was driving recklessly or otherwise breaking the law. Later that day, the group would paint similar memorials around the city for pedestrians who had been killed by drivers who had been speeding, jumped the curb, or run a red light. In each of these cases, no driver had been charged with a crime.

[quote]“Last summer, a San Francisco a police officer deliberately parked his car in a bike lane during a Safe Streets rally, apparently to make the point that collisions involving cars and non-motorists were ‘the bicyclist’s fault.’”[/quote]

A running joke among riders in New York is that the best way to kill someone, and get away with it, is to run that person over with your car. Depending on who you ask, the hostility to cyclists is not limited to their hometown. In , Toronto’s mayor Rob Ford allocated $300,000 to remove a bike lane, having declared cyclists “a pain in the ass,” and their deaths “their own fault at the end of the day.”

Last summer, a San Francisco a police officer during a Safe Streets rally, apparently to make the point that collisions involving cars and non-motorists were “the bicyclist’s fault.” In , a lawmaker proposed a carbon tax for cyclists, on the grounds that cyclists, with their higher respiration, expel more CO2 into the atmosphere. And many people saw the colorful of Dorothy Rabinowitz, a conservative columnist at the Wall Street Journal, to New York’s Citibike bicycle sharing system (or its subsequent parody on).

After watching a RoW intervention in Midtown, one cab driver rolled down his window to solemnly tell the group: “You know what you’re doing is wrong.” There is plenty of of  to go around, so much that it’s probably not stretching things to suggest that we are in the midst of a proxy culture war over the place of bicycles on our roads and in our cities, or that the occasionally illegal guerilla efforts by Komanoff and company is simply stoking the fire; at least after the confrontation with the cab driver, they were undeterred. “We’re doing something for the public good,” Stephan Keegan, Right of Way’s chief organizer, told the  last September, “So I think it’s O.K., even if it’s illegal.”

FRUSTRATED WITH CITY OFFICIALS doing nothing or very little to protect cyclists, a growing number of groups around North America have taken to this kind of DIY activism, much of it unauthorized if not downright illegal—painting bike lanes, putting up , installing unsanctioned barriers, or drawing “sharrows” (chevron-shaped arrows meant to encourage motorists to share the road with cyclists), which they feel the authorities should be doing anyway.

Others, while still meant to provoke the police, have been more sanguine. In 2010, members of Right of Way wore white hazmat suits labeled “Bureau Of Organized Bikelane Safety (BOOBS),” and rode around with a set of portable speakers to play “The Safety Dance,” by the 1980s synth-pop group Men Without Hats. A year ago, participants in a sister group called Times Up! dressed as clowns and handed out authentic-looking parking tickets to cars who were parked in bike lanes.

Stephan has been arrested multiple times, and at least once for his involvement in “clown rides,” when he was accused of impersonating a police officer. (At the time, Stephan was wearing a comically fake-looking uniform, as was his accomplice, Barbara Ross, whose red, adult-sized tricycle was confiscated. The two countersued for wrongful arrest, and in January, the city settled in mediation, agreeing to pay Stephan and Ross $11,000 apiece.)

Stephan has an idea of what attracts attention, and of what’s funny, even though when speaking about his work with Right of Way, his voice is usually flat and matter-of-fact. 286 people died in traffic collisions in New York last year, including 173 pedestrians, and while he is encouraged by the prospects of Vision Zero, a plan unveiled by the new mayor, Bill De Blasio, to end traffic fatalities by 2024, Stephan is at least a little skeptical, and a little indignant.

“We still have people dying,” he told me in recently. “You have to constantly push the envelope forward, or you’re going to go backward.”

GORDON DOUGLAS, A PHD candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, uses the term “DIY urban design” to describe some of the work Right of Way is involved in. Some of its practitioners describe themselves as “radicals,” but most, he says, are simply private citizens working on their own to make public space more livable. “Often they’ll pretty explicitly acknowledge that the city doesn’t have the resources, or doesn’t have the authority,” he says. “So they say, ‘We have 300 bucks, and we know how to go to Home Depot and buy a lane striper. So why not?’”

Douglas says the typical DIY urban designer is a practical, civic-minded person who isn’t looking for trouble. This, by most accounts, was the attitude behind a bike lane painted by the Other Urban Repair Squad, an anonymous group in Toronto.

In the fall of 2005, members of the group turned their attention to a planned bike lane near the Huron-Sussex branch of the University of Toronto, which never came into being. Located near a subway stop, the stretch of Bloor Street between Spadina Avenue and Bathurst Street was a main artery for students. It had been a candidate for a bike lane conversion since the mid-1990s, and was singled out for a lane in the city’s official Bike Plan in 2001. The OURS members believed they had waited long enough, and so in October, they intervened by laying down a stenciled image of a cyclist, complete with a diamond shape used by the city. They even donned orange vests to redirect traffic, while waiting for the paint to dry.

Martin Reis, a photojournalist who lives in Toronto, noticed OURS’s work a few days later, and was chagrined when a manager of city road operations had it painted over (at the reported cost of $1,973.74).

“City council is bizarre in Toronto,” Reis said over the phone. “They see cycling either as a fringe activity, or an inconvenient form of transportation that they have to deal with.”

Members of OURS have described the 2005 action as “a test run.” It was replaced by a pink stencil, on the same street, in March 2006. Reis posted a picture of the painting on his, and soon, he was receiving emails from cyclists around the world, with photographs of projects like the one he saw. Through Reis, OURS also shared a pdf of a do-it-yourself manual for people who wanted to copy them.

“Despite their small size, these interventions make an impact,” Douglas in an article last spring. “Even if these interventions are removed by authorities, they suggest the sort of city that residents actually want to see, something that authorities occasionally even recognize.”

By and large, the projects Reis has documented are, indeed, small, but in cities where cyclists don’t necessarily feel welcome, they tend to stand out. Jimena Veloz, a blogger who lives in Mexico City, heard about the project in Toronto around 2009, when she was still in school. She has since joined a like-minded collective called Camina Haz Ciudad, and has searched for places for them to install DIY bike lanes that will attract attention.

“What we concluded here in Mexico City is that even though we want it, we can’t make the infrastructure ourselves,” Veloz says. “It’s too expensive, it’s too big for us to do that. But what we have done are very strategic projects that can catalyze government action.”

Rather than avoid police, members of CHC engage them deliberately, and in the past have painted bike lanes directly in front of the capitol, where the Congress of the Union meets. Most passersby—including a few members of Congress—spoke approvingly. When they were approached by the police, the group simply asserted that what they were doing was necessary and legal.

“It’s also the Mexican context, where mostly everyone does whatever they like,” Jimena says. “The police don’t have much. Of course they can arrest you, but they usually don’t, not even if you’re doing something really illegal. But if you are, they will stop you and ask you for money.”

So far, no one in CHC has been arrested. Indeed, as much as stories about a “war on bicycles” (or, for that matter, a “war on cars”) might gather public attention, it is a challenge to find even one cantankerous urban planner who actually hates guerilla bicycle groups. In some cases, city governments welcome the citizens’ interventions, and say thank you.

THIS PAST APRIL, A GROUP in Seattle decided to modify a steep stretch of Cherry Street, a few blocks from City Hall. Tom Fucoloro, an Illinois native who moved to Seattle in 2009, rode through the area frequently, and while there had been a painted bike lane for a long time, he never felt entirely safe.

“It wasn’t very comfortable to be huffing your way up the hill,” he said, adding that the road was very close to on-ramps to I-5. “When you’re only going a few miles per hour, it can be really unsettling.”

With about $350 worth of equipment, members of the group Reasonably Polite Seattleites placed some plastic pylons along the path, photographed them, and then, like OURS, emailed their friendly local blogger. Fucoloro, who authors the Seattle Bike Blog, also received a few paragraphs explaining how the pylons would make riders feel safer, and noting that they were in any case put in place with a light adhesive (instead of epoxy, which is more permanent).

“If they so choose,” the group added, “Mayor McGinn and SDOT [Seattle Department of Transportation] can remove these in a matter of minutes.”

The pylons were, indeed, removed, but not without an equally polite response from Dungho Chang, Seattle’s Traffic Engineer, followed by another email, a few months later, explaining that the barriers they had originally installed would be made permanent.

When I spoke to him over the phone, Chang was busy making preparations for a parade to honor the Seattle Seahawks, who had just won the 2014 Super Bowl. He sounded cheerful and heartened, said he’d “always dreamed” of having his current job, and described the RPS intervention as “very humbling.”

“You are absolutely correct that there are low cost and simple ways to slow traffic, increase the sense of protection, and provide bicycle facilities that are more pleasant and accommodating for a larger portion of people who ride bicycles,” Chang wrote in an email to RPS. “I am truly appreciative that you care enough to take time, money, and risk to send your message to me and my staff.”

IN HIS OPTIMISM, his friendliness, and his eagerness to work with the anonymous group, Chang is in a minority. Perhaps because of the inherent pushiness of city life, or perhaps because the groups’ strategy is innately subversive and sneaky, attempts at a detente between motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians have continued to feel like the opposite: confrontational, and, at times, nasty.

Last spring, while riding downhill on Troy Avenue in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, stencilers from RoW were tailed by the driver of a grey SUV, who honked his horn, frustrated at their taking up the whole lane, and accelerated when the vehicle finally sped past. A few blocks further down, he narrowly avoided two pedestrians, a Hasidic couple, who were pushing a stroller across the street.

When I asked Komanoff about it later, he shrugged. “It’s like going to the zoo,” he said. “You’re observing some kind of some species that you know you’re connected to, and yet it’s quite alien.”

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The 10 Best Canadian șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs

How do you pick an adventure in a country as big and boundless as Canada? We asked our favorite nomads to reveal the greatest hidden paddling, biking, and hiking spots, from Nova Scotia to the Northwest Territories.

• Mountain-Bike Quebec
• Paddle Ontario’s Missinaibi
• Climb B.C’s Okanagan Valley
• Sea Kayak B.C.’s Clayoquot Sound
• Trek Alberta’s Willmore Wilderness
• Ride Nova Scotia’s Tidal Bore
• Northern Exposure

The Best Canadian șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs: Mountain-Bike Quebec

Easy cranking

Canada’s tourism department sells British Columbia as the World’s Best Mountain-Biking Destination. They might be right, but I’ll be in Quebec. With hardwood forests, steep fjordlands, and 17th-century cities, the province has European culture and rugged terrain. Plus, it’s just a 90-minute flight from New York City. Three summers ago, I spent a week riding half a dozen trail systems on a west-to-east road trip through Quebec with a group of B.C. mountain-bike junkies. We started with downhill laps an hour east of Montreal at , a 1,263-foot peak with three chairlifts, 19 downhill trails, and no crowds. Then it was twisting, technical singletrack through the rolling hills of Coaticook Gorge and beginner banked turns at a limestone canyon called VallĂ©e Bras du Nord. But the choicest rides were on the 100 miles of cross-country trails at , a bike-friendly ski resort 45 minutes from Quebec City. An hour after finishing the nine-mile Le Ruissea Rouge loop, I was sipping beer at a bar with views of the Saint Lawrence River on one side and 400-year-old ramparts on the other. Try finding that in B.C.

GET THERE: Fly to Quebec City and set up shop at the at Ski Bromont (doubles, US$177). Get your bikes at the mountains’ rental shops (US$60 per day at Ski Bromont; US$116 at Mont-Sainte-Anne).

The Best Canadian șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs: Paddle Ontario’s Missinaibi

High water

Of the 50 sets of rapids studding the Missinaibi River’s 350-mile route, only two absolutely must be portaged. The rest are fun Class II–III affairs, which is what makes the Missinaibi one of the world’s best canoe trips: it’s tough to find that many moderate rapids all in one place. A centuries-old trade route between Lake Superior and James Bay, the Missinaibi cuts through thick birch and spruce forest, rimmed with granite bedrock that makes for clean, level campsites. One July, I led a group of teens down the river for a canoe camp, and we spent a day hauled out at one of those mandatory portages. Thunder-house Falls is a spectacular three-tiered maelstrom and an ideal place to lay over for a few days, listen to the falls’ roar, and yank walleye out of the water below. Which is what we were doing when a camper ran up shouting that one of our canoes had floated away and another one was about to. The river had flash-flooded overnight. I waded nipples deep into the swollen current and dragged one escapee back to shore. We loaded the remaining boats to the gunwales and wobbled downstream in search of the other. Then, slowly spinning in a wide eddy just a few hundred yards above the nasty, appropriately named Hell’s Gate gorge, there was our missing green canoe, upside down but intact. It being summer camp, we celebrated that night by hog-tying a camper to a tree. (Sorry, Will.)

GET THERE: You can paddle the entire 350-mile route from Missinaibi Lake to Moosonee in 20 days—or split the trip in half by putting in at Mattice, where the river is crossed by the Trans-Canada Highway. Rent boats from in Chapleau (US$240 per week), which also offers shuttles. At Moosonee, load your canoes into a boxcar on the train—there are no roads here—and head to Cochrane, where your shuttle awaits (US$60 plus US$100 for the shuttle).

The Best Canadian șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs: Climb B.C.’s Okanagan Valley

Sweet sidetrack

One time a couple lady friends and I had this great idea to drive my two-seater pickup with all of our climbing gear from Santa Fe to Alaska, each of us taking turns riding in back. We never even got close, and the reason wasn’t because we waited until September to roll out or because the Mounties at the Canadian border ransacked our dirtbag-mobile for several hours. The problem was British Columbia. It stopped us as if we’d run into a rock wall, which wasn’t too far off. Just 40 miles north of Oroville, Washington, the gneissic goodness of the Skaha Bluffs poured through the windshield, and we mashed the brakes. How could we not linger here in the hot Okanagan Valley, where more than 650 sport routes soar over the pines? A few days later, with knuckles sore from so many crimpers, we packed up and hopped in with a plan to gun it 1,400 miles north to Haines. Instead we drove 160 miles the wrong way to Revelstoke, where the intermediate crags below a gorgeous 5.10 roof at the Begbie Bluffs area kept us occupied for days. In more than two weeks on the road, we never got farther than four hours north of the U.S. border. We all learned something valuable about planning Alaska road trips, though: if B.C. is in the way, you should probably take a plane.

GET THERE: Fly to Kelowna and drive an hour south. In Okanagan, book a lakeside campsite at the (US$45). In Revelstoke, crash at the (US$90) and climb the Raptor Wall at Begbie Bluffs, just south of town. For guides, call .

The Best Canadian șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs: Sea-Kayak B.C.’s Clayoquot Sound

Fire islands

Reaching Clayoquot (klak-wot) Sound, one of the woolier sea-kayaking destinations in North America, requires a two-hour ferry ride from the city of Vancouver to Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, a 130-mile drive west to the end of the Pacific Rim Highway, and a willingness to launch your craft into a storm-lashed archipelago crowded only with killer whales. The draw: 236,000 square miles of watery wilderness. Some 30 miles from the put-in at Tofino are shoreline hot springs—a perfect camp spot. Of course, that doesn’t mean the paddling is easy, as I learned on my debut trip to Clayoquot back in high school. It turns out that following the windward side of the islands, instead of the tame inland passage, means surf landings and long, exposed crossings. Fog can arise even in July, and strong currents slow the progress of those unacquainted with local tides—like me and my three buddies. We never made it to the hot springs: a squall blew in and stranded us on Vargas Island for three days. To pass the time, we built a driftwood fire large enough to divert passing tanker ships. (Hey, we were 17.) Recently, I asked my friend Tim what he remembered about the trip. “I still have nightmares about the awesomeness of that fire,” he said. “Had it not been absolutely pouring rain, we would have surely lit up the entire island. It was freaking beautiful.”

GET THERE: Plan your trip with Sea Kayaking Barkley and Clayoquot Sounds, by Mary Ann Snowden. Tofino provides the essentials: groceries at the and boats and charts from (US$40 per day for kayaks, including paddles, flares, PFD, sprayskirt). For a deluxe, all-inclusive version of the Clayoquot experience, take a 30-minute boat ride from Tofino to the spectacular kayak-equipped (US$4,800 for three nights).

The Best Canadian șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍűs: Trek Alberta’s Willmore Wilderness

Big empty

The World Pumpkin Confederation and the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth have beef. This is the story of the moment one of them made history.

The post Pumpkin Wars appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

“Most people think I'm an idiot.”

That's Ray Waterman, giant pumpkin impresario, talking to the media from ground zero in Collins, New York, just south of Buffalo. While it's true that °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s entire life revolves around what he calls the “sport hobby” of growing record-breaking specimens of Cucurbita maxima, he isn’t exactly an idiot. °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s a wily operator, and tomorrow, October 5, 1996, is his ’s yearly weigh-off. He's got CNN on the line and USA Today on hold while the Today people book the live feed. Tomorrow, Waterman hopes to present a $50,000 check to the grower who produces a pumpkin that hits or surpasses the mythic 1,000-pound mark. It’s a grail that pumpkin green thumbs have been talking and dreaming about for over a decade, a grail that now actually seems within reach. (Two years ago, in fact, of Brockville, Ontario, stunned the pumpkin establishment with a leviathan that weighed in at 990 pounds.) °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s expectations, and his knack for cultivating the media, have been building for years: Tomorrow’s weigh-off, should it yield a monster fruit, will be an apotheosis of sorts.

It will also be an occasion requiring considerable diplomacy on °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s part. For as it turns out, there is trouble in the ranks of the pumpkin world—schisms and petty jealousies and internecine conflicts. And not everyone is on Ray °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s side.

In the popular imagination, the world of pumpkin growing is a happy one, peopled with rustic farmers and punctuated with familiar orange orbs that bring smiles to the faces of children. What could these growers possibly argue about? The proper ratio of cow manure to hog manure? A better way to carve a jack-o’-lantern's nose? No. Unfortunately, competitive pumpkin growers, world-class growers, argue about things like hypodermic needles and silicone gel. They accuse one another of cheating, lying, hoarding prize seeds. They scheme and spread rumors. They file lawsuits.

You wouldn’t sense any of this upon first meeting Ray Waterman. Initially he comes across as nice, fastidious, soft-spoken, perhaps a little stern. He wears blue jeans and a farmer’s plaid shirt. He keeps his graying blond hair neatly trimmed. The day before the weigh-off, I drink a cup of coffee with him in the dining room of , the family restaurant he owns and runs in Collins. It’s a Naugahyde-stool-and-Formica-table sort of joint where the dessert special is—what else?—pumpkin pie. Next door is °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s party lounge, The Pumpkin Room.

Waterman seems bored with our conversation until I bring up the bad blood between his World Pumpkin Confederation and its dreaded rival, the . Then he leans forward, and a trace of a smile stretches across his thin lips. Suddenly Waterman has turned into something dark and strangely sacerdotal, a master of esoteric intrigues: the archdruid of the vine.

Humongous pumpkins, really, really, really humongous pumpkins, pumpkins with the kind of heft and girth and pleasant rind-thumping tonalities that will turn the head of a man like Ray Waterman, are freaks of nature. Nearly all of the champs have come from highly prized, highly specialized seeds—most notably the , a strain that a Nova Scotia dairyman named Howard Dill hybridized back in the 1970s with an eye toward the record books.

Giant pumpkins are nursed on a rarefied diet of manure, composted vegetable matter, and vast quantities of water. For plants that seem to advertise their own robustness, giant pumpkins can be astonishingly fragile. If exposed to the summer sun, their skin burns and blisters. If they go thirsty, they wilt. Neglect to remove a stone from the soil under the fruit, and you lose five pounds as the pumpkin grows around it. A thumbnail dent can cost several ounces.

Unfortunately, competitive pumpkin growers, world-class growers, argue about things like hypodermic needles and silicone gel. They accuse one another of cheating, lying, hoarding prize seeds. They scheme and spread rumors. They file lawsuits.

Giant pumpkins prefer long, sunny days and cool nights, which is precisely why most of the world champions have been grown along the 43d parallel—especially around upstate New York and southern Ontario. Here in the Great Pumpkin Belt, it takes just 70 days for a Dill’s Atlantic Giant to grow from the size of a handball to the size of a doghouse. At the peak of their growing season—in July and August—championship pumpkins can take on 35 pounds a day. Some people say you can even hear them growing.

I took my first innocent step into the world of competitive pumpkin husbandry on a crisp October afternoon, just a few days before °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s big event. The aroma of crushed grapes filled the air as Craig Lembke, of Forestville, New York, led me past his vinyl-sided farmhouse, through his vineyard, and on toward his pride and joy: a vaguely ominous-looking patch of vegetation, some 3,600 square feet in all, with leaves as big as tea trays bobbing a foot above the ground. Vines as thick as my forearm snaked through the dirt.

In the middle of it all slumbered the behemoth itself. Like a pampered celebrity, it had its own personal windbreak, and a sunshade too. As I drew closer to the orange mound, however, I found the object of Lembke’s devotion a sad spectacle indeed.

If the perception of the giant pumpkin is something out of Playboy, pneumatically plump and rounded, the reality is more along the lines of National Geographic, where gravity and time's inexorable march have left their mark. Lembke’s fruit looked wrinkled, flaccid. The pocked and dimpled skin conspicuously sagged. Superficial wounds and soft spots added further insult.

I tried to hide my disappointment, for love had obviously blinded Lembke. His eyes gleamed as he pointed out the thickness of his pumpkin’s rind. “She took a thousand gallons of water a day in August,” he said, beaming with pride.

Lembke figured his pumpkin for about 650 pounds—not enough to win him first place, though probably good enough to make the top ten. But he had something that excited him even more, in the next plot over. We waded through the tall leaves and carefully lifted a blue tarp. There, at the end of the vine, lay a giant green squash.

The squash, he explained, comes from the same seed as the pumpkin. If the gene for color expresses itself as orange, the fruit gets called a pumpkin and starts down a path toward glory that could culminate in an appearance on David Letterman and a cross-country tour, hitting state fairs and casinos in Atlantic City and Las Vegas and bringing thousands more dollars to the proud owner. If the fruit grows up green, on the other hand, its fate is more circumscribed. It competes with other green squashes for paltry prize sums, and its chances of ever going on a victory tour are slim to none.

Lembke thought his green prodigy weighed about 750 pounds—quite possibly the next squash champion of the world. The only question was where to take it. The closest weigh-off was °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s event, the WPC contest over in Clarence, a mere 30-minute drive northeast from here. But over the last few years Lembke had turned sour on the WPC. He believed that WPC members hoarded prize seeds. He accused Waterman of corrupting the hobby with his $50,000 payout offer. Lembke said he really didn’t want to talk about the WPC, but the whole subject was like a scab he couldn’t stop picking. At any rate, his mind was all made up: Tomorrow morning he planned to drive all the way over to Oswego, a four-hour trek, to enter a contest held by the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. If his squash were to win there, he’d fetch $200—and a ribbon.

Lembke showed me his squash’s stem, which was about nine inches in circumference. “Long, big, thick,” he said, nodding. “That's an ideal stem.” Then he experienced a momentary reality check, adding, “But who wants to see a giant squash?”

“He's going all the way to Oswego with a stupid squash?”

Craig Lembke planted his first pumpkin patch in 1981, purely to amuse his young daughter, Angela. Right off the bat he got a 50-pounder and was hooked. In the 15 years since, through a regimen of hard science and meticulous care, he’d managed to increase his best pumpkins’ weight by more than 650 pounds. Last year, he took two 700-plus pounders to a weigh-off in Canfield, Ohio, and came home with third prize—$250 and a “real nice plaque.”

The season begins in early April, when Lembke pokes ten seeds into small cups of soil in his greenhouse. Within a few days, the sprouts emerge. He inspects them daily, . Around the first or second week of May, he transplants the sprouts into the ground. The mother vine begins to lengthen, about a foot a day. When the plant blossoms, Lembke transfers pollen from a male blossom into a female. To prevent bees from horning in on this private genetic experiment, he covers the blossoms with plastic bags.

If Lembke’s handiwork is successful, the tiny fruit that's present under every female blossom “takes off.” He’ll bury each vine so it will throw down a taproot and bring up more nutrients. To get maximum nourishment and water into the potential prizewinners, he’ll gradually winnow the number of fruits on the plant to five or six and then, after about 30 days, to one.

This last fruit, known among horticulturists as a “sink,” will be the beneficiary of the entire plant’s photosynthates. Some vines and leaves will also be carefully pruned. “You want the nutrition going into the pumpkin, not those other parts,” Lembke says.

While Lembke’s methods are certainly labor-intensive, they seem fairly straightforward when compared to those of growers like Leonard Stellpflug, of Nunda, New York, who is known to use a divining rod to find water caches and energy fields. Other growers have installed 1,000-watt grow lights or heated their irrigation water to avoid shocking the roots. In Pennsylvania, a man chopped down a dozen oak trees just to get another half-hour of sunlight on his patch. Some top growers, wary of vandals who might slice up their pumpkins and abscond with the seeds, set up roving security cameras.

The bigger a pumpkin is, the more likely it is to split and the more susceptible it is to disease. Every ten days, Lembke sprays his pumpkins with insecticide. He dusts small bruises with captan, a fungicide. He fertilizes with a compost of rice hulls and grapes. He spreads cow manure. He plucks off insects and frets when the wind comes up. “A windstorm could flip the whole vine over!” he told me. When the pumpkin achieves “propane tank” size—that's well after lemon, baseball, and basketball size—Lembke erects the plastic sunshade, and the coddling begins in earnest.

By September, Lembke is a nervous wreck, checking his patch three or four times a day. September is the do-or-die month. It was in September, just a few weeks ago, that three of his most promising young beasts had split on him. “You get cold nights and the skin toughens,” he said. “Then you get a hot day and—boom.”

At about five o’clock, two reporters from the Syracuse University TV station arrived to interview a very excited Lembke. His eyes were bright, and he smiled while he talked. What are you feeling right now? they asked. “I feel a little shaky. It's five months of hard work. All the worrying about bugs and weather and vandalism. I won't sleep Friday night.”

A little later, as the sun oozed behind Lake Erie, Lembke solemnly asked if I’d like to cut the pumpkin from its vine. He removed a penknife from his pocket and pointed to a spot two inches from the fruit. I knelt and prepared myself for the great moment—a gush of umbilical fluids, perhaps, a faintly audible death rattle as the life forces receded. But the knife bit easily into the stem, and in two dry strokes, I was through.

---

People have have been for 10,000 years, and pumpkin weigh-offs have been a staple of county fairs and harvest exhibitions since the early 1800s. But competitive growing didn’t attain international stature until 1900, when William Warnock, of Goderich, Ontario, sent a to the Paris World’s Fair. In 1903 he bettered his record by three pounds. That record held until 1976, when a Pennsylvania man exhibited a 451-pounder at the U.S. Pumpkin Contest in Churchville, Pennsylvania.

From then on, the numbers steadily climbed. Starting in the late seventies, Howard Dill coaxed his Atlantic Giant seeds into world-championship pumpkins for four years running. Ray Waterman was duly impressed. In 1982 he contacted Dill, and together they founded the World Pumpkin Confederation. “A lot of county fairs were weighing off,” explains Waterman, “and they needed credibility and standardization.”

Soon the rules were codified and competition grew immeasurably stiffer. Quantum advances in seed genetics led to consistently larger pumpkins: in the 700-pound range, then up to 800. As the prize money inched upward, competition became cutthroat and cheating more common. People doctored cracks in their pumpkins with automotive body filler. They injected water into the cavity with a hypodermic needle. Then there was the guy who razored off the stem of his pumpkin, filled it with water, and sealed the whole thing with superglue. He got caught when a judge jabbed a knife into the base and orange water poured out by the gallon.

In 1993, a number of disenchanted WPC officials, including the renowned pumpkin seed savant himself, Howard Dill, bolted from °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s group and created their own, the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth. From the start, there was bad blood between the two organizations. Dill’s group claimed that most of the WPC sites didn’t pay out and that Waterman cared more about publicity than the growers themselves. WPC loyalists, on the other hand, argued that the fledgling GPC tolerated cheaters and the rigging of contests.

“If you want to talk dirt with other people, you do that,” says Paula Zehr. “But we're just trying to grow pumpkins.”

In the fall of 1993, the year that a Winthrop, New York, grower named Don Black raised an enormous pumpkin, the infighting took a turn for the worse. On October 1, Black placed his pumpkin, along with the large tarp in which it was wrapped, on the scales at a GPC site in Nova Scotia. Afterward, officials weighed the tarp alone and subtracted the six-pound difference. Black’s pumpkin weighed 884 pounds-easily the largest pumpkin in the world at that time.

Meanwhile, Norm Craven, a realtor from Stouffville, Ontario, won a WPC contest near his home with a pumpkin that weighed a mere 836 pounds. Ignoring Brown's record altogether, Waterman reported Craven's lesser pumpkin to the Guinness Book of Records.

When Black saw the , he went ballistic, as did Howard Dill. Not only did they charge Waterman with willfully misreporting the record; they also accused Craven of cheating—of bracing a split stem with silicone.

To this day, however, Ray Waterman defends the Craven fruit and maintains that Black’s pumpkin was improperly weighed. Waterman, it seems, is a strict constructionist. “WPC rules state that you cannot weigh the tarp!” he says.

“Yeah, but then they subtracted the tarp,” I say.

Waterman only shrugs. Rules are rules. There’s nothing that can be done. But when I press Waterman further, I gather that all this to-the-letter quibbling over tarps is really immaterial. “We wouldn’t be inclined to recognize any GPC record,” Waterman finally admits. “Because if you take that group, they really have no rules! We’re not going to put the credibility of the whole Confederation on the line.”

I ask Waterman where Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville, New York, are going to weigh off this year. He claims he doesn’t know. Last year, the Zehrs won at a GPC site with a pumpkin that weighed 968 pounds. It was certainly the largest pumpkin in the land that year, but of course Waterman declined to recognize it. This year, the Zehrs are refusing to announce where they’ll weigh off. Apparently they’re afraid of sabotage. Rumor has it their pumpkin is big. Real big. But to claim the $50,000 prize money, there’s only one place they can take it: °ÂČčłÙ±đ°ùłŸČčČÔ’s gig in Clarence.

Waterman doesn’t know where Craig Lembke is going to weigh off either, and this clearly bugs him. So I spill the beans: Lembke is going to Oswego. Waterman shakes his head in dismay. “That's a long way to drive to win very little money.” Well, I reply, he’s got a fine squash this year, and he thinks it will place in Oswego. Waterman is positively incredulous. It’s hard for him to understand why anyone would deliberately miss out on history in the making, the chance to see the world’s very first kilopounder. “He's going all the way to Oswego with a stupid squash?” he asks, squinting.

---

It’s just above freezing as the first specimens arrive at the Great Pumpkin Farm, a sprawling roadside patch in Clarence, New York. Steve Baldo Chevrolet has a half-dozen new pickups parked out behind the candy apple and fried dough stands. From their antennas, red, white, and blue flags snap in the breeze. A hundred normal-size pumpkins—Pick Your Own!—dot a dry, brown field.

WPC officials wearing orange jackets register each giant, El Markoing a four-digit number onto the skin. Waterman is in operations mode, barking commands into a walkie-talkie, directing pickups, and telling the man from Fairbanks Scales where to park it. By nine o’clock, about 75 people are milling around. Twenty giant pumpkins are lined up and waiting. “That looks like a squash to me,” a man whispers to his wife.

Paula and Nathan Zehr arrive in a pickup pulling a horse trailer. WPC officials remove the first of three pumpkins with a forklift. “Whoa,” says the crowd. All three are monstrous. Paula is inside the truck flossing her teeth, and she won’t say a word to anyone until she’s done.

The Zehrs look like the kind of people you might see in a Publisher’s Clearinghouse commercial. She has a light brown bob and wears pink lipstick and a pink parka. Her white blouse is buttoned to her throat. Nathan has bristling brown hair and looks sportif in a white cardigan and Top-Siders. Nutrition consultants by trade, the Zehrs began growing pumpkins as a hobby ten years ago. When Waterman issued the 1,000-pound challenge, they took up the call, devoting five hours a day for six months to three promising-looking pumpkins, which they named My Secret Prayer, The Great Can Do, and Do It Again. Last night the fear of a last-minute disaster compelled Nathan to sleep, Linuslike, in his patch.

Giant pumpkin growers talk like sports stars. The Zehrs are no exception. What do you think of the competition? “I think we've got a real good pumpkin here today, and we just came out here to have some fun.” (That’s Nathan.) How do you explain your success? “We never gave up believing that we could go for it. God’s blessed us. We're just the caretakers.” (That’s Paula.)

Earlier, I asked Paula if the animosity between the WPC and the GPC bothered her. Then she sounded less like a sports star and more like a schoolteacher. “If you want to talk dirt with other people, you do that, but we're just trying to grow pumpkins.”

Plant physiologists and university extension services have little to teach people like the Zehrs, who represent the cutting edge of gigantism. Growing these things is largely a mystical process.

Plant physiologists and university extension services have little to teach people like the Zehrs, who represent . Growing these things is largely a mystical process. Because you can’t interrupt a giant’s growth, you can’t completely assess its health until you cut it from the vine, at which point it’s too late to make corrections. Although they keep meticulous logs of each pumpkin’s genetic lineage and the precise amounts of food, water, and other stuff each pumpkin consumes on any given day, growers like the Zehrs don't completely understand what makes one so much larger than another.

With the crowd swarming around him, Nathan Zehr cuts a slice from Can Do’s stem and points at a few rust-colored spots in the woody-looking conductive tissue. What are the spots from? I ask him. “We don't know, but it may be some kind of bacteria,” Nathan says. Couldn’t the local ag experts tell you? He cuts me a look. “We’ll listen to them when they grow a pumpkin as big as ours.”

The weighing commences at 10:30. We get some 500-pounders, some sixes and sevens. It quickly becomes apparent that the emcee, a man named Kelly Schultz who is the owner of the Great Pumpkin Farm, plans to drag out the ceremony as long as possible. Weights over 700 pounds draw polite rounds of applause. I’ll soon learn that the visual difference between a 600-pound pumpkin and a 700-pound pumpkin is negligible. Most of the weight is in the rind, which can grow up to 14 inches thick.

A carousel spins nearby; essence of corndog bathes the crowd. I wander over to some tables covered with giant sunflowers, giant rutabagas, giant gourds, giant kohlrabies, giant cornstalks, and giant radishes. This is the grand arena for Waterman's Olympics of Gardening, the green hall of fame. Prizes will be awarded in each of these categories, but so far these attractions have drawn little notice.

With the larger pumpkins, Schultz heightens the drama by covering the readout of the digital scales until he can focus the crowd’s attention. It's one o’clock by the time the first of the Zehrs’ pumpkins makes it to the scales. Do It Again, an exhibition-only pumpkin, weighs in at 845. “Folks, I have to ask ya to please stand back and make way for the forklift,” Waterman exhorts the crowd, now eight people deep. My Secret Prayer, also exhibition only, weighs 917 pounds.

The Zehrs are beaming. Paula has shed her parka and freshened her lipstick. She holds Nathan’s hand as the forklift delivers The Great Can Do to the scales. The pumpkin is knobby and off-kilter, and looks like the prow of a sinking ship. The forklift backs away. An assistant shades the digital readout. It’s a nail-biting moment.

“If we get a thousand-pounder,” shouts Waterman, “we gotta let the folks in the next county hear it.” Oswego is in the next county, where at this very moment Craig Lembke is winning $100 for his second-place squash.

Finally, the suspense is unbearable. The shade comes off the scale and Waterman pronounces the weight: “One thousand and 61 pounds!” The crowd roars. Nathan and Paula hug conservatively and then raise their arms in champion salute. The great barrier has been shattered at last, the Mach One of the vegetable world, and the Zehrs are $50,000 richer.

Waterman passes Paula the microphone. “We'd like to thank God, our community, our friends, and our church.” Waterman presents the Zehrs with their check. Then he implores the crowd, “Folks, when you get your photographs of the pumpkin, do not let the kids sit on it.” He steps back a little and lets the TV crews swarm. Waterman is in heaven. It’s everything he ever dreamed of. He lets the moment percolate, lets the reporters have their way. Then the forklift returns the kilo-pounder to its pallet, and people start drifting toward their cars.

Waterman gets right back in front of the mike. “Don’t go away folks,” he pleads. “We’ve got a lot more things to weigh.”

Correspondent Elizabeth Royte wrote about the Iditarod sled dog race in the December 1996 issue.

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