MY FIRST REGIONAL EXPEDITION
Article written by Cadet Warrant Officer Haowen Lu, RCACC 2806 Pointe-Claire (RMR)
Pointe-Claire, Quebec – 02 April 2024: Please take a moment to read the article posted by C/WO Haowen Lu retelling his experience during a five-day expedition in Mont-Valin that he completed during the March break week. The article is posted below but is better read in the original web blog format which includes many photos.
My regional expedition started on March 2, 2024, as I arrived at the designated bus stop where I would be picked up. I was very nervous since this was my first ever regional expedition. After a long bus ride, I finally arrived at Valcartier Cadet Training Centre and had a nice warm meal at the military canteen. I then spent the rest of the night putting away my stuff, hanging out with other cadets, and most importantly, learning which team I was going to be in.
The next morning, I met the rest of the members of my expedition team. We were eight people in total: seven cadets and one officer. For the morning portion of that day, we spent most of our time doing team building activities, organizing the travel routes, and checking the equipment that we will be using. Before going out for lunch, a list of personal equipment was given to us. Unlike in a normal field training exercise, instead of just being given equipment they had us pick what equipment we thought we would need. To be honest, I really liked this idea of picking our own equipment for the list. This really allowed us to pick whatever we wanted according to our own individual needs, and it really helped reduce the weight of the kit we had to carry with us. After lunch, we prepared the rations that would be our lunches for our following days in the mountains. When all the preparations were done, I rushed back to my barracks and took a nice hot shower. I then spent the rest of my night packing my bag, playing some fun card games with my fellow cadets and relaxing before the big day.
On the third day, we departed from the training centre as soon as we finished our breakfast. We spent our whole morning on a bus traveling to our starting destination, Monts-Valin in the Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean region. The highway we travelled on was built on the mountains and our ears hurt a lot with the changes in altitudes. You needed to constantly swallow to keep your ear pressure balanced. However, the vibe on the bus was still quite good. You had people playing songs on their speakers and other cadets playing games. It was around noon when we arrived at our destination. We ate our lunch, received our snowshoes and prepared for ourselves to disconnected from the rest of the world for the next five days. According to our team’s schedule, we would spend our first night at a chalet located near the top of the mountain. With only a few hours of light left, there wasn’t time to just climb the mountain, so we took a shuttle that dropped us and our equipment two kilometres away from the chalet.
Having been dropped off, we took our equipment and started hiking. Hiking uphill with all your equipment for two kilometres might not sound like much of a challenge, however, if you ever experienced it, you’ll know better. On the field training exercises at my cadet corps, we don’t do much hiking in the wilderness, and if we do, we generally don’t have to carry a heavy backpack and try stick to routes with relatively flat terrain. This was a completely new experience for me. Despite the tough nature of our hike, our team was able to get ahead of our planned schedule, so we decided to take a trip to a nearby lookout, where we had an amazing view of the countryside. Unfortunately, with the sun setting soon, we had to quickly get back to making our way to our chalet before nightfall.
Once arrived at the chalet, we started a fire in the chalet’s wood-burning stove and started to cook our dinner, one of the freeze-dried meals were had been given for the week. After we finished eating, we started doing our daily retroaction and then planned our route for the next day. Before going to set I made sure to set my alarm for 0300 hours (3 a.m.). “Why an alarm at 3 am?” you might ask, well someone had to make sure the fire stayed light during the night and that was my scheduled time to check the fire and add more wood to keep it going. It was during my turn that I learned an important lesson, that it is always a good idea to always add at least two or three logs into stove each time you wake up. During the night, one of my teammates had only added one log during their scheduled check and as a result, when it was my turn to add logs to the fire, there was only a tiny spark left. Luckily, another cadet and I were able restart the fire.
We all woke up early to climb up to the highest lookout point in the area, located at 984 metres above sea level, so we could watch the sun rise. It was a lot of climbing, but all the effort was worth it; the view was magnificent. Everyone took a lot of pictures before started we made our way back to the chalet. We had our breakfast – still more freeze- dried rations – and packed up our things for our journey to our next chalet. Luckily, the path that we followed was mostly downhill, so at least my legs didn’t hurt as much as they had yesterday. After a couple hours of walking through the snow-covered trail we arrived at our second chalet around noon. We ate our lunch and played a couple rounds of Uno, before deciding to take an hour siesta as we were all pretty tired. After our siesta, we put on our snowshoes and hiked to another lookout. The view from the lookout was pretty good, but it was not as good as the view we had from the lookout in the morning. The rest of the day was relaxed, with us heading back to our chalet where we started cooking our dinner, followed up our daily retroaction. Tonight, luckily, I didn’t need to take care of the fire, so I was able to get a much better sleep compared to the night before.
The fifth day was more downhill trekking, and a chance to learn another life lesson, that trekking downhill can be just as hard as trekking uphill, especially when the slopes are super steep and slippery. Sometimes it got so bad that I had step into the snowbanks on the side of the path just to be able to descend safely. However, this also resulted in me getting stuck often in deep snow, but if you’re equipped with gaiters and manage to not get snow into your books, as I did, it was still better than slipping and sliding down the hill uncontrollably. We arrived at our next lookout point about middle way through our planned route for the day and spent some time there resting with another team of cadets that had arrived at the same time. After this short stop, we got back on our original path and arrived at the chalet we would be staying at for the night around 1300 hours (1 p.m.). As usual, we took a short siesta before heading out for another nearby looking where we hope to catch the sun set. To save us some travel time, we did some off-piste snowshoeing (that’s when snowshoe on snow outside the marked trails). Once again, the effort was worth it, and we were treated to a beautiful sunset. By the time we made back to our chalet, it was already dark, so we quickly started cooking our meals, some freshly cooked pasta! After all the freeze-dried rations, having the change to finally eat some fresh food was just great. Once we were done eating, we did our routine retroaction session and then went to sleep. Unfortunately for me, it was my turn to be responsible for keeping the fire going that night, so I had to get up a couple of times during the night.
The next day, we did all our travelling on snowshoes. We first started off climbing 200 metres during the first part (two kilometres) of our journey. Surprisingly, it only took us 50 minutes to do so. As for the second part, it was purely downhill. Fortunately, the slopes weren’t as steep as they were before, making the whole downhill trek relatively smooth. Around noon we arrived at a shack where some skis had been stored for us. We had our lunch and a lesson on how to use these ski-snowshoes called ski-hocs and then went out to practicing skiing with them. In general, I did well on them on flat surfaces – I was a member of my corps biathlon team, so I know a little bit about cross- country skiing – however the downhill skiing part of our practice session was where the real fun began for me (if you know what I mean). After this little training session, we left our skis at the shack and continued the rest of our journey on snowshoes (don’t worry, we will be coming back for the skis on Day 7). Once we arrived at our final chalet, I started building an improvised shelter since I have decided that I was going to spend the night sleeping outside. After a couple hours of hard work, my shelter was finally built and then after eating dinner and completing my retroaction for the day I slipped into my waterproof bivy sack and sleeping bag for the night. To be honest, sleeping in my little warm shelter under the star-studded night sky was one of the most unique experiences I have ever had.
The seventh day was our last in the wilderness. We packed up all our equipment, put on our skis and made our way to the rendezvous point where the bus would pick us up to take us back to Valcartier Cadet Training Centre. It took us two hours of skiing to make it there and we were all super-tired after having completed five days of intensive physical activities. While waiting for our bus we played some card games and made sure to eat whatever was left in our backpacks to try to regain some energy. When we got back to the training centre, we were all happy to eat some read food, take a hot shower and get a good night sleep.
Despite just being back from five days of intense hiking, snowshoeing and skiing, Day 8 was full of more physical activities. In the morning, we were scheduled to do some indoor rock climbing, but I just couldn’t do it anymore. I was just too tired and every muscle in my body was sore. But after a bit of break and a good lunch, I was able to join in on the afternoon’s dodgebow and bubble soccer activities. When we finished doing these activities, we went back to the training centre, had our dinner and received our expedition pins. I felt a mix of joy and pride in myself for having made it through this experience. The next day, we all woke up early, returned our equipment and got on the bus to return home. The ride home was slow and bumpy due to a snowstorm, but we made sure to make the best of it, playing music and games all the way back.
And that is how my first regional expedition concluded.
