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Special Section 5, Saturday, January 15, 2005, p. f6
The Winnipeg Free Press
By Bartley Kives
IF you happen to be in St. Vital this morning, you might notice several dozen women in their 50s sauntering down the Seine River at a healthy clip.
Despite all appearances, this is no coven of Wiccan priestesses attempting to consecrate the frozen river ice. This assemblage of parka-clad humanity, which is bound to include a few men, is the Prairie Pathfinders, a walking club with more than 500 members in and around Winnipeg.
Today, the Pathfinders will traipse 10 clicks down the Seine as part of their annual river walk, one of more than 100 outings planned by the non-profit organization each year.
The trips are designed for people who want to go on long walks but like the comfort and security of exploring the city and province in the company of other humans.
Originally, group members were mostly older women. But that's changed as the Pathfinders branched out from gentle walks around Winnipeg to more challenging hiking trails outside the city.
"As we've gone on more difficult walks, we've seen some younger people and more men," says Leone Banks, 70, who co-founded the Prairie Pathfinders in the late '90s with three other Winnipeg women -- Wendy Wilson, 56, Kathleen Leathers, 62 and Sheila Spence, 52.
The walking club is actually an offshoot of a do-it-yourself publishing company that's released three popular guidebooks that rank as local best-sellers at McNally Robinson Booksellers.
Manitoba Walks, a guide to day-hiking trails across southern Manitoba, is out of print as Banks and Wilson plan a second edition. Manitoba Picnic Perfect is a guide to lunch spots.
The Pathfinders' most popular book, Winnipeg Walks, has sold more than 10,000 copies since its original release in 1998. A second edition published just before Christmas features improved layout and more historical tidbits about routes around the city.
The reason for the books' popularity is simple: There are very few guides to any form of outdoor activity in Manitoba.
Aside from the Pathfinders' walking tomes, the very short list of provincial guidebooks includes Hap Wilson and Stephanie Aykroyd's Wilderness Rivers of Manitoba, Robert Buchanan's Canoeing Manitoba Rivers, Sue Lebrecht's Trans Canada Trail Manitoba and Catherine Senecal's ecotourism guide Pelicans To Polar Bears. To my knowledge, both Wayne Petty's Cycling Back Road Manitoba and Ruth Marr's Manitoba Outdoor Adventure Guide-Cycling are long out of print.
So even though the Pathfinders are not tackling many extremely strenuous hikes, their guidebooks -- particularly Manitoba Walks -- are useful to local hikers who want to rely on more than dodgy Internet sites, word-of-mouth and this silly column for information about trails.
The inspiration for Winnipeg Walks, the first Pathfinders guidebook, came from Banks, who's spent a lifetime exploring other cities on foot.
"Any time I visit a new city, I like to explore it by purchasing a walking book. I always found it strange we didn't have one here in Winnipeg," she says. "The only way to get to know a city is to get out and walk."
So she and her partners did some research, loaded a desktop-publishing program on to a home computer and started cranking out guidebooks.
"We've all reached a time in our lives when we said to ourselves, 'Let's do something we really care about,'" says Wilson.
"It turned out we weren't the only ones -- a lot of people like to walk in Winnipeg and Manitoba and don't want to do it alone."
During most of the year, the Pathfinders lead an average of two hikes every week, plus a couple of more challenging multi-day excursions.
In August, there's a Whiteshell Provincial Park tour that'll see participants scramble over 61 kilometres of Canadian Shield trails in three days. A four-day trip to Riding Mountain National Park in September will cover 65 kilometres. Both trips involves a series of day hikes, so participants won't have to lug a backpack the entire distance.
For a full list of the organization's activities, visit www.prairiepathfinders.mb.ca. (And if you were disappointed this column wasn't actually about Wiccan priestesses, you might find the info you need at www.canadapagan.com.)
bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca
© 2005 Winnipeg Free Press. All Rights Reserved.
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