The Headwaters Experience
Care. Respect. Wonder. Awe. Joy.
Program Development – The Headwaters Approach
The Headwaters Wilderness Program is an educational organization guided by the purpose of developing, implementing, and practicing education for the present time, aimed toward the long-term. Centred around enabling entwined relationships with nature and with community, we view thoughtful wilderness travel as an ideal medium for a wild, flourishing education. To this end, Headwaters runs intentional wilderness trips and, taking lessons from these experiences, also creates and facilitates local programs for school groups, organizations, and teacher professional development, bringing the teachings of the wilderness home with us to our domesticated places and human communities.
Teaching and living by our core values is the foundation of all our programs: Care, Respect, Wonder, Awe, and Joy.
What Our Trip Programs Look Like
All of our trips are traditional. The lakes, rivers, and portages we travel constitute an interconnected trail system that has been in use by the living beings of the land for thousands of years: we voyage on ancient paths, never the first to have done so and hopefully never the last. What we see has been seen and what we experience has been experienced, but to us it is new, and so long as the wilderness remains free and our hearts remain open, we shall be pioneers of the spirit.
Every day that passes further removes awareness of the traditional voyage. It is thus, to an exactly equal degree, that each passing day makes the voyage more necessary. To connect with the ancient ways is to know our place in the world – to know our humanity stripped of its insulating artefacts. We are drawn to engage, both by necessity and by choice, no longer interested nor able to find ourselves idly swept along, unconscious to the world. It is to live raw, and to live richly indeed.
A Day on Trip
We travel by canoe and we portage on foot. We cook on an open fire that we made ourselves, preparing each meal communally. Our food consists of homemade recipes long perfected for the canoe voyage, with fresh baking done in a reflector oven. We sleep in tents. We awake when our bodies are rested, rather than by the clock. We gather blueberries from the land and our water from the lake. We travel as according to how the weather dictates. We take rest days whenever we find a good spot. We travel without haste, for the trip itself is the point.
We travel with, not on – we are interested in relating with, rather than conquering. This necessitates a slower form of travel; there is no race. A big lake, a portage, a rapid, none of those are obstacles to be overcome, but rather wild places to engage with, to discover their character. All of our trips are designed such that there is a known route, but ample time for the group to determine the exact path, if they so choose – the specific lakes, portages, and days of travel. Once you're into a lake system on the Canadian Shield, you can go in any direction. As such, so long as we arrive back safely where we need to be on the final day of the program, the group has agency to wander, to poke around – to explore a nearby lake here, to take a hike there, to discover what the place has to offer and to follow the call of its song. This results in new discoveries, a sense of self-determined freedom, learning to read the land, water, sky, map, and compass, making mistakes, learning to navigate situations where the possibilities are not pre-determined for us, and the new-found self-confidence and resiliency that comes with genuine accomplishment. It is a connection to how humans travelled long ago, before roads narrowed and accelerated our travel into the most "efficient" route. What we gained in speed and convenience we lost in the wonder and awe that comes from choosing one's own path, from moving slowly, and from discovering all there is to find along the way.
"[Self-propelled wilderness travel] should promote feelings of belonging to the place, of experiencing its hospitality, first as a guest and later as a full member of the household in that place"
~ Bert Horwood,
Tasting the Berries: Deep Ecology and Experiential Education, 1991