Sadness at the end of a long wilderness journey.

"As we dined lavishly in Winnipeg's finest hotel, my companions' sadness increased....This they said was their first truly great experience of their lives, and would probably be their last "wilderness adventure". They had lived most of their lives up to then by the dictates of urban circumstance.... It was a life with little physical activity, and it would no doubt now be circumstantially continued.....From weeks of travel through Canada's winter wilderness, they had reached that ascendancy of physical well-being known only to few. Now they were at a point when their bodies and minds were attuned to nature. They had come to recognize its vibrant effects in the most self-evident sense. Life, not languid conformality, and having peeked momentarily into paradise below zero, their mundane lives could never again be quite the same."

Traveling under your own power through the wilderness changes your life forever. I hope you all take time to travel a wilderness waterway and experience it first hand.