The Mile a Minute trail

This is the story of a lost ski trail. Today there is a twisting loop of so called “racing trails” between Fortune Lake and trail #14. (The racing trail has also called the “practice course” and the “training course” on the NCC website.)

Trail # 14 was once known as “Chicken Run” but that’s another story.

For both stories you have to understand that the place you think of now as Camp Fortune wasn’t the place that people thought of as Camp Fortune from the 1920s to the 1970s. Camp Fortune has slid down the valley.

(Flickr link)

The main Camp Fortune lodge used to be where the Chalet des Erables now stands and the important point is that this place represented the main centre for cross country skiing in the Gatineau Hills. As such, all trails converged at this point.

Chicken Run was one of them, but crossing the maze that is now the racing trail and diving down to the old Camp Fortune was a trail known as “Mile a Minute.”

You can still see it if you look for it as you start up the northernmost branch of the racing trail. Below is a picture (hosted at Flickr where you can see a larger version) showing the racing trail sign as you look up what had been Mile a Minute. You can see that all the growth is fairly young. If you go there you can also see by looking down the hill that the pine trees which are quite large, grew initially without much surrounding forest; you can tell this because they grew lower branches (pines that grow in dense brush shed their lower branches as they get huge).

This hillside used to be wide open and treeless.

(Flickr link)

But the funny thing is that before this was Mile a Minute it had been called “Traveler’s Hill.” The story goes that the name was changed because Traveler’s Hill had been named in honour of the Traveler’s Insurance Company who had paid out 16 claims for ski injuries there in a single season.

Although the Ottawa Ski Club News was often written with tongue in cheek as early as February 1928 there is mention of “Traveler’s hill, which accident insurance companies now refuse to include in their policies.” The more fulsome explanation came in January 1931

This pine clad and trim looking hill west of Camp Fortune, gradually rising to a dizzy height into the clouds by a series of small plateaus or steps, is the old Traveler’s hill, so called because a certain Insurance Company of that name once paid in a single season some sixteen claims for twisted ligaments and broken bones sustained at some part or other, but generally at the bottom, of its slopes, which caused the headquarters of the Company to inquire if “those fool people down in Ottawa spent their time shooting at each other in winter.” These happy days are no more; cleaned of its shrubs by the machete expert of the Club, Doc. Chisholm; stripped of many of its trees by Joe Morin—who wanted to find out who the property belonged to and who did; bridged and improved in its worst spots, the hill would now be classed as A-I in the safety list. The old name of Traveler’s, which recalled sinister memories, was changed to “Mile-a-Minute,” which seemed more appropriate, but the old designation still endures, although it has now practically lost its meaning. Ask any Junior member and he will tell you that “the hill is known as Traveler’s because there is a whole lot of traveling done on it”—and so there is.