Sheila Nollert wants people to know that age is only a number.
The 65-year-old Barrie woman recently returned from a four-day, three-night trip into the Canadian wilderness, where she hiked, camped, canoed, and portaged her way more than 20 kilometres — completely on her own.
Nollert tells BarrieToday she has been active her entire life and has been a big proponent of healthy living for many years. She and her husband often take canoe and camping trips together.
“About six years ago, we started going on camping trips in the same spot in the northern part of Algonquin Park, between Matawa and North Bay,” she says, noting the small camp ground where they stay each year also serves as an access point for canoe routes.
It was during one of those camping trips Nollert says she noticed a woman loading her canoe by herself.
“I thought, ‘Where is the guy? Is he sitting in the vehicle texting!? Why is she doing all the work?!' Then she got in the canoe and paddled off into the wilderness,” Nollert says.
She soon learned from talking to the park manager that it has been becoming more popular as the years go on that women go out into the wilderness solo.
“This was a bit of a wake-up call for me. I thought, ‘Wow! I really want to do that'.”
Despite her new-found desire to follow in that stranger’s footsteps, Nollert admits it wasn’t until this September that she finally followed through with it.
“Every year I would see women go out. Sure, they were younger than me, but they were there. I had to do it, but I kept coming up with these excuses not to do it,” she says. “COVID was one, or I would think about how vulnerable I would be out there. All it would take is a turned ankle and it could be very dangerous. There’s no cell service out there and you’re completely on your own… but every year, I wondered why I kept doing this to myself.”
In order to make it more difficult for her to back out, Nollert says she set her intentions by announcing her plans on social media. Then she was locked in.
“It’s harder to break that commitment when everybody knows about it,” she says,
She began preparing for the outing by purchasing some new gear.
“The exercise, endurance aspect of it was already taken care of because that’s my lifestyle, but I made it happen.”
Nollert set out on Sept. 13 and spent four days and three nights alone in the park, where she paddled 23 kilometres and portaged her canoe and gear 14.1 kilometres over eight lakes.
She tells BarrieToday she's still on a high from her adventures.
Going into the trip, Nollert knew that nighttime was going to be her biggest challenge, but she says she found while she was out there that she wasn’t as scared as she thought she would be.
“When it’s just you, you are not filling your head with all of those ‘what-ifs’. You’re just dealing with what is,” she says, adding a leaking tent was an additional challenge she had to take on. “I had one of those emergency blankets in case it got too cold that I would use on top of my sleeping bag and I put that foil over my sleeping bag to keep me dry.”
All in all, Nollert calls the whole experience “empowering” and she's extremely proud of what she accomplished.
“It doesn’t matter how old you are. If you have the ability, stop and realize your capabilities and see what you can do," she says. "Society norms are that older people need assistance and are unable to do the things they did when they were young, and it affects how we feel about ourselves as we age. We need to break that cycle.
"I can’t tell you how happy and fulfilled it made me feel to do it. I know I would have lived with regret if I hadn’t done it. I loved how relaxed I was out there — and I really felt at home and like it was where I should be.”
