Canadian Rangers have been busy in Northern Manitoba in the past month-and-a-half, conducting exercises in Gillam and Lynn Lake and responding to locate people stranded in a snow groomer, says Capt. Wade Jones, commanding officer of the 4th Canadian Ranger Patrol Group’s Manitoba patrols.

“During Christmas we did a request for assistance from the RCMP detachment in Churchill and that was for two stranded people in a trail groomer that had been stranded for 48 hours and that was on Christmas Eve,” Jones says. “It’s life and limb. These guys have been out there for 48 hours, they have no survival gear. Five Rangers from Gillam left and recovered the individuals, helped them got them back to Gillam.”

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There are eight Canadian Ranger patrols in Manitoba and they help out in about eight to 10 such searches per year.

“Some communities don’t even have RCMP,” Jones says. “In many locations we are the only organized group and the RCMP know that and the government of Canada knows that, that relationship between the armed forces and the RCMP, particularly when it comes to search and rescue, that we react.”

As class A part-time reservists in the Canadian Armed Forces, Canadian Rangers are required to complete 12 days of training per year. During a recent training exercise in Gillam, Rangers set out east towards York Factory on the coast to find Panco Lake, named for a World War I veteran.

“We went to look for the plaque [in honour of the solider] and to clean it up, clear the brush around it,” said Jones. “We’re going to see if we can find the family, supposedly they still live in Winnipeg, and we’ll send them some pictures of the plaque.”

The plaque, however, is only a pretense for practising the skills that Rangers require.

“It sounds like it’s focused on this, going out and doing that, but in reality it’s the preparations, the navigation to get there, it’s the winter survival skills it’s the snowmobile maintenance,” says Jones. “To do one thing, a whole bunch of other skills are covered at the same time. This gives them a reason for being out but it’s covering off a whole bunch of things that we want them to do.”

A week later, about 20 Canadian Rangers from Lac Brochet, Churchill, Gillam, Lynn Lake, St. Theresa Point and Snow Lake as well as one each from Powell River and Dease Lake, B.C. gathered in Lynn Lake with six Rangers staff members before heading out to Kinoosao on Reindeer Lake just over the Saskatchewan boundary.

“We brought all these Rangers together, two or three or four from each location, and then the exercise was centred on preparing Rangers for a request for assistance from the RCMP or local policing agency,” said Jones. “We covered things like ground search and rescue, long-range navigation by snowmobile, wilderness first aid, casualty preparation and casualty evacuation by air, hasty landing strips for aircraft on skis, snowmobile maintenance, bush fixes. Some guys are really good at that stuff. The idea behind having a collective exercise is to pass on either new information or to review and practise their skills that they already know so that we have an even knowledge base in all of the patrols in the province and obviously at the same time there’s leadership involved so we develop some of those Rangers’ leadership skills.”

For some of the patrols’ members, these exercises are just a way of passing on knowledge while for others they’re a way to pick up additional skills.

“Because there’s such a transient population in Northern Manitoba, we’ve got people from all over the country and all over the world actually who come to live in Manitoba,” Jones says. “They don’t necessarily have those skills so when they join the Rangers we can’t make the assumption that they know all those outdoor living skills and stuff like that, the key things that we look for in a Ranger, so we review lots of individual skills as well. Every community or every patrol location there’s always those key individuals, the long-time residents that are the jack of all trades. Those are the guys that we have in our patrols and those are the key guys that teach everybody else. We had guys from Snow Lake teach things, guys from Gillam were teaching things. We, as the staff, we don’t normally do that stuff. We allow the Rangers to do that themselves except for when it comes to technical things like wilderness first aid or something like that, then we have instructors.”

Jones says some Canadian Rangers seem to be able to extricate themselves from just about any sticky situation.

“I’ve seen guys break a throttle cable in the middle of nowhere and they’ll put a tent up around the snowmobile, take that throttle cable off, take the wires and braid it all back together and shorten it. It’s enough to get them home. Those are the skill sets that we’re looking for, guys who can do everything with nothing because that’s what they’re going to be faced with one time or another.”

During the most recent exercise, the Northern Manitoba Rangers had the chance to try out the C-19, the new Colt Canada rifle that will become the Rangers’ standard issue firearm, replacing the venerable Lee Enfield .303.

“It’s a very nice rifle,” Jones says. “It’s quite an upgrade from the .303 and I hope it lasts as long as the .303 did which it probably won’t. The Rangers love it. We’re in the process actually, all across Canada, starting March this year is when it’s going to be issued.”

But while a renewed focus on Canadian Rangers in the last decade-and-a-half has seen them equipped with new gear, Jones says sometimes the old ways still work.

“In 2009 we went from Kitimat, B.C. to Churchill, Manitoba by snowmobile. Each province is a company so each province was responsible for a segment of it so I was responsible for from Points North Landing in Saskatchewan to Churchill and the longest leg across no-man’s land is between Lac Brochet and Tadoule Lake. We had done it the year before just to prove the route and when we were doing that there was a guy that had done it when he was 12 years old with his dad and he led us and only once did he ever ask me [for assistance]. He couldn’t remember if the portage to the next lake was in this bay or in that bay. That’s pretty amazing. Their ability to navigate traditionally is better than map, compass or GPS of today.”