The festival is expected to be one of the province’s signature events in 2008. Planners met at Milford House, south of Annapolis Royal, because this was the jumping off point for the famous fishing and camping trip taken a century ago by sportsmen from New England and guides from Nova Scotia, written about by Albert Bigelow Paine in his book, The Tent Dwellers.

That trip – which got underway after a wagon ride from Milford to Jakes Landing, in what is now Kejimkujik National Park – made its way through lakes, portages and rivers in Kejimkujik and the Tobeatic Wilderness Area. For Leif Helmer, that wilderness is almost a second home.

Helmer is the regional protected area coordinator of the western region of the Department of Environment and Labour, the government ministry responsible for looking after Nova Scotia’s natural environment. Its minister is Mark Parent, who was in the Tobeatic a couple of weeks ago, and whose own deeply-held values, Leif said, were closely aligned with the values held in planning for the Tobeatic. Parent took two days vacation last summer, spending both in the Tobeatic.

The Tobeatic, which is provincial, and Kejimkujik, which is federal, sit side by side in southwestern Nova Scotia. Together, they make up one of the largest wilderness areas on the eastern seaboard of North America, and the largest in all of Atlantic Canada. Both are favourite haunts of the people of Queens, Shelburne, Yarmouth, Digby, and Annapolis counties, whose home areas are touched by this large wilderness, and they make up the core of the Southwest Nova Biosphere Reserve.

Helmer, whose home is in Petite Riviere, told another packed house at the Mersey Tobeatic Research Centre’s summer seminar series that you’d have to go a long way to find a larger contiguous natural area, and that it was “pretty significant for our part of the world.” He said the Tobeatic includes five natural landscapes, that it was largely undisturbed, and that since it touched five counties it had five sets of histories.

About eight and a half per cent of Nova Scotia is protected through parks, nature reserves and private land trusts, Helmer said. Both the provincial and Canadian goal is 12 per cent by 2015. That total in Nova Scotia is growing, he said, as lands are acquired, which means that places like the Tobeatic are growing as well.

He described the natural features of the Tobeatic, and why the area was protected. For one thing, nine different rivers flow out of the Tobeatic, including the Shelburne, which is a Canadian Heritage River, and which flows into Lake Rossignol. There are old forests, undisturbed wetlands, barrens, glacial landforms, natural species (including the rare Blandings turtle), and human heritage, including that of the Mi'kmaq.

There was also European settlement in the Tobeatic, with trade on travel routes between Shelburne and Annapolis, involving houses and hotels in some places. A road for military use was cut in 1780, Helmer said, and that stimulated economic interest through such things as logging and sawmills. From the late 1800s there was quite a tradition associated with sporting and guiding.

There was also a long history of wildlife management. The Tobeatic was Nova Scotia’s first park, set up in 1927, established both for wildlife and for people to enjoy. Helmer said the park was being managed for wilderness dependent recreation, so that the activities favoured depended on solitude and challenge and self-sufficiency. He said there were also outstanding unique wilderness fishing, hunting and trapping opportunities that were traditional in the area.

Leif Helmer also spoke about the Tobeatic Wilderness Area Management Plan, released last fall. He provided copies of the plan for people and said that because the plan was printed, the department was moving from a talking to an implementation phase. A collaborative approach was being used, involving hundreds of people, with the main guiding principle being ecological integrity.

The talk was one of the last activities by Leif before he takes parental leave. His wife, Stacey, is about to give birth to their second child, and he is as passionate about his family as he is about the wilderness.

- Tom Sheppard can be reached at twsheppard@gmail.com