Ranger Steve
Steve, the guide who lives at LeTerrain and hosts its tours
He came north for a two day camping trip and has not lived anywhere else since. Every season on the land since then has been one he was here for, the winters included.
Eleven years of walking the same four hundred acres, in every month of the year. There is no certificate for that and it is not a credential, but it is the whole reason there is a person on this page at all.
“The year was 2015 and the month was August. I was called to the land and called to never leave.”
Before the land
Steve Durand spent twenty years in music before any of this. He co-founded a band in Montreal that opened for the Smashing Pumpkins at a sold-out Metropolis, and a decade later he co-wrote a major label record and toured it around the world for two years, on the biggest stages and the biggest television shows there are. Then he built a studio and made records for other people. It was a real career at the top of a hard business, and he remembers it fondly.
The woods, though, were there the whole time. He had already left once, at twenty-eight, for seven years alone in a cabin studio in the Quebec hills, before the road called him back. So when he came north in 2015 for a two day camping trip and found LeTerrain, it was not a break from his life. It was the second time the land had called, and this time he answered for good. He had no experience of living off grid and, in his words, no idea what to do with such a vast and beautiful wilderness, other than to protect it by sharing it.
- 1990–96Co-founded Tinker: two singles and two albums on Bear Records
- 1993Opened for the Smashing Pumpkins at a sold-out Metropolis
- 1997Left it all at twenty-eight for a cabin studio in Val-des-Monts
- 2004–06Co-wrote Auf der Maur's Capitol debut, then two years of touring and TV
- 2006–09Led Moufette with Ariel Engle; toured as Young Galaxy's lead guitarist
- 2009–15Ran a recording studio in Hudson, New York
- 2015Came north for a two day camping trip, and stayed
Learning where everything is
He arrived in 2015 with a house that had been empty since the 1960s and a wilderness he had walked for two days. His first task was not to fix any of it. It was to know the land. He gave himself a year to be able to walk anywhere on it, off trail, with no map, no device and no fear of getting lost.
By the end of that year he had it. He was, in his own words, home on his range, and everything since has been built on top of that one year of walking.
Six peaks. Two rivers and their wetlands. The great Quyon valley, and its headwaters.
Inook, the dog who made that year possible
Inook, part Canadian Eskimo dog, was 100 lbs of wolf-like apex predator with his prey instinct fully intact. Learning a wilderness off trail takes a certain security, and walking it beside him is where that security came from. They became the age-old power team of man and beast in the wild, and the goal of that first year was reached together.
Inook, beloved magic beast, 2011 to 2023. Without him the first years here would not have been survived, and he saved Steve's life more than once. This page carries his name.
The land is open on purpose
He could have kept it shut. Someone who finds a place like this and wants it left alone has one obvious move, which is to let nobody in. Living here is what talked him out of it: land stays protected because enough people care that it does, and nobody has ever come to care about a place they were never allowed to see.
So the trails are cut and kept open, and he walks them with whoever comes. He takes members out to the ancient stone ruins himself, and on a clear night the day ends in the dark sky preserve. In winter he does most of it again, on snowshoes, for fewer people.
There is no team behind him and there never has been. What keeps this place whole is not a fence and not one ranger; it is everyone who comes.
Walk it with Steve
This land stays wild because of the people who walk it. Membership is how you join them, and how you book Steve's guided walks, from CA$20 a month. Cancel any time.
