Beyond the Trees

by Adam Shoalts

  * * *

  The next day, June 2, I put in nine and half hours of upriver travel: a combination of poling, some paddling for variety, and yet another technique meant to overcome the difficulties of upstream navigation. I experimented briefly with walking along the shoreline and dragging the canoe with a rope behind me. This method worked indifferently, and wasn’t as fast as poling proved. I also managed to do a bit more sailing when the wind was favourable. All in all, my progress that second day was better than my first: I made it twenty-five kilometres upriver.

  Partly what gave me the idea of experimenting with these different methods was reading a 228-year-old diary by Alexander Mackenzie, a hardscrabble adventurer and fur trader. In 1789, at the age of twenty-five, he ventured down the river now bearing his name along with some dozen companions—mostly Canadian voyageurs, Dene hunters from lands to the south, and a stray German tossed in for good measure. After reaching the Arctic Ocean, Mackenzie and his companions retraced their route all the way back upriver, returning to their fur trade post on Lake Athabasca. Mackenzie’s diary describes them as fighting their way upriver using various means, with some men hauling their large canoe with ropes along the shore while others remained in the canoe, working to paddle and pole it together. Obviously I couldn’t replicate this combined approach on my own. But I did try out each method individually, and found poling to be the most effective.

  I was hoping to keep improving my pace, but June 3 saw a stiff headwind blow against me. Battling the current and the wind together was doubly difficult, yet I forced myself to keep poling regardless. Ten hours of hard effort saw me advance another twenty-four kilometres. This left my arms and back feeling pretty sore. There could be no thought of resting, though. The next day saw me again equal this distance, with more of the same headwinds that prevented me from raising sail.

  In the course of this fourth day struggling up the mighty Mackenzie, I felt my aspen pole crack after one hard push off the river bottom. This was a bit disconcerting, as scanning the banks I saw no sign of aspens from which to fashion a replacement pole. There were spruces and tamaracks aplenty, but to use a conifer would mean getting my hands coated in sticky resin. The conifers also have a lot of branches along their trunks, not ideal for a fashioning a pole. Still, putting into shore and searching for a suitable aspen would mean a costly delay. Then suddenly help arrived from an unexpected source.

  I could hardly believe my luck when I saw a perfectly sized stick already cut and lying a short distance away on the bank. The teeth marks on either end of it showed plainly that it had been cut by a beaver. It seemed to be of balsam poplar, and likely had come from somewhere far upriver, drifting down with the current until it lodged where I found it. It was just the right length and thickness I needed; the water had already worn it smooth. After mentally thanking the beaver gods I grasped the pole, leapt back into my canoe, and resumed poling with renewed vigour. That beaver-fashioned pole worked even better than my old one, and I was able to establish my best pace yet, making it twenty-eight kilometres upriver that day.

  Over the following week I continued my solitary journey upriver. Most of the time the wind was against me, including a three-day stretch in which I battled ceaseless headwinds that left me unable to use the sail at all. In places I found great mounds of ice still piled up on shore. In one spot where the river curved, the ice formed a continuous wall some twenty feet to thirty feet high, which was slowly melting in the June sun. I was somewhat apprehensive that, poling along these massive blocks of haphazardly stacked ice that formed caverns and caves, they might crumble and collapse onto me as I poled by. The odd block of ice in the river showed clearly where some of the mounds had already collapsed, and the steady drip coming off the ice mounds in the noonday sun suggested that more might collapse at any time. If a block should topple over just as I passed it, I’d be crushed, or at least knocked clean into the river. Neither seemed appealing.

  This massive ice wall, forming towers and turrets, extended along the river’s shore for about half a kilometre, looking in my imagination like some enchanted ice palace. Ideally it’d be safer to stay outside the range of the ice mounds if they were to collapse, but this I couldn’t do. It was too deep for my pole farther offshore. So in the spots where the ice seemed particularly precariously stacked and in danger of toppling over, I just poled past as quickly as I could, passing by before the ice could fall. There’s nothing like falling blocks of ice for maintaining a good travelling pace.

  Other places presented hazards of a different sort along the banks. One morning I came across a young blond grizzly. The bear had its head down as it sauntered along the bank, apparently searching for food, and didn’t notice me. When I saw the bear, I switched from my pole to my paddle, in order to stay a safe distance offshore. Here, the current wasn’t too bad, so I paddled along for a bit. Eventually, the young grizzly noticed me, and after curiously looking at me for a few seconds, abruptly ran off into the woods. It seemed I’d terrified him.

  Three days later, still poling along, I saw near a small stream a mother grizzly with two cubs. To my surprise, contrary to what you might expect a mother grizzly to do, she simply took one look at me and immediately turned around and ran off. Her two bewildered cubs, seemingly caught a bit off guard by their mother’s sudden flight, looked wide-eyed at me a moment longer, then turned around and hurried after their mother. I got the strong impression that the cubs received a stern talking to that evening about how they’d been raised to know better than to linger staring at humans. In fact, as the days went by, it seemed to me that the grizzly’s reputation for aggressiveness was somewhat exaggerated, as I found the grizzlies generally more timid than my experiences with both polar bears and black bears.

  In contrast to the grizzlies, landslides were a more serious concern along the Mackenzie’s high banks. There were many dozens of areas where the banks had collapsed into enormous landslides that buried everything in their path. Some slides were over a hundred metres wide and the height of a three-storey building, with full-grown spruces and aspens knocked over and now sticking out of the mud every which way like pins in a pin cushion. As far as I could ascertain, the slides were triggered by some combination of stream-caused erosion, melting ice, rainfall, and the thawing out of the ground. At night, when selecting my campsites, I had to be extra cautious for any signs of impending landslides. To have an avalanche of mud and rocks slam into my tent and bury me while I was sleeping would really put a damper on things. (Later I learned that CBC News reported that the same summer I was poling along, a landslide on the Mackenzie River obliterated an entire log cabin, which was, fortunately, empty at the time.)

  The landslides, because of the huge quantities of mud they wash into the river, caused other obstacles to upstream travel. When I tried to pole alongside one giant slide, I found that I could no longer push off the river bottom. The pole, rather than striking a hard bottom, simply kept sinking deeper and deeper into the soft, quicksand-like mud, failing to give any purchase for the thrusts required to drive the canoe against the current. Nor could I get out and walk along the shoreline: I’d just sink into the mud if I tried. There seemed no other option but to try paddling. The current, however, was very strong, and the landslide of mud and tumbled spruces extended out into the river, forming a sort of weir that amplified the current’s strength.

  Nevertheless I began paddling, battling the current with each stroke. The mudslide stretched for about a hundred and fifty metres, so if I could just manage to overcome the current for that long, I’d be able to resume poling. But as I edged away from shore to skirt around the slide, it felt like paddling on a treadmill. Then, as I began to tire, the current overwhelmed my efforts and I drifted back to where I started.

  Until now I’d been using a traditional paddle with a straight shaft—the familiar kind of paddle you see most everywhere. Mine had been crafted from ash for a strong shaft and spruce for an extra-light blade. I loved my paddle, as only a c
anoeist can. But now it was time to try something different. Stored in my canoe, as yet unused, was a second paddle. It was shorter than my other one, with a wider, rectangular blade. But the real difference was the shaft: its blade was set at an eight-degree angle. This odd-looking design, developed in the 1960s, is based on the principle that an angled blade will remain vertical in the water longer through each stroke than a traditional paddle. The result is increased power and efficiency. Bent-shaft paddles are now the standard among competitive racing canoeists, although they’re still uncommon among wilderness canoeists. I suspect that’s partly because most canoeists are at heart romantics. Still, I’d thought it prudent to acquire one, and now I’d see if it could make the difference I needed.

  With the bent-shaft paddle I kneeled down in the canoe and threw all my effort into fighting the current. My strokes were quicker and shorter than before—each one pulling through the water with maximum efficiency. I edged around the fallen spruce, paddling furiously as I went. The bent-shaft design was more awkward than my traditional paddle, and not as good for steering. But for sheer power, it had the advantage. My furious strokes propelled me upriver until I was safely past the landslide and able to resume poling.

  * * *

  Five days into my journey upriver on the Mackenzie and I still hadn’t seen another soul—an experience that would be hard to replicate on any other great river of comparable size, whether it’s the Mississippi, Amazon, Nile, Congo, or Yangtze. But then, late in the evening of June 8, I heard the distant sound of an engine coming from somewhere downriver. A small motorboat materialized with two men on board. They were gunning the engine hard, battling their way right up the middle of the river, about half a kilometre offshore. When they spotted my tent they steered in closer and hovered in the current. Over the roar of the engine and the distance between us, one of the men shouted, “Do you have any marijuana?”

  “No!” I shouted back.

  This important inquiry out of the way, we discussed other matters, bellowing back and forth to be heard. They’d come from Inuvik, they told me, a small town about three hundred kilometres downriver, and were on their way to Fort Good Hope, which lay another couple hundred kilometres upriver. It occurred to them the oddness of seeing me camped where I was on the bank so early in the season after the ice breakup. Normally, canoeists wouldn’t arrive this far down the Mackenzie River until much later in the summer. They wanted to know, shouting to be heard over their boat’s engine, how I’d managed to make it so far downriver this early in the year. I explained, shouting back, that I hadn’t come downriver at all.

  “I came upriver,” I shouted.

  This revelation caused some bewilderment, and it was as much as I could do, shouting back and forth, to explain things. When they realized that I’d indeed been travelling against the current, they now seemed to think I must be in some kind of trouble. They offered to help, explaining they had a satellite phone and could call for rescue if I was injured. I explained I was fine, but this only prompted an offer to take me in their motorboat to wherever it was I was going, though they said, my canoe would have to be left behind, as there wasn’t space for it. When I insisted I was perfectly happy, they at last relented.

  “Well,” shouted the man at the engine, “enjoy the Mackenzie! And if you ever make it to Fort Good Hope, come see us and we’ll give you a place to stay and a good meal!”

  With that, they waved goodbye and roared off upriver.

  The only other people I encountered along the Mackenzie during my eleven-day journey up it were in two other motorboats. The first was another small boat, also battling the current upriver, this time carrying three men and a snowmobile. They were too far away to communicate with, as where I spotted them the Mackenzie was over three kilometres wide. The other boat I saw was a much larger one, also in the distance. Scanning through the zoom on my camera, I made out that it was the coast guard ship Eckaloo. On its three-tiered deck were two smaller boats covered in tarps and a crew swarming about. To me in my little red canoe, the giant, noisy coast guard ship, powering up the river with its mighty diesel engines, was an odd sight. As far as I could tell, the Eckaloo was steaming along the river in order to lay out navigational buoys, to open it up for boat traffic, now that the ice had cleared. Without buoys, the Mackenzie’s shifting sandbars and mud flats pose a hazard for boats.

  Meanwhile, my pace continued to improve. On June 6 I’d made it another thirty-two kilometres upriver, mostly by poling aided with a little sailing, and I managed to replicate this success over each of the next few days. As I became more adept at sailing, I experimented with trying to sail and pole together. This unorthodox method turned out to be quite effective when the wind wasn’t too strong. I tottered a few times when gusts hit the sail, but with my beaver-made pole I was always able to stay upright and keep pushing along. The result was better progress upriver than even I’d dared to hope possible—a full thirty-seven kilometres in a single day, which I managed twice. That was accomplished in just ten hours, with three hours of combined sailing and poling and seven hours of only poling.

  My progress might have been better yet had it not been for a costly delay. I’d come upon a long, flat, muddy island, and rather than pole the long way around by sticking with the river’s main channel, I decided, not without some hesitation, to remain close to the eastern bank I’d been following. There was a chance the mud “island” might be only a dead-end bay. My maps indicated that it was an island, but maps aren’t always to be trusted. Shifting channels and fluctuating water levels can make islands disappear and reappear. However, I reasoned that since it was still only the first week of June, given the recent ice melt, high water levels ought to indicate a clear passage. Moreover, the current on the near side of the island wasn’t as strong, and this enticed me to chance following it to avoid the main current on the far side.

  But the farther I went, the thicker the weeds and the shallower the water became until, after twenty minutes of poling, the channel abruptly terminated in a mud flat. It wasn’t a channel after all, but merely a long narrow bay. I’d have to take off my hiking boots and wool socks, roll up my pants, and haul my canoe and gear across the mud flats that separated me from open water. But there was no way to haul over two hundred pounds across the quicksand-like mud flats, which I sank into as soon as I stepped out of the canoe. Instead, I had to carry each load across individually, sinking past my ankles into the cold mud with each step. A trio of curious sandhill cranes silently watched as I struggled across with the different loads.

  The effort of hauling my gear across mud flats caused me to work up a thirst. Attached to my backpack was a small handheld water-filter. It was brand new for this journey, and I’d upgraded to a better model than the type I normally relied on. After all, you don’t want to skimp on water safety. And it was certainly a comfort to have a top-of-the-line model at hand now, especially since the waters of the Mackenzie are exceptionally muddy and silty. I dipped the intake hose into the river and the output hose into my water bottle. Then I began pumping, marvelling at the efficiency of the contraption. Abruptly, the filter clogged. Then water burst out of the seams. I could hardly believe it: inspecting the device, it had ruptured and broken irreparably—apparently a result of how dirty the river was. The irony of this I found amusing, the thought of drinking untreated water for months to come as rather less so.

  Still, there was nothing for it. I could boil my water at night but not during the day, when by necessity I’d be unable to stop (even my breakfasts and lunches were just energy bars that could be eaten on the fly). I took heart in the fact that I’d recently read the results of a new science study that had concluded, somewhat unexpectedly, that most water in backcountry rivers, lakes, and streams was generally safe to drink. On the other hand, I’d also read reports that contradicted this—though I preferred not to think too much of those ones at the time. At any rate, I was now offering myself up as a guinea pig to see what would happen from months of
drinking untreated water across the Canadian North. If I were to get sick with giardia (a type of microscopic parasite found, among other places, in wild animal feces), my journey would end rather badly from a personal perspective, though perhaps well for medical science.

  At the moment, though, my concern was in finding somewhere to make camp. Considerable stretches of the river were lacking in camping places, due to canyon walls, steep banks, mudslides, heaps of driftwood, and piles of melting ice. When travelling downriver, it can be easy to take for granted finding a suitable site to camp, as if nothing looks promising, one can always drift along with the current until something better shows up. Not so though when dealing with upriver travel, when at the end of a long, wearisome day of battling the current, one has to take whatever one can get. June 10 was such a day for me. For a long while I’d been passing high muddy banks that came right down near the water’s edge, not leaving space enough to pitch my tent amid the driftwood. So when I finally happened upon a clear spot that looked level enough to camp, set back some way from the river edge on a partially sloping bank, I took it.

  However, upon closer inspection, the spot wasn’t as level as it’d appeared from the water, and there were wild rose bushes with thorns that weren’t very comfortable for sleeping on. But scanning ahead upriver I couldn’t see any more promising site, and there were huge quantities of spruce logs currently drifting downriver, which, presenting the obstacles that they did, made me indifferent to the idea of pushing on. So far the Mackenzie had kindly given me charming campsites on soft sand beaches, spoiling me with their ease of access. Now it looked like I’d have to haul my gear and climb the high bluffs to find a site in the woods above. If it’d been only a matter of sleeping on a slope and some thorns, I might have tolerated it for one night, but I’d also noted that the banks here looked partially susceptible to a landslide. Such slides were very common, as I’d passed many during the day. I carefully inspected the soil—it seemed fairly hard-packed and dry, and there hadn’t been any rain lately—but still, for peace of mind, I decided not to chance it. So, after securing my canoe and barrels on shore, I took my backpack and climbed up the high, steep banks to the forest above. It was thickly grown with dead black spruces, their ghostly, claw-like branches reaching out every which way, as well as aspen, poplar, and even a few dwarf birches. Amid them I spotted a patch of sphagnum moss that was just big enough for my tent.