by Adam Shoalts
The winds had grown fiercer yet, to the point where, even with my canoe reloaded, paddling became impossible. Still, I couldn’t afford to stop, knowing as I did that summer was over, and that fall had come to the tundra. So I beached the canoe, put away my paddle, and grabbed the bow rope. With my waders on I continued on foot, splashing along in the shallows and dragging the canoe behind me. The winds were cold, and by now I was wearing my wool toque, gloves, and had the collar of my jacket flipped up to protect my face from the blowing sands.
Staggering on like this was slow progress, but advancing even a few kilometres an hour was better than nothing. Yet the weather continued to deteriorate. The winds were so loud I couldn’t hear myself think. On shore was a small patch of green willows. Farther ahead I could see nothing but miles of sandy desert, which didn’t seem an encouraging place to camp in high winds. So I took advantage of this last patch of soil to halt early for the night.
I staked my tent down in the securest place I could find, which on the tundra really wasn’t all that secure. I’d had storms blow down my tents before, but this one, once it was staked down and secured with guy lines, was marvellously strong. The wind shook it violently but it held steady. Even boiling water on the camp stove was difficult; I had to use my canoe and barrels to shelter it from the winds. After a bit of tea and a freeze-dried dinner, I hunkered down in my tent for a stormy night.
* * *
In the early morning I woke to lashing rain and screaming gales shaking my tent. It didn’t seem like very good canoeing weather. So I slept in a bit, as I didn’t want to take down the tent in such a downpour, since doing so would mean getting the inside wet. And the wind was too extreme for paddling. Hours passed with no letup in the rain and wind, and I noticed with some disappointment that water was beginning to pool inside my tent in a corner. This was from the sheer force of the wind, which was pressing down the outer rain fly, buckling the tent poles and forcing the drenched fly to press against the tent itself, causing rain to soak through and drip in. The tent, on the whole, was admirably well designed—rain alone couldn’t get in, nor could the winds knock it down—but the combination of continuous heavy rain and fierce winds is something no tent can withstand indefinitely.
But fortunately, I’d spent my teenage years camping and tramping across wilderness with a twenty-dollar Canadian Tire tent, so I’d become somewhat accustomed to putting up with a little water inside a tent, and always made light of it. Some of my fondest memories were of my friend Wes and I stranded on miserable islands on far-flung lakes, enduring terrible thunderstorms in that ragged, threadbare little tent. When I reached my twenties I went through a phase in which I didn’t bother with tents anymore, preferring to sleep in the open or in shelters I’d fix up on the spot (it’s a phase I imagine everyone goes through at some point). This, too, I associated with all sorts of fond memories of adventures far and wide. Eventually, I don’t know if I went a little soft, but I invested in higher-quality tents and rode out countless storms in them.
So, on the whole, I judged my tent’s performance excellent and didn’t too much mind the bit of water that had pooled inside it. I was still warm and dry, and my sleeping bag was dry too, which was the main thing to be concerned about. I also had an emergency blanket that I kept specifically for spreading out inside my tent if the water became problematic.
By mid-morning the rain had slackened enough that I decided to make a dash for it—breaking camp, getting the tent rolled up and secured, and my canoe packed. The wind was still too fierce for paddling, so I took the bow rope in hand and waded ahead, towing the canoe behind me. The desolate sand flats continued for miles.
Wading was painfully slow, not only because of the fierce winds, but because I sank into the soft sand with every step. In one place, because of steadily deepening water that I couldn’t wade through, I had no choice but to paddle across in the high winds to the river’s opposite side. This allowed me to continue wading and towing the canoe. The landscape was dominated by immense ridges made of fine white sand, dunes, and vast windswept desert plains. In places, distant mountains loomed on the horizon. When I made it through the last of the sand barrens I found I could paddle again with hard effort, as some hills helped partially shelter the river from the winds.
It was necessary to run a couple of rapids, which in calm weather would have been a simple matter, but in the high winds required considerably more determined paddling to avoid slamming into protruding rocks. Not far beyond these I came to a small canyon with a roaring waterfall that halted my progress. Here the river squeezed between narrow jagged rocks, crashing loudly over a three-metre, or ten-foot, fall into a pool, then on to smaller cascades over boulders below.
A short portage of a few hundred metres enabled me to safely bypass the falls and cascades, and also gave me time to snack on blueberries. In high winds, one thing I always made sure to do, before setting off with my various loads, was to secure the canoe well onshore. If a wind gust caught it, the canoe might easily flip over and tumble into the river, getting swept over the falls and destroyed. The portage was fairly easy, aside from carrying the canoe over my head in the wind. The gusts made me stagger back and forth with it, but the ground was mostly free of obstacles and I completed it in good time. Just a short distance ahead, however, I knew was a much longer and more difficult canyon.
Less than a kilometre of paddling and wading across a wide pool, with sandy beaches and a few clumps of stunted black spruce tucked in valleys out of the winds, brought me to the start of another jagged canyon. I had to approach it cautiously, as the current was strong immediately above it, but I wanted to get as close as I safely could before beginning what promised to be a long and arduous portage to bypass it.
Where I landed the canoe the entire river was funnelling into a narrow chasm cut through sharp, jagged rocks that looked like something from another planet. The whole scene seemed frightfully apocalyptic. A waterfall marked the start of the chasm, which continued beneath the narrow canyon walls for several hundred metres until it disappeared around an S-bend. I knew from my maps that the canyon was nearly three kilometres long, punctuated with numerous violent rapids, waterfalls, and more S-bends. To portage around it, I figured I could cut diagonally across some of the river’s snaking course, but that would still necessitate a more than two-kilometre portage over rough terrain. And with my four loads, the total distance I’d have to cover would come out to about sixteen kilometres. Such a long portage would have to be broken into stages, and I suspected I’d have to break it up over a day.
I strapped on my backpack, setting off on the first leg. My trek began with some scrambling over rocks and boulders before reaching more hospitable ground that had enough soil for dwarf birch and berries to grow; this level tundra then led me to a steep, rugged range of green hills. I climbed up the first slope, picking my way carefully in the wind. When I reached the rocky summit I had a better view of the snaking course of the nearby canyon.
It had an utterly wild aspect about it—like something primordial, from the very dawn of the earth. Seething, violent rapids raged beneath its jagged walls that twisted through repeated S-bends. Inside the shadows of the upper canyon, amid the swirling, surging dark waters, rose a towering pillar of ancient rock.
I continued my trek down the hill and along the rim of the canyon, hiking as near to the edge as I dared. It was amazingly narrow, just a deep chasm cut into the earth; whitewater frothed and roared some thirty metres below where I stood. When I became worn out with trekking, I rested to drink water and snack on the last of the fading cloudberries along with some blueberries, crowberries, and lingonberries. The skies had stayed dark; rain fell intermittently. I hiked on through willows, up and down ridges, cutting away from the snaking course of the canyon on a diagonal at times to shorten the total distance.
When I reached a flat plain with short grasses, opposite the canyon’s third S-bend—this one concealing a large roaring waterfall tossing mist hig
h up in the air—I set down my backpack. That was far enough for one stage of this long portage. It would take the remainder of the day just to transport the two barrels and the canoe to this spot—although that last was doubtful. It seemed that once more my friend and I might have to spend the night apart.
I managed to get my two barrels across, trekking back and forth four more times after my initial trip with the backpack. My first trip had purposefully been more meandering, as my curiosity about the canyon had led me along it rather than veering off on a more direct route.
I set up my tent on the tundra, made another quick dinner, and then dove inside just before more rain fell. On cold, stormy nights, my tent seemed more homelike than ever. Feeling a little sore and weary from the repeated portaging of the day, I stretched out comfortably in my sleeping bag and drifted off listening to the hypnotic-sounding roar of the distant waterfalls.
* * *
In the rain the next morning I carried my canoe over the high rocky hills and across the plains to my camp. Up in the high country, it was a struggle to hold it tight and maintain my balance in the gusting wind. It made me think of a passage in the explorer John Franklin’s journal in which he described one of his Canadian voyageurs portaging their canoe on the tundra only to lose his balance in a wind gust, smashing the canoe off rocks as he fell. Things hadn’t ended very well for any of them after that.
Fortunately, my portage went better. Once I reached my camp I set the canoe down, taking up my backpack in its place to scout out the rest of the way forward. It proved another meandering kilometre of travel: across a mix of level tundra, over high, windswept ridges, then down up to my knees in swampy lowlands and alder thickets over my head. This was followed by sandy plains and dunes, then finally another stretch of rock-strewn tundra to a steep eroded bank where I could resume paddling. When I’d finished transporting all my loads across this kaleidoscope of landscapes, I was underway paddling again.
But this lasted only a few minutes before I came to another wild, dangerous canyon that couldn’t be navigated. To make the arduous portage as short as possible, I paddled as close to the start of the turbulent water as I dared, snaking between great boulder slabs and cliffs. When it felt unsafe to go any farther by water, I climbed onto the rocky cliffs and, holding on to the bow rope, escorted my canoe along in the swift current below. Just before the start of the violent cascading rapids, I pulled into a little cove.
But portaging up and out of the cove proved an exhausting struggle. This sheltered valley hid a small grove of black spruce, alders, and willows, which required some difficult climbing up steep slopes to get through. The canoe I had to haul up from the bow, heaving and pulling to get it up the slope through the thicket. The terrain was thick with spruces and willows; strangely, the wind died just at this moment, allowing bugs to magically rematerialize and attack my face.
I ended this difficult portage by descending another steep slope to a rocky beach. There was still a half-kilometre more of boulder-strewn rapids I hadn’t bypassed, but with the wind down they didn’t pose too much trouble. So I reloaded the canoe and carefully paddled my way through the rapids, passing huge boulders of red sandstone as I went.
It wasn’t long before I reached yet another canyon—this one concealed a considerable plunging waterfall of some forty feet, and demanded yet another strenuous portage. It was late and rainy, so I decided to save this portage for the morning. I figured I’d used up my portage quota for the day.
When morning arrived I was up early—hauling my canoe and three other loads around this last canyon, passing a plunging waterfall tossing spray into the air. Nesting peregrine falcons along the canyon flew up to yap at me with their shrill calls, telling me to be on my way. I told them I was moving as fast as I could.
The portage was a long one, about two kilometres (or fourteen kilometres total with all the trips). The problem was that after bypassing the falls I couldn’t get back down into the canyon easily. The water below was tranquil, but steep rock cliffs meant there was no easy way down to it.
Eventually I came to a less steep gravel slope; although still precipitous, it seemed safe enough. The trickiest load was the canoe, which I had to balance over my head. Angling sideways, I picked my way carefully among the loose stones and gravel, descending the slope to great slabs of rock that jutted into the river.
Here I happened upon an unexpected sight—a pile of abandoned gear. It included three large backpacks crammed full, a plastic canoe barrel, some old, rusted empty fuel cans, and a bag of garbage. From what I could tell, the stuff looked as though it had been sitting there for years. Had someone simply littered in a place like this?
The story the gear told seemed clear: a party of canoeists coming downriver apparently hadn’t been prepared for just how lengthy and gruelling the many portages around the river’s canyons were, and dumped their gear here to lighten their loads. If this conjecture was true, it was ironic: this was the Hanbury River’s final canyon, meaning they’d needlessly littered (and tossed away valuable gear) to no purpose.
The only alternative that seemed possible was that something had gone badly wrong, and the party had needed an emergency evacuation, abandoning their gear in haste. Given the dangerous falls upriver, it didn’t require too much imagination to guess what that might have involved, or else the steep cliffs were perfect for breaking an ankle on. Still other possibilities could have been a different sort of medical emergency, like an allergic reaction to a bee sting. One of the worst accidents I’d heard of involved a party of canoeists on the Coppermine River that had left their propane-butane fuel canisters too close to a campfire. The resulting explosion had caused severe injuries that required an emergency airlift.
An acquaintance of mine, an air force pilot, once told me about the search-and-rescue missions that are part of his job in the Arctic. I was surprised when he told me that the majority didn’t involve canoe expeditions at all, but rather locals from the scattered little towns, who, out for a day trip hunting or fishing by snowmobile or motorboat, became lost or stranded. It’s a reminder of how easy it is for anyone to get lost or turned around in such a vast landscape.
In any case, I concluded that my first theory was the most likely one and that this abandoned assortment of a barrel, backpacks, and fuel cans was simply from litterbugs. (There were no canoes or paddles left behind, and the pile looked deliberately left at the end of a portage rather than hastily ditched.) As such, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of annoyance at whomever had littered in a place like this. I try to tread as lightly as I can: even that unwieldy and ineffective cart I lugged for miles so I could put it on the floatplane rather than abandon it somewhere, and my barrels included my sealed-up wrappers.
My canoe reloaded, I set off downriver, passing cliffs, sand bars, and eroded rock pillars rising along the banks like castle turrets. Paddling the remainder of the river was easily done, with only a few smaller swifts to get through. I pushed on, taking advantage of the calm conditions, until I came to an impressive sight: the Hanbury River’s confluence with a much larger waterway, the last of my journey—the storied Thelon.
× 19 ×
DOWN THE THELON
The Thelon River, at about nine hundred kilometres long, is one of the largest rivers draining into Hudson Bay. Where I entered it the Thelon was over a half-kilometre wide, with impressive white sandstone cliffs on its far shore. It was the biggest river I’d seen since the Mackenzie. I paddled for some thirty kilometres down it, before making camp for the night on its western bank. Just beyond the river were high hills and ridges, which gave it a closed-in feel, as though it was somehow its own little world in the midst of thousands of kilometres of northern wilderness.
I slept soundly, more so than usual, except that I dreamed I’d fallen into some water.
Sometime later I awoke to water pooling on my head. My lifejacket was soaked; my hair was wet; the sides of the tent were drenched. But I heard no rain. Had the river risen in
the night? I sat up and unzipped the tent door to see what was going on.
What I saw was nothing at all—an impenetrably thick mist had smothered everything. It was the thickest mist I’d ever seen, so thick as to seem less a mist than an actual raincloud that had fallen to the earth. The mist had drenched my tent until, heavy with the weight of water, it began dripping from the ceiling and soaking my head.
Breaking camp proved a little more difficult than normal, as I couldn’t see more than a few feet in any direction. I’d camped inland from the riverbank, and had to carefully wander down through the mist with each of my loads to the water’s edge.
When I pushed off into the water, my only option was to hug the shoreline, as with the mist I couldn’t see anything. It felt a bit eerie, alone in the wild, paddling a canoe inside what felt like a cloud, unable to see the sky, across the river, or ahead or behind. At least there wasn’t any wind.
Eventually the mist cleared, or actually, it didn’t—I simply passed beyond it, as once I’d come out of the cloud, I could look back along the river and see the edge of the mist from which I’d emerged. It was an odd feeling, as if a magician had cast some spell on that part of the river, shrouding it in thick mist that abruptly ended at an exact point.
Now that I was in the open, immediately beyond the mist, I realized that it was actually a sunny day with glorious blue skies. With the fair weather, my progress was rapid. I paddled steadily downriver, passing two bull moose standing together—which was unusual, as normally moose are solitary animals. I also met with a handsome caribou swimming across the river, and another on the bank with glossy, velvet-like fur and impressive antlers. There were still large numbers of waterfowl: mergansers, Canada geese, tundra swans, and, most common of all, white snow geese. But in a few weeks they’d all be heading south.