Author: Mike Reiseberg (Page 4 of 6)

The delicate thread holding our group together had stretched to the breaking point. Doug ate lunch very quickly and then wandered up the beach to Byron and me and announced, “I’ll be on the right side of the river somewhere.” We finished our usual long lunch break and caught up to him at the Donnelly River. We had been paddling for ten hours, and although we had covered only 32 miles, I thought it time to call it a day. When Byron pulled up, Doug asked, “How much farther are we going to go today?”

“Looks like a good spot to camp just down the river a bit,” I suggested slowly.

Anger clouded Doug’s face as he exclaimed, “I don’t know what’s gotten into you guys. I think we ought to go to Snafu Creek. Good grief, we’ve got a good current; it’ll take us only a couple of hours.” He stormed to his canoe, pushed into the current and said, “I will be drifting until you catch up.” And over his shoulder he yelled sarcastically, “I hope I don’t drift too far.”

Byron and I watched him go, and I said,” We’ve got a real problem here.”

Byron replied, “Yeah, I guess we do, but I don’t think it’s got that much to do with the pace. Doug’s not enjoying himself, and he just wants to get off this river as soon as he can.”

“Do you think he might quit?” I asked.

“No, he’s too proud to quit. He’ll probably keep going even if he hated the entire trip.”

I asked, “Well, how do you feel about the situation? Do you want to speed up?”

He thought a minute and then said, “I’ve got three priorities: first to enjoy the trip, second to get along with the group, and third, to reach the Bering Sea. I’ve been having a good time until now, and I don’t want to rush along.” I agreed that I didn’t want to rush, and his priorities were similar to my own.

We caught Doug and suggested a camping spot about a mile away. Doug seemed to agree so we set up camp, but Doug just stood around while we lit a fire and unloaded our boats. He kept looking as if he was about to say something but didn’t know how. Byron finally told him, “Well, old boy, spit it out.”

Doug then said, “I think it would be better if I went on alone for a while. You guys want to go too slow and…“

Byron rather abruptly interrupted, “Look I want to enjoy the trip, get along with everybody, and get to the Bering Sea, in that order.”

Doug angrily answered, “Well, it’s not my right to insist that we should be making fifty miles a day when you don’t want to, but it’s another thing to not reach the Bering Sea because we’ve been fooling around. You guys have gotten too damn lazy. I’ve got too much energy to stick around anymore.” He threw the tent poles in my canoe saying, “Here’s your damn tent poles. I’ll meet you in the East Channel somewhere near Inuvik.”

“Take care,” Byron admonished, and Doug was gone, a lone canoe on the wide river.

I had been sitting on my heels and remained silent while the scene unfolded, afraid to say anything for fear of saying something wrong. I was reasonably sure that the real problem had little to do with the pace but that it was just like Byron said; he had not been enjoying himself and just wanted to get off the river as fast as he could.

It seemed strange to sleep in the tent with only one other occupant and to wake in the morning and see only two canoes on the beach, only two pots on the fire, and only two paddlers to venture into the river in the rain.

The river roared along, nearly 2 1/2 miles wide, through what is marked on some maps as the Spruce Island Rapids. The river appeared to reach a dead end, with cliffs rimming the river on all sides. As my canoe swept along irresistibly with the powerful current, a narrow gap in the cliffs scarcely a fourth of a mile wide opened, and through that gap the river swept with all its power into a narrow canyon known as the Ramparts. Here the massive limestone cliffs rose 200 feet above the river shutting out the rest of the world. Dark shadows chased streaks of brilliant sunshine dancing on the river with only sky, river, rock, and two lonely canoers swept along in the current.

When we stopped for lunch and to dry out, I walked up a gully to the top of the cliffs overlooking the river. Beauty surrounded me. Everything was endowed with a special portion of whatever it is that makes us say, “Wow, look at that!” Flowers, covered with raindrops, brushed lovingly against my feet and filled the air with their lovely scents. Along the tops of the cliffs deep, soft, and very wet moss covered the ground. A few trees hunched on the edge of the cliffs, beaten by the wind and yet still standing, proud to be trees. I wanted to call out to Doug from the cliff tops, “It’s a beautiful world. Slow down and enjoy it.”

The gorge gradually became a wind tunnel with waves piling like huge monsters in the middle of the river. We stayed close to shore, out of the biggest waves but also out of the strongest current, slowing our progress. The cliffs came right down to the water’s edge forcing us to be cautious because, with no place to get to shore, a capsize would be very dangerous.

Before long we realized we were getting almost nowhere and the wind was increasing, so we stopped at the first possible campsite and planned for an early start. In order to make it easier to get up, we made up our own time which we called Stanley Standard Time. Byron set his watch ahead four hours, and we planned to get up at our usual time of about eight o’clock, in reality four 0’ clock.

Doug’s departure forced me to take a good hard look at my motives and priorities. Why does anyone go on a long wilderness trip like this? I’ve been asked that many times. For a long time I gave a stock answer, “If you have to ask that question, you won’t understand the answer.” To some extent that is true, but it doesn’t begin to answer the question. The beauty of the wilderness is certainly part of the answer as is the feeling of doing something that few people can or will do. Being self-sufficient, doing your own thing, meeting a big challenge, being in great physical shape, getting away from the clutter and rush of everyday life, simplifying life—these are all reasons given by people who travel in the wilderness. One reason not often given but to me one of the most important is the sensation of timelessness that a long journey creates. We all long for timelessness in one form or another; we all wish for immortality. In a long journey time stands still to some extent. At the beginning the end seems so far away, an eternity away. It’s impossible to conceive of an end. Of course toward the end of the trip the timeless feeling disappears. Someday, perhaps, I will embark on a journey with no end and experience true timelessness, eternity.

Our idea of setting our own time zone seemed to work the first day. Twenty-five miles went by before lunch, and we joked about being obsessed with making miles. We crossed the Arctic Circle in the early afternoon and were welcomed by a blinding hailstorm. After an easy forty miles, we stopped to camp by the Tieda River.

Byron quickly caught two northern pike, and I boiled one and added the meat to a casserole base calling for salmon or tuna. Delicious! A disadvantage of starting early was going to bed with the sun high in the sky making the tent feel like a furnace because we had foolishly pitched it in the sun. We took a dip in the cold river and then the warm tent felt very comfortable, but it was still hard to sleep. A four-hour time change can’t be adjusted to immediately.

I awoke later to the sound of sheets of rain driving against a wet and sagging tent leaking in several spots. I got up and restaked the tent so the tent fly faced away from the walls of the tent and then burrowed back into my sleeping bag to wait out the rain. From the look of the clouds I expected another all-day drencher. But weather changes rapidly in the Arctic, the clouds blew away, the rain stopped, and we happily greeted the day. Byron had been smart and brought a piece of birch bark into the tent so we had no trouble starting a fire even with wet wood.

Late in the afternoon Byron spotted Doug’s camp on the opposite side of the river. We stopped, climbed the bank, and waved at him but didn’t see any reaction. Byron said, “He’s probably asleep. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s on a night paddling schedule.”

“I figured that he would go on a 24 hour spree to get past the Arctic Circle, but I guess he didn’t if this is as far as he’s gotten,” I remarked.

Byron surmised, “Well, you know Doug. He’s probably having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings. I figure he will be back in a day or two.”

That prophecy turned out to be right as the next day I spotted what looked like Doug’s canoe on the shore. I thought, “Surely that can’t be him. He must have gone farther than this.” | approached carefully, wondering if he was still upset with us. “Anybody home?” I asked. No answer, so I peeked inside his tarp shelter and saw a fire burning and equipment left all over the beach. Byron came up and I asked, “Do you think he saw us coming and left?”

“No, I doubt it. Shall we wait for him or shall we just leave a note?” Just then Doug sauntered back with binoculars in his hand.

“Just out checking on the birds around here. Saw a big eagle just up on the ridge.” Then the problem at hand came back and he said, “I must say I’m glad to see you guys. I’ve had a lot of time to think the last few days, you know, and I don’t know, maybe this isn’t the kind of trip to do solo.”

“Look,” Byron said, “we’ll be eating lunch a couple hours down the river. Why don’t you pack up and meet us there?”

Doug caught up to us shortly after we stopped, walked to the fire, and asked somewhat timidly, “Do you guys mind if I rejoin you or do you want me to go on a little longer by myself?”

“No, we missed you,” assured Byron.

I fumbled around for the right words to say, hesitated twice, and then said, “Welcome back.”

Although we were glad to have the group together again, tensions lingered around the campfire that night. None of us knew exactly what to say. We wondered a bit about the rest of the trip. It might take some sort of challenge or disaster to bring us fully back together.

Now over 2100 miles into the trip, we couldn’t see either end. Jasper? It seemed like a place we had left years ago. And the Bering Sea? It didn’t seem possible to ever get there. I loved the rivers and felt I could go on forever. A mystique surrounds this kind of experience. It’s a magic blend of making miles and camping, of becoming saturated with beauty and facing untold hardships, of sublime moments of rapture and moments of deep depression. We had just faced a serious problem, and now it was time to go on the rest of the journey together.

I relaxed next morning while Doug and Byron climbed Roche qui Tempre L’eau and later pushed my canoe into the strong current. I had told Doug and Byron I would meet them at the Ochre River which, we had read, turned bright red in the early summer, but it was crystal clear when I arrived. I improved my time by doing some fishing and had a big northern pike when they showed up. With the strong current through the mountains, we took less than three hours to go twenty miles.

I had been amusing myself by writing a parody of Robert Service’s poem, “The Man Who Won’t Fit In.” Service is my favorite poet, but I didn’t like some of his lines. This is my version.

The Man Who Wouldn’t Fit In
There is a race of men who won’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still,
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.
They range the field and they rover the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest,
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.
Now they don’t go straight, they just go far,
They are strong and brave and true,
But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new. They say,
“When I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I will score.”
So they chop and change and each fresh move
Is always a search for more.
And each forgets as he strips and runs,
With brilliant and fitful pace,
That it’s the steady quiet plodding ones,
Who win in the human rat race.
And each forgets as the days pass by,
Forgets the ways of the past,
Till he stands one day with a hope that’s high,
In the light of the truth at last.
He has tried, he has conquered, he has taken the chance,
He has always done his best,
Life’s been a marvelous tie for him,
And now he has passed the test,
And yes, he is one of the few,
He was always meant to win,
He’s a rolling stone and it’s bred in his bone,
He’s a man who won’t fit in.

June 21, the longest day of the year, and we were still about 275 miles south of the Arctic Circle, which we had hoped to cross in time to see the midnight sun, but the ice on Great Slave Lake had slowed us down.

Late in the afternoon we decided to lash the three canoes together and drift in the fast current until sundown. Since we had two decked canoes and one open canoe sitting at various heights above the water, we chose to put two birch poles under the canoes. We lashed each canoe securely to the poles, reloaded our gear, and pushed off. This stable craft allowed us to stand and move around, but having the poles underneath made the raft very hard to paddle. We drifted on through rain and wind, pin-wheeling slowly in the current. Every couple of hours we had to man the paddles to move the raft away from the shore.

I put three of my packs in the back of the canoe, unrolled my foam pad on the floor, put the spray cover on, and lay down with only my head sticking out. Byron said, “You look like a canoe with a hat.” Even though I was under the spray cover and out of the wind, I felt very cold by the time we stopped on a gravel bar and lit a fire.

Doug and Byron seemed in an uncommon hurry next morning, but I caught them at a creek where they were fishing with no success. We parted company agreeing they would stop at the Little Birch River about twenty miles farther. They didn’t stop, and as I turned to leave, I surprised a beaver on a high bank. He was so startled he whirled around, stumbled, and fell about six feet down the bank landing with a great splash.

I had a hunch Doug and Byron would stop on an island a couple of miles away mostly across the river, but the wind did its best to see that I didn’t get there before the current swept me past. Their canoes with light blue tops and bottoms were very hard to spot, and I was almost there before seeing them pulled up on the exposed gravel bar on the tip of the island. The wind blew so hard we used nylon cord to tie the tent, a four-man dome that stood up pretty well. Late in the night sheets of water lashed at the tent, hard gusts of wind threatened to blow us off the island, but we hunkered in the tent, snug and dry, and didn’t consider leaving our shelter until the rain stopped late in the afternoon.

By that time we were bordering on starvation. Nobody had been brave enough to venture out in the storm. The wind continued to howl and rain discouraged us from going anywhere. Waves marched up the river, continuously waving row after row of whitecaps leaving us no choice but to sit tight and wait. Byron dug out a needle and attempted to patch the badly torn knees on his Army surplus pants while Doug read a book. I dutifully recorded the day’s activities in my journal with one word, “Stormbound.”

Next morning in spite of a windy drizzle I was ready to move on, but when we put our canoes in the water, the powerful wind and soaking rain returned. We plowed off anyway into what looked like a hurricane. The wind drove rain into our faces, and even with my hat pulled low over my eyes, my glasses were soon so spattered with rain that I could hardly see. We paddled hard for over two hours before the wind overpowered us, and we stopped only five miles downstream, built a fire, and hunkered down.

As soon as the white crest disappeared from the waves, we pushed on, almost into a disaster. Where the river went around a point, the current and wind combined to pile up waves four feet high. I headed for shore but not soon enough. The bow of my canoe plowed into the first wave and rose up through it. Water showered everywhere as I crashed through the waves. The spray cover kept out most of the water as it washed over my canoe, and I made it to shore to bail out. But we didn’t learn our lesson and returned to the river.

About three miles upstream of Fort Norman sit the famed Smoking Hills noted by Alexander Mackenzie in 1789. But the heavy rains of the last two days must have dampened the permanently burning coal seam because when we went by only a few wisps of steam or smoke were visible.

Passing Fort Norman and the Great Bear River, we camped beneath Bear Rock, a striking tower of limestone rearing 1500 feet above the river. Jutting from the river below Bear Rock is an enormous petrified spruce trunk explained by the following legend:

Many years ago a giant who had suffered through a winter of severe cold and hunger on Great Bear Lake went to the source of the Great Bear River looking for food. Spotting three beaver he followed them downriver and killed them. He got the last at the river’s outlet, throwing his spear with such force that he could not pull it out and it remains there to this day. The giant then skinned his beaver, made a great fire, and roasted them. They were so fat that when the grease dripped into the ground and caught fire, it never stopped burning. After his meal, the giant went to Bear Rock where he stretched the skins which explains the three distinct red patches on Bear Rock.

I climbed the steep slopes of Bear Rock and was rewarded with a magnificent view of the clear waters of the Great Bear River still flowing unmingled with the muddy Mackenzie. Across the river a big island swam in the river with several sandbars huddled around it like ducklings around their mother. Rimming the horizon, snowy mountains rose majestically from the valley.

Frustrated by having our speed cut in half by the strong wind, we all felt a little angry and discouraged. We needed a party to liven up the evening, and that’s what we had. A whole boatload of Indians stopped with a couple cases of beer, and we had a little beach party on the shores of the wild Mackenzie. A couple of them were hungry so they ate the rest of the fish we had cooked for supper. One of them commented in a straightforward manner, “This fish is way overcooked.”

“Where do you folks live?” asked Doug

Charlie, who did most of the talking, answered, “We live in oe Norman. Just went up to Wells to visit some friends.”

“What do you do for a living?” continued Doug.

“Well, we mostly just sit around and drink beer. Not much happens in Fort Norman, you know.” He didn’t seem in a hurry to get home even though it was late. With virtually 24 hours of daylight, there is very little pressure to get back before dark.

When Byron pulled his canoe farther on shore to tie it for the night, its rudder broke because the soft aluminum hinge couldn’t take the strain. Using considerable ingenuity, he cut a strip about four inches wide from his wet suit and used it for a hinge. He used wood screws to fasten the rubber wet suit material to the rubber and then taped it to the hull. Sawyer Canoe had promised to send new rudders to Inuvik, and Byron hoped his makeshift repairs would last till then. Doug’s canoe also had an ailing rudder, which had fallen off back on Great Slave Lake when a rivet had broken. Bailing wire now held it together.

Morning came blue and calm, and the river flowed smoothly north. With such a great contrast to yesterday’s rough water, I couldn’t wait to cruise down the mirror-like surface, but the calm lasted about 45 minutes before the wind came up again. We stopped to buy some salt at Norman Wells, the site of the only oil refinery in the Northwest Territories. Alexander Mackenzie noticed the oil seeps in the area in 1789, but not until 1919 did Imperial Oil drill its first well. If the projected pipeline is built, rapid development of the area is almost certain.

The price of salt astounded us as usual. Prices in the little northern communities are always high and are reflected most in heavy items like salt. After lunch the increased wind made progress slow and disheartening, and in three hours we covered only five miles. I pulled to shore and shouted, “To hell with it.” Doug and Byron came paddling up, discouragement written on their faces, and Byron remarked, “This is what it’s all about, isn’t it? We are really suffering.”

“Yep, we deserve it. We worked hard to be out here in the pouring rain watching the whitecaps on the river,” added Doug.

Although we had been working hard, the weather had been holding us back and even stopping us. We had been expecting to travel fifty miles a day easily on the Mackenzie, and so far our longest day had been only 48 miles. This progress kept us on schedule but just barely.

Doug still wanted to push on rapidly as he had the notion we would see the midnight sun if we reached the Arctic Circle by July 1. Any attempt to dissuade him elicited a very angry reception. He suggested, “Why don’t we start paddling at night?”

“I don’t think it would work, “replied Byron. “We’d be paddling at weird times and get all messed up. Besides, a lot of the nights have been windy.”

“Well, I don’t object to traveling at night, but I’d just as soon maintain some sort of schedule,” I said. This seemingly insignificant disagreement mounted ever bigger as time passed, but now the storm had passed over, and we thought about going a little farther. Although it was late in the evening, I didn’t want to object since Doug obviously wanted to go on. Byron settled the matter by saying, “I think tonight is for sleeping; we can paddle tomorrow.”

The next morning was calm, and we paddled steadily, never once stopping to look at anything. When we finally did stop, Doug wanted to keep moving even though we had come forty miles. We ate supper huddled around a sputtering fire in the cold misty wind, the air charged with tension, and a real rift threatened over Doug’s displeasure with the pace.

When I started to question my motives and goals, a gentle peace enveloped my mind like the fog on the river, and I thought of a passage I had written in my journal just the other night.

“When all is said and done, what do we have of worth to spend but time? A thing costs precisely the amount of time we must put into it. Now, we can either exchange our time for money through a treacherous institution known as a job and use the money to buy things that will make us happy, or we can spend our time directly with no exchange doing things that make us happy. This is how I regard the time spent canoeing. I wish to learn of happiness, to experience deeply the peace of the wilderness, to become part of that peace. J want to revel in the joyfulness of the cascading stream and to drink fully of that joyful water. I want to watch the dignity and grandeur of the mountains and improve my soul by traveling through them. Yes, my time is being well spent. I have invested many an hour in this journey, and so far they have all been worth it.”

A headwind next morning grew stronger as the morning went on, but my attitude surprised me. They seemed more a challenge than a hardship. I rose above them just as my little canoe rose over the mountainous waves. As I plowed along through the waves that threatened to stop us, and as the rain beat steadily on my felt hat and dripped off the brim, I tried to accept the wind and rain as part of an experience to be enjoyed. I laughed at the rain and admired the waterfalls cascading from little canyons still filled with ice and falling over the sheer cliffs into the river.

We stopped about two miles above the San Sault Rapids, the most dangerous place on the entire Mackenzie. We climbed the bank to a memorial for a man who had died in the rapids and read the inscription:

Hugh Lockhart Donald, born August 21, 1940, who made his last camp near this site. He was drowned in the San Sault Rapids August 10, 1961. This memorial is a grateful tribute for help given at that time by the people of the area with the hope that it may give shelter to those who travel the Mackenzie River.

Inside the monument were a Bible, a pencil and a notebook. I opened the book to see a picture of Hugh Lockhart Donald. Under the picture were the words, “He lived through all the singing years.”

People had been leaving their names and destinations for years in the notebook, and we checked with particular interest to see if anybody had traveled the same route as we were. There didn’t seem to be anyone so we left our names and destination and set off to face the mighty San Sault Rapids.

A rocky limestone ledge extending midway across the river from the east bank forms these rapids. Wave are said to approach ten feet in height at low water, and we had been warned repeatedly to stay near the west bank because the east side was a maelstrom of waves and rocks. Staying near the west bank and crossing our fingers, we went for it. The fast water boiled and swirled violently; however we had no difficulty as we sped down the rapids.

When we stopped for lunch just below the rapids, Doug seemed very unhappy, refused to eat with us, and instead went downstream and ate alone. Something was seriously wrong.

Barely two miles downstream from Fort Simpson we camped on a barely suitable island. We had to be careful where we stepped because in some spots the seemingly firm ground suddenly gave way. I found out the hard way. When I went to pull a canoe onto the shore, the ground gave way, and there I was — up to my knees in mud prompting an eruption of laughter from Byron. During our planning he had suggested that I bring some high waterproof boots because he had read that the Mackenzie had mud a foot deep along its shore. I didn’t bring any and had been poking fun at Byron since we had not yet encountered any mud. Now he had his chance to laugh as I tried to wallow out of the mire.

With a cool breeze and almost no mosquitoes, we slept in the open air little knowing how few times we would again enjoy the pleasure of sleeping outside the confines of a tent. When we finally hit the river a bit late next morning, the wind got on my nerves, my shoulders felt stiff and sore, and I paddled along angrily the first few miles feeling rushed and trapped inrto keeping up with the other guys. I couldn’t stop when I felt like it — I had to stay in the canoe and keep paddling so we wouldn’t get separated. Got to make those miles. Got to prove something to somebody. Suddenly, like a wave rushing up to the shore and breaking on the sand, the anger and irritation passed. I got off the river and admired some blue-eyed grass and a thicket of lavishly blooming wild roses. The angerI had felt had been brushed away by the rose petals and blades of grass, andI was happy to continue on peacefully through the waves.

By this time we were far separated and not until late in the afternoon did I realize I must be ahead of Doug an Byron. As I drifted around a bend, I saw Nahanni Mountain hanging blue and distant on the horizon, and the sight cheered the afternoon with promise of beauty to come. Suddenly the wind whistled up the valley like a freight train sending me running for cover. Like a miniature tornado, it scooted along the river picking up water, swinging up the banks, breaking off trees, and tearing off branches. With such an awesome display of power, I was one thankful man that nothing hit me.

Soon Doug and Byron showed up, and we camped oobn a pretty beach with a good view of the mountains. Next morning a misty, drizzly rain doused my visions of beautiful, early-morning light shining on the mountains, just perfect for picture taking. But my body screamed “No,” to the idea of leaving our warm fire, getting into the cold canoe, and setting off against the cold wind and rain.

“How do you expect to make miles and get to Alaska if we refuse to paddle?” my mind asked.

My body quickly retorted, “Don’t want to go to Alaska. Don’t want to paddle. Want to stay here by the fire.”

My mind won the battle as usual, and off I went into the cold rain and vicious headwind. Twice storms kicking up huge waves stopped uys, the second time stranding us on a little island in the middle of the river. We huddled rather discouraged on the muddy bank wondering how to get off the island. After eight hours of hard paddling, we had come about twenty miles. We needed something to lift our thoroughly dampened spirits.

After the storm abated, we rounded a bend, and Doug suddenly pointed saying, “Look over there.”

I glanced and said, “Yeah, looks like another coyote.” A second look and I exclaimed, “No, that’s a lynx. Just look at the fur on him.” I reached for my camera and, of course, it had no film and the nearest roll was buried deep in a pack. We drifted silently to within twenty feet. The lynx didn’t move, but its eyes followed our every action, and his muscles rippled like coiled springs. With one easy bound, he leaped into the bushes and sat there, green eyes gleaming out of the darkness. What a lift to our spirits!

We camped at the mouth of the North Nahanni River surrounded by the Nahanni Mountains on one side and the Camsell Mountains on the other. Byron said, “I’ll bet that at sunrise those mountains will be something to see.”

Doug grumped, “Well, you can get up then, take a picture, and we’ll see it when we get back.”

Doug arose first next morning, a remarkable event in itself but made more remarkable by the fact that the sun was not up yet. “Come on, “Byron urged, “We can sleep some other time.”

“Okay, let’s go paddling through the mountains.” Later I found Doug and Byron sound asleep on the shores of Willowlake River sheltered from the wind in some big rocks. I wandered to the top of a small hill and strolled through a huge field of fireweed in full bloom. I picked and ate some of the fireweed stalks, but it would take a long time to get a meal.

When I returned, we had a little discussion on the distance we ought to be traveling. Doug urged, “I’d like to reach the Artic Circle by June 2 to see a 24 day with no night.”

“Well, that’s a hell of a long ways,” I replied.

Yeah, I guess it is. But we could do it if we put our minds to it,” assured Doug in a confident tone.

“It would depend a lot on the current and the weather, but I suppose we could if we really had to,” agreed Byron. I listened with a sinking feeling. We seemed to be falling into what I call the “push for miles” syndrome. The ultimate goal seems so far that it’s easy to get discouraged and want to speed up. In the long run, however, speeding up is self-defeating. After all, we were out to enjoy ourselves and not to race anywhere.

Byron and I outvoted Doug, and I suggested,” We ought to take a day or an afternoon off and climb a mountain or something for a change from steady paddling. It would do us a world of good.”

We passed the town of Wrigley next day and heard the story of the townsfolk deciding to move the town across the river to be nearer the airport. Although the move occurred several years earlier, many maps still show the town on the west side of the river. We stopped below the Roche qi Tempre L’eau, which, translated by my very rusty high school French, means ‘the rock where the water is warm.” We had heard of hot springs beneath the towering rock, which rises over 1000 feet. The rocks and trees soaring high in the sky beckoned to me saying, “Come up and see the country.” I couldn’t resist the invitation and climbed to the point where rock met sky. The lower slopes of aspen thickets were a little difficult to walk through, but very beautiful, white trunks and bright green foliage contrasted against the sky. As I climbed, the aspen gave way to spruce, and by staying close to the cliffs, I found the rest of the way easy going. After collapsing on the rock and wiping the sweat off my brow, I gazed over the valley.

On the valley floor from one horizon to the other wound the Mackenzie River, a huge brown swath through the land. On both sides lakes and marshlands and coniferous forest covered the wide valley floor. Mountains shrouded in mists rimmed the ranges of mountains, mysterious and far away. With feelings of wonder and fabulous well-being, I retreated to our camp and excitedly told them, “You’ve just got to climb up there – the view’s marvelous.”

An Indian man named George Williams came visiting, and we peppered him, as we had all the Indians we met, with questions ranging from what he did for a living to how Indians felt about the government. We watched as he answered. He often thought so long that we wondered if he had forgotten the question, but then he would answer.

“What do you think about the pipeline proposal from Norman Wells south? And what about the road being put in along the Mackenzie River? “I asked.

He answered slowly, “I don’t want the pipeline and I don’t want the road. The river is our road. The pipeline will destroy our land. That’s all we want from the government, just our land. We don’t want money — just our land.”

Doug asked, “What’s it like in the winter?”

“Damn cold! Last winter we had about seven feet of snow and out trapping I about froze. One time coming back from the mountains,” and he pointed to a far-away range. “It was 60 below and I wanted to get back home. Kept going and froze half my face.”

He asked where we were going and seemed impressed when we said Alaska. As he pushed his boat into the river he cautioned, “Watch out for San Sault Rapids. Be sure to stay to the left, or else it’s good-by world.” And he fired his outboard motor and roared off to Wrigley.

The Mackenzie River rises full-grown from the Great Slave Lake, a wide silver path that travels over a thousand miles on its long, lonely journey to the Arctic Ocean. This river would be our path to the Arctic. Alexander Mackenzie, the first white man to travel the entire river, took only sixteen days to go from Great Slave Lake to the Mackenzie Delta. We would take twenty-five days, but then Mackenzie was on a business trip, and we were on vacation.

After lake travel the current pushing us on our way felt good. As we moved away from the lake, the temperature rapidly warmed and fifteen miles away became positively hot. Byron went off, shotgun in hand, to see if he could shoot a duck to celebrate our first night on the Mackenzie. Soon we heard a single shot ring over the water and come echoing back. Byron came strolling back into camp with his gun over his shoulder and two ducks hanging limply in his hand. “Not bad, huh,” he smiled smugly. “Two ducks with only one shot.”

“How are you going to cook them?” asked Doug.

“I think I’ll try wrapping them in tinfoil and laying them in the coals.” He didn’t let them cook long enough in the coals so cut them up and put them in a stew.

But somehow shooting and eating the ducks didn’t seem like a thing we should have done. It didn’t fit in. We came to watch birds, not shoot them. That was the first and last time we shot anything on the entire journey.

The next day we crossed Beaver Lake with a very strong crosswind. Although the lake was not very wide and the waves not too big, towards the end of the lake the current and wind combined to kick up a terrible chop. I found it hard to decide where to point the canoe, as the waves seemed to come from all angles. Right in the middle of the worst waves, as I struggled to keep my bow pointed into the waves, I saw a flock of little tiny baby ducks bobbing along merrily over 300 yards from the shore, paddling along calmly with their little feet, safe as could be in the same conditions that threatened to swamp my boat.

When I went by the Fort Providence ferry, one of the deckhands leaned over the rail and asked, “Where are you going?”

“Alaska,” I answered.

Obviously he didn’t believe me and retorted, “Oh, sure you are.”

Keeping a journal became discouraging. Too often I’d look back at my entries and want to tear them up. While planning the journey, I had considered not keeping a journal and leaving my camera at home to avoid any unnecessary intrusion into the present reality. I wanted to enjoy experiences now without thinking about how to best record them for the future. Rather than take pictures, I wanted to actually look at scenes and use the time I spent writing in my journal meditating on the ideas I would have been writing. While doing the trip that way would have merit, I didn’t think I had the mental discipline to handle it.

I felt the camera and journal helped me see and understand things. What is a camera but a tool to focus one’s vision on what one really wants to see? And what is a journal but writing to help focus thoughts on ideas one really wants to understand? So I bought my camera and journal, but now I seemed to just take snapshots without putting any effort into seeing, and my journal fell into a ho-hum record of insignificant events. So I put my camera away and refused to write in my journal, waiting until I really saw something before I reached for the camera and until I had something to say before writing in my journal.

As we neared Providence Rapids next morning, the current pulled irresistibly toward a narrowing of the river between the fifty feet high banks. I kept close to the shore but far enough away to be out of the eddy lines near the banks. The current rolled and rumbled through the rapids—a swirling current that swung our canoes back and forth, but we sped easily through the waves.

We had been told that Mills Lake could be very rough when the wind blew from the north across the eleven-mile expanse of open water. However, the lake spread calm and flat before us. After lunch I drifted along watching Doug and then Byron disappear down the river and amused myself by swatting bulldogs (a big fly similar to a horse fly) with my paddle. With a little practice I became quite adept at knocking them out of the air with a quick swat. Ambition finally came to me when I realized the wind and current had combined to keep me motionless. So I set off in pursuit of my partners, finding them camped on a grassy gravel bar between a river and a marsh. Surrounded by deep grass, the tent seemed afloat in a green sea. Mosquitoes rose in clouds out of the grass, and we were certainly glad that we had a mosquito proof shelter. I wished, though, that we had each brought a tent as the air in a tent gets somewhat less than fresh with three guys inside who could use baths and millions of menacing mosquitoes outside. But nobody complained.

Fortunately, in the big river we could paddle away from the shore and the mosquitoes, and a wind almost always blew. Several of the gravel bars gave a home to clouds of screeching gulls and terns. I stopped to see if I could find some nests and found the entire island dotted with them every ten or twelve feet. The gulls hovered about twenty feet overhead, squawking what I’m sure were gull obscenities while the braver ones took turns diving at me. In the interests of preserving the cleanliness of my clothes, I left for the safety of the open river.

We camped one night beside a sluggish stream dignified by the name Morrisey Creek. The mosquitoes made the most of the moist, calm air, and we were forced to wear headnets to protect from their onslaughts. The air didn’t seem to have enough space for all the mosquitoes swarming around us. We could then understand the old saying, “If there were any more mosquitoes in the North, they would have to be smaller.”

The lack of current on the upper Mackenzie discouraged us as we had expected an average current of about three miles an hour and so far it had been half that. I had hoped that with a strong, fast current we could make lots of miles and still have plenty of time for fishing, dreaming, drifting, and exploring side-streams and shorelines. Instead of drifting, we had to paddle hard to make just a few miles. And whenever the current sped up, the wind would blow harder in exact accordance with the second law of canoeing.

The day before we arrived at Fort Simpson, our third food drop, I tried to clean up a bit. It had seemed either too cold to bathe or the mosquitoes discouraged me, but I braved the cold water and washed some clothes for good measure. They dried rapidly on top of my packs. It was the middle of J une, and everywhere flowers bloomed in lush green grass. Summer had arrived suddenly in the Mackenzie basin.

We camped about forty miles from Fort Simpson and expected to arrive there sometime late in the evening. We were wrong; the current turned exceptionally strong, racing along the narrow valley, and we cruised into town in above five hours. The fort is located on an island at the confluence of the Liard and Mackenzie. Extremely muddy water from the Liard contrasted sharply with the comparatively clear waters of the Mackenzie. For nearly one hundred miles downstream, the difference was easily differentiated.

Doug had already gone to find the post office when I pulled up, so Byron said, “Why don’t you go into town, and I’ll stay here with the canoes. I’ve got to finish this letter.”

“All right. Which way did Doug go?”

Just then three Indians roared up in their pickup, and Doug jumped out of the back announcing, “These guys picked me up. Then they took me to the post office, and I got all our boxes and a tour of the whole town. What there is of it, that is.”

We thanked them for saving us a long trudge carrying three heavy boxes of food. One of them said, “Well, we saw you two days ago when we were out hunting and then again last night where you camped by Spence River. We figured you’d be in here today so we just kept an eye out for you.”

Doug asked, “What do y’all do for a living?”

“Well, we work for the government painting houses, but mostly we just run around in the truck burning up government gas,” they replied, “and pick up girls.”

We went down the beach and opened our boxes. Opening boxes always gave us a good feeling of security in having enough food to continue. We usually spread the food all over the beach to sort and then attempt to stuff all of it in our packs. Mine were all homemade. With shaky finances I simply sewed four top-opening nylon packs approximately 25x18x12 inches. Instead of shoulder straps, a leather-carrying handle helped me lug the packs from the canoe to a campsite. For portages I strapped the packs to my trusty Kelty pack frame. It provided a lot of flexibility; I could strap on more packs than I could possibly carry or just one or two.

Always it seemed impossible to fit all the food into the packs, but always we squeezed it in somehow, crammed the packs into the canoes, and set off down the river.

The bottoms of the clouds, a fiery red, heralded the coming of the sun. With the melting of the twilight grew a kind of expectancy and the lake, the ice, and the air gave way to sunrise. Without a sound the sun cracked the horizon and turned the water into a sea of molten gold. We chopped and hacked our way through the shore ice and headed down the lake over big rolling swells left from yesterday’s wind storm. Up and down, up and down— before long I was feeling seasick. But the breeze blew from behind and in six hours we covered twenty-two miles.

As we ate lunch the wind blew the waves towards monster size. I decided to fish, but when I found my lure box, I discovered that a bottle of mosquito repellent had spilled all over the lures. What a mess! Mosquito repellent makes excellent paint remover, and it had done a good job on most of the lures. I’ve often wondered what mosquito repellent does to the body. We cheerfully smear it on our skins, and yet it is powerful enough to dissolve plastics and remove paint and varnish. The fish didn’t like the lures; I could see them go for the lure and then swish away. But after I washed the lures in soapy water several times, I caught a fish almost immediately.

Tossing the fish into the canoe, I headed onto the increasingly rough lake. Soon the waves were bigger than we cared to challenge. The first time I approached the shore, I got twisted sideways to the waves and narrowly avoided broaching in a big breaking wave. Spinning the canoe around, I paddled back through the breaking waves trying again, getting thoroughly wet, but making shore.

When we camped in a grassy nook by a large swamp, two killdeer voiced their displeasure at our intrusion. After a marvelous supper of pike and onion, muffins and gingerbread with several cups of tea, I walked on the shore and found why the killdeer were so unhappy. Our canoes were parked only a few feet from their nest. Their spotted eggs blended well with the surroundings. Mama and Papa Killdeer hopped around happily calling to each other after we settled into our beds to watch a seagull do slow turns around the setting sun.

The lake lost its clear blue color as we passed the mouth of the Hay River. Because this town is the southern terminus of barge traffic on the Mackenzie River, we had to wait for a tugboat to pass through the shipping channel. When the wake from the tugboat and the waves on the lake combined, I took on water for the second time. Earlier I had stepped on shore to stretch my legs but didn’t get my canoe onto the beach quickly enough. The waves crashed over the stern of the canoe, filling it instantly. It happened So fast I didn’t have time to react but jumped into the water, wrestled the packs out of the canoe, pulled it up, and started to bail. “Marvelous,” I thought, “I’ve managed to get everything soaked.” I noticed water draining from the bottom of my camera bag as I grabbed it from the bottom of the canoe. Closer inspection revealed two splits in the vinyl on the bottom corners, but a quick look at the contents was encouraging. The camera was still dry, but the 200 mm lens had some fog.

Although we thought we had seen the last of the ice, it began lining the shores again. Since the lake seemed calm except for a gently rolling swell, we felt confident enough to keep paddling along the outside of the ice. At evening we had to lift and drag our canoes across a 100 foot strip of ice to shore. As soon as we found a camping site, I went through all my gear. Surprisingly, everything in the packs was dry even though they had been under water. Wet loose stuff I laid out in the brilliant sunshine to dry.

I went to sleep dreaming of ice jams across the Mackenzie River. As we slept the wind shifted and moved the ice farther into the lake, but it took one final shot at us and froze the water between the floes to a thickness of almost 3/8 inch. Paddling madly, we plowed through it. Our canoes heaved a sigh of relief after their pounding by the ice of Great Slave Lake.

Four hours of steady paddling brought us to the head of the mighty Mackenzie River — the biggest river in Canada and our path to the Artic Circle and beyond. We ate a celebration lunch; Doug with a big chocolate bar, I by baking a chocolate cake, and Byron by bringing out his trip report on the Mackenzie River for us to peruse. Great Slave Lake had been a thrilling experience, but now we headed down the big river.

But in the evening Doug seemed very unhappy and refused to eat with us, going downstream instead a couple hundred yards to eat alone. Clearly something was seriously wrong.