by Adam Shoalts
“Hello,” she announced as she approached. “Anyone home?”
I thought for a moment, then said, “Hi.” I added, from still inside my tent, “Sorry, since the bugs are bad I’m just going to stay inside if you don’t mind. But you can come over to the door, if you like.”
“Oh,” she replied. “Yeah, they’re awful.” She swatted at the horde of blackflies and mosquitoes swarming round her head as she approached.
“How many of you are in there?” she asked.
“Only one,” I said.
“Where’s the rest of your party?”
“I’m it.”
“Just you?”
“My canoe, too.”
“You’re going solo down this river?” She seemed surprised at the notion, as if travelling alone in the arctic wilderness was strange or something.
“No,” I said.
“Oh,” she replied, nodding.
“I’m going solo up this river.”
“What?” She crouched down to look through my screen door. She appeared to be about the same age as me.
“I’m Adam, by the way,” I said from inside. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be unsocial, it’s just that I’ve only just got my tent bug-free and don’t want more to come in.”
“Oh, no worries, I understand. I’m Erica.” She waved a hand. “I thought for a second there you said you’re going upriver,” she laughed.
“I am.”
Her eyebrows raised and her mouth opened, staring at me as if I’d said something crazy. After a moment she seemed to realize I was serious. “But how’s that even possible?”
I briefly summarized my methods.
“Wow,” she said slowly, “that’s kind of impressive, but also kind of insane.” Then, evidently deeming me either an object of great curiosity, or else not dangerous to the group, she called to the rest of her party to come over and join her. There were five of them—an all-women’s group from a canoe camp in northern Minnesota. They’d been dropped by a floatplane some weeks earlier on a lake, and now they were descending the Coppermine to complete their trip. Erica was the camp leader; the others were younger.
I told them about some nicer sites I’d seen farther downriver that they might make it to within an hour or so that were good for camping, with some nice beaches, and a bit about what rapids they could expect. They seemed shocked when I spoke of the Boundary Waters in Minnesota, apparently having assumed I was some lone wanderer who must know nothing of the outside world, let alone anything of their home state. It seemed to reassure them that I wasn’t as crazy as I first appeared.
They wished me well, and I did the same for them, and fifteen minutes after our conversation had begun, they left and continued downriver. Such extensive socializing had quite worn me out, and I half-hoped that would be the last of it for at least another month or so.
× 14 ×
LAKES BEYOND COUNT
Another hard day of battling rapids—some whose edges I could wade along, others so large I had no choice but to portage around them—brought me to the Coppermine River’s outflow from a beautiful lake. I’d come to Rocknest Lake, a maze-like lake with a huge tabletop mountain overlooking it. To escape from the river’s fury and be back on calm water was a great relief. I could paddle easily once more. I happily pulled off my waders, which had flooded again as I struggled in the current, and went barefoot in the canoe, my socks drying on the reefed sail.
It was somewhere on this lake that the pilot Michael had promised to drop off the remainder of my resupply. I wasn’t sure of the precise location, but it was supposed to be on a remote island, easy to spot. Fortunately, the bush pilot was as good as his word: I found the stash without any trouble. No wolverines, bears, or Minnesotans had touched it.
I decided to make camp on the little island my resupply crate was left on. It commanded a charming view of the wonderful surroundings—sparklingly clear waters and big green hills, with granite cliffs and boulders scattered about the land as if by giants long ago. Even nicer was the island itself—catching the sun as it did, the multitude of berries growing on it had ripened nicely. I could fill myself with arctic blueberries, crowberries, bearberries, and lingonberries, the last of which were still a bit tart but perfectly acceptable to me. There was also dwarf Labrador tea for a warming drink, caribou lichens (a decent emergency food if you boil it first), and sphagnum moss, which is useful for treating cuts as it has naturally occurring iodine in it. With the berries finally ripening, it felt like having a supermarket right next to my camp.
The character of my journey had now shifted again: I’d left the furious Coppermine River proper behind, and was entering into a long series of interconnected lakes. Technically I was still within the Coppermine River system, but now it was made up of almost all lakes connected by just a few narrow channels. Some of these channels did have powerful rapids, which I’d still have no choice but to battle up, but other than that, I was now turning the corner on my route’s exhausting upriver travel.
Most of these lakes lie beyond the trees, surrounded by nothing but apparently limitless tundra that in summer resembles vast fields, some of them boulder-strewn. To many people it’s a desolate, eerie-looking landscape, at least compared to the more hospitable forests to the south. On maps these wild lakes appear as a virtually indecipherable maze of byzantine complexity, featuring hundreds of bays, channels, islands, and peninsulas that can easily confuse travellers and make getting lost extremely easy. It was on these large lakes that I was now paddling that almost two centuries earlier John Franklin led twenty men to horror and death on his first doomed quest for the Northwest Passage.
Unlike his later, more famous naval expeditions in the High Arctic, on this first Arctic foray in 1821 Franklin had opted to travel by birchbark canoe with four British naval compatriots, a party of Canadian voyageurs, and two Inuit interpreters. Their expedition didn’t turn out all that well. Although they managed to make it down the Coppermine River to the Arctic Ocean, and even travelled along its dangerous coast in canoes, on their return trek things unravelled. Their food supplies ran out, the canoes were destroyed, one of their interpreters became lost, and finally, ragged and starving, they grew increasingly paranoid about one another. It seems some of them began to look at the others as meat. As they huddled around their tiny willow-twig fires, whispers of cannibalism could be heard.
One by one the party dwindled, men falling behind and perishing alone on the tundra. The survivors eventually reached the very lakes I was paddling, but without canoes they were unable to cross them, at least until winter froze them solid. For days they wandered, desperate and destitute, along the barren shorelines. Of the twenty-one men who set off, only ten returned.
It was also this same landscape that a half-century before Franklin, back in 1770, the young sailor Samuel Hearne and his friend Matonabbee had made an epic journey on foot across thousands of kilometres. They’d set out from Churchill and wandered all the way to the mouth of the Coppermine River and back again. Matonabbee and Hearne, upon first sight of the river, with the sort of wisdom one gets from living in these places, immediately judged it far too treacherous to be navigable. Their journey, however, was marred by the tragedy of Bloody Falls, when Matonabbee’s Dene followers ambushed and massacred an unsuspecting Inuit camp. The attack was part of a larger, centuries-old conflict between the Inuit, who lived near the seacoast, and the Dene, who lived to the south within the spruce forests. Between them lay the vast no man’s land of the “barrens,” where battles tended to happen if wandering hunting parties ever crossed paths.
* * *
A long day of steady paddling took me through Rocknest Lake’s snaking bays and channels. By midday I’d reached a narrow section with rapids where I had to put away my paddle and pole hard off the bottom. This brought me into a new body of water, Red Rock Lake, which I found surrounded by rocky hills and, most prominently, a gigantic towering cliff over a hundred metres high composed of red rock. I figured that
this was probably the origin of the lake’s name.
I’d been paddling steady, dealing with wind that was alternatingly hitting my canoe broadside, head on, or from behind, the direction changing based on the zigzagging pattern of the lakes’ maze-like shape. A light rain dissipated as I completed a necessary crossing from the lake’s northern to southern shore over a large stretch of open water with big waves. Then I spotted something farther up the opposite shore: a collection of little white and brown rectangular specks that clearly indicated something human-made. It was, I guessed, mostly likely some fly-in fishing lodge, although I’d never heard of one existing on this lake, which seemed odd.
A small open motorboat materialized near the white and brown specks, a lone figure on board. The boat moved back and forth along the distant shoreline, evidently the person on board was trolling, likely for lake trout.
My little speck of red moving alone up the far shore eventually attracted the notice of the figure in the motorboat that had issued out from the mysterious encampment, and the boat now powered across the lake in my direction. When the boat neared I saw on board a young man, seemingly not much older than twenty. He switched off his engine and coasted in toward me.
“Hello,” he called, waving.
“Hi,” I said.
“Where did you come from?” he asked.
“The Yukon.”
“What?” He looked puzzled.
“I’m paddling across the Arctic.”
“All by yourself?!”
“Yeah.”
“My God.” He stared at me.
“That’s a nice-looking fishing lodge,” I said, pointing across the lake. I could see it a bit better now, and compared to any other fly-in fishing camp I’d ever seen, this one looked rather more elaborately constructed. “I didn’t know there was one on this lake.”
“Oh, that’s not a lodge,” he said.
Catching my intrigued look, he launched into an explanation. He said the compound belonged to a mega-wealthy airline tycoon who’d had it built as an ultra-private fishing escape for his family and friends, with a whole lake to themselves, miles from anywhere. The owner, who was 95 years old, was at the compound this very moment, having recently arrived on one of his floatplanes.
“He’d love to meet you and have you stay,” said the young man enthusiastically. “Do you want a hot shower? You can stay the night. We can feed you too. We’ve got plenty of spare beds. It’ll be great!”
“Hmm…” I hovered on the waves. “Do you have any orange juice?”
“We’ve got loads of orange juice!” he exclaimed.
“Well,” I said, mulling it over, “I’m afraid I have to be on my way. I’m on a tight schedule. Maybe next time I’m here. Thanks, though!”
The young man looked a little downcast, but seeing my resolve to keep paddling, he wished me well with real warmth.
The truth was, I’d become so accustomed to my routine of long days that I didn’t wish to deviate from it. More importantly, the winds were at the moment pretty good so I couldn’t afford not to make the most of them, fearing as I did what the storms of August would bring.
I paddled hard, wanting to put as much distance as I could between me and the compound of more than a half-dozen small buildings. To me it had been a bizarre sight—jarringly incongruous after passing thousands of kilometres of natural landscapes. To suddenly see buildings perched on rocks in the middle of nowhere felt like stumbling upon the set of a science fiction movie. I thought how it must have cost a fortune to have built such a place—all the construction materials, furniture, solar panels, motorboats, and other stuff would’ve had to have been flown in by helicopter or bush plane from far away. But, I guess that’s the kind of thing that’s easier if you own an airline.
I pushed on another four hours, paddling up the lake’s snaking bays past islands and barren hills. Appealing camping sites were scarce, as the lake’s shoreline was high banks cloaked with willow thickets. Hauling all my gear up such steep banks wasn’t a pleasing prospect, especially since sleeping inland like that would mean enduring appalling clouds of bugs. Whenever possible on lakes I try to camp near an open shoreline, where a breeze can help keep the bugs to an acceptable minimum. But after passing kilometres of shoreline with just high, willow-thicketed banks, I realized I had no choice. I pulled in to a steep, fifteen-foot-high bank and wearily began hauling my three loads, and then the canoe, up to the top to make camp.
The bugs were as bad as I’d feared: masses of them assaulted me, making eating my freeze-dried mac and cheese joyless. Just pulling up my mesh bug net a little to take a bite caused suffocating clouds to swarm my face. How many I swallowed with the food I’ll never know. I just tried to eat as fast as possible so I could escape into my tent.
* * *
Glancing at a satellite image of northern Canada you’ll see that there are three million lakes, creeks, ponds, and rivers. (In your spare time, I suggest counting them.) Most of which are of recent vintage, having been gouged out during the retreat of the massive, mile-high Laurentide Ice Sheet ten thousand years ago or less, depending on their location.
With that many different waterways, the amount of resulting route combinations are infinite. You could live a thousand lifetimes and not even begin to scratch the surface of paddling all the possibilities. To devise my particular route, I examined satellite imagery: looking at what at first glance appeared an incomprehensible labyrinth. Then I measured distances between points to create the most efficient route I could, while taking into account whatever else seemed important. In those first few weeks of planning, though, every time I’d look at the satellite images or topographic maps laid out on my desk and posted on my walls it was difficult to make heads or tails of them all. With such a puzzle of lakes and ponds, it’s hard not to confuse one bay or inlet for any of the thousands of others.
But once I’d committed it to memory, I could pick out at a glance on any large topo map or satellite image my exact route, and what day I ought to be at any nameless bay or point. As a kid I’d always enjoyed puzzles and memory games, but it didn’t seem like it would ever amount to much career-wise. Then I realized I could put it to good use doing these sorts of journeys. A GPS built into your brain is a huge asset; one that’s easy to overlook how advantageous it is when travelling, as checking a map or GPS screen is time-consuming (it’s not like checking a phone at home with the swipe of a finger, in the wilderness, the GPS has to first power up, load the satellite imagery, and then, on a small screen, fiddle with it for a bit to see what you need.) These memory and spatial skills—the ability to transfer a two-dimensional map image into a real three-dimensional lake—were exactly what I needed now to navigate these lakes quickly without fiddling every ten minutes with maps or a GPS.
My route from the end of the Coppermine River proper would next take me through a complex maze of different lakes across the central Arctic—more than three dozen in all. The distance I’d have to cover through these often dangerously windy lakes, plus a bit of river travel and portaging for good measure, totalled roughly 883 kilometres, or more than double the distance I’d crossed on Great Bear Lake. Of course the actual distance, when factoring in the multiple trips required to complete the many portages between lakes and around dangerous rapids, was considerably greater.
On the last day of July I paddled into a new lake, Point Lake, which is over a hundred kilometres long and punctuated by numerous, bays, islands, and peninsulas. The lake seemed almost unnaturally quiet. There was barely a hint of wind; the skies had turned blue without a speck of cloud; there weren’t even sounds of birds or any sign of wildlife. I’d paddled far offshore, so even the bugs had vanished. There was nothing to be seen in all directions except rocks, cliffs, hills, and tundra. It was a strange, empty, quiet place—so calm that it felt as if I were paddling in a landscape painting.
The dead calm allowed me to make excellent progress, in part because I was able to cut across the largest open-water cr
ossings I’d ever attempted solo in the Arctic—in some places exceeding three kilometres between points. To be that far from land, surrounded by nothing but blue water on all sides, alone in my heavily packed canoe, could make me slightly uneasy, but I felt the calm conditions more than justified it. The result was excellent progress, allowing me to make it over sixty-five kilometres that day.
To add to such agreeable weather, when I made camp I found my first ripe lingonberries of the season, though the bugs were extreme onshore. Interestingly, I calculated after repeated experiments that it took an average of five minutes after landing for the full onslaught of millions of bugs to materialize. This meant that I had a few minutes of relative peace to gather berries before the bugs passed along the word that human flesh was to be had for the taking. The only wood available now were little bits of dwarf birch, typically no larger than finger-sized, and these I burned just for the smoke to help drive off the insect swarms. For boiling water I now relied on my little camp stove.
The eerie, perfect calm lasted for several days as July passed into August. I continued paddling eleven or twelve hours each day, tripling the daily distances I’d managed when travelling upstream on rivers. My route took me past great towering cliffs, jumbles of immense boulders as old as time, and vast grassy fields without a tree in sight. In other places, some of the great grey cliffs were so cracked with fault lines as to give the suggestion of ancient masonry, as if they were crumbling castle ruins. On one of these vertical cliffs overlooking the lake, raspy little cries rang out as I paddled below. Looking up, I spotted in a crack on the cliff face two baby peregrine falcons. They were hungry, calling for their parents to serve lunch.
