by Adam Shoalts
ALONE AGAINST THE NORTH
FELLOW, ROYAL CANADIAN GEOGRAPHICAL SOCIETY
ADAM SHOALTS
ALONE AGAINST THE NORTH
AN EXPEDITION INTO THE UNKNOWN
To my fellow explorers, in spirit and deed.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Introduction
1.The Start of an Obsession
2.Plans and Preparations
3.Into the Wild
4.Downriver
5.Hudson Bay
6.Alone
7.Nameless River
8.Back to the Coast
9.New Horizons
10.Trailblazing
11.River of Mystery
12.Adrift
13.Changing the Map
14.End of a Journey
Afterword
Addendum
Acknowledgments
Index
PROLOGUE
Here we have reached the remotest region of the earth … a wilderness without a footprint.
—Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, fifth century BC
AHEAD OF US LAY the pitiless expanse of frigid ocean known as Hudson Bay. Behind us lay countless miles of windswept tundra, trackless swamp, and impassable muskeg. Half-famished polar bears roamed the desolate coastline. It wasn’t a place one should travel alone—or at all, really.
For the past two weeks my friend and expedition partner Brent Kozuh and I had been hacking and paddling our way across this still largely unexplored wilderness, battling hypothermia and insufferable clouds of mosquitoes and blackflies.
Once we reached the bleak shores of Hudson Bay, Brent finally cracked.
I had seen this moment coming—for the past few days he had fallen into a stupor, his resolve corroded by the millions of bloodsucking insects and the grimness of our journey. We were ankle-deep in icy water, dragging a heavily laden canoe behind us while staggering against fierce winds sweeping off the sea when Brent finally seized up altogether.
“Adam,” he said mechanically, “I can’t go on … I want to go home.”
“We can’t quit. We haven’t reached the river yet,” I replied.
“I don’t care about the river. This is about survival. Let me have the satellite phone. I’m going to call a pilot and try to get him to land here.”
The wind howled across the treeless tundra, biting into our bearded faces. For a fleeting moment, I thought about Brent’s proposal to abandon the expedition. But as I stood there shivering in the salt water, I felt I would never be able to live with failure. I needed to reach the river we had come to find.
“No,” I said shaking my head, “quitting isn’t an option.”
“What does it matter? We’ve done enough,” Brent said.
“We’ve barely done anything.”
Brent didn’t reply. To him, the nameless river we were seeking wasn’t some priceless prize, but just another subarctic river like all the others we had paddled since we began our journey. To me, however, this river represented something more—it was a mystery, and a promise of a pristine place untouched by the modern world, a river so obscure that no known person had ever previously explored it. That made it irresistible. But I could see that all Brent had in mind when he thought of another river was more discomfort, more cold, more swarms of mosquitoes and blackflies.
So I tried to appeal not to the explorer in him, but to the athlete. To quit now, I told him, would be to admit defeat. It would open the door for someone else to explore the river instead of us. Brent slouched down against the canoe’s oak gunwale. “No one in their right mind is ever going to do that.”
“Someone has to do it,” I replied.
Brent sighed, “It doesn’t have to be me.”
My feet were numb from standing in the cold water. With the sun sinking below the horizon, I was keen to get moving. “Let’s push on a little farther. We’ll make camp, get a fire going, warm up, and then you’ll feel better.”
Brent didn’t budge. “I won’t feel better until I’m home on my couch with a roof over my head.”
“There’s the rest of your life for that. This is a chance to do something different.”
Brent just stared at the canoe. The wind continued to howl around us. We both shivered in the cold. Snow geese flapped across the sky. I scanned the tundra in either direction. There were no bears in sight.
“Each day feels like an eternity out here,” mumbled Brent. “It’s freezing, I’m hungry, tired, and wet. There are polar bears all over the place, and we’ve no idea what might be on that river.”
“Things will get easier. We’ve just had some bad weather,” I replied, but without much conviction, knowing that things would likely only get worse.
“Adam,” Brent said slowly, “sometimes you’re insane.”
“I can’t do this alone.”
Brent shook his head, “I can’t do this at all.”
Clearly, appealing to Brent’s competitive side would now get me nowhere. So I appealed to the one thing I thought he still valued: “If you quit now, you’ll have to pay for the entire cost of the flight out of here. The Geographical Society won’t cover any of it. It’ll cost you a fortune.”
“I’d gladly spend my entire life’s savings to get out of here.”
“You’d really leave me alone in polar bear territory?” I was grasping at straws.
“There’s no reason you can’t get on that plane with me.”
“Not until we’ve succeeded.”
Brent just kept staring at the frigid sea. I was sympathetic. I knew he was cold. I knew the truth of his words—a day can drag on endlessly when you’re hungry, exhausted, and wet. When you have only the dimmest sense of what lies ahead. When polar bears are stalking you. I knew it must be hard to put one foot in front of the other if you aren’t drawn magnetically toward your destination—as I was.
Brent tossed his hands in the air. “We can just lie about it. We can say we explored the river.” His expression finally showed some life.
“Brent!”
“What?”
“We obviously can’t do that.”
“Who’d know?”
“We’d know.”
It became clear that nothing would convince Brent to push on deeper into the wilderness. His will was broken, his mind made up. Now I had to accept the inevitable. To argue any further while standing idly in the estuary would just give us both hypothermia. “All right,” I said after a very long pause, “we’ll head back to the old goose hunting shack and you can try to contact a pilot.”
With that, we grabbed hold of our loaded canoe and dragged it back upriver, wading through frigid water and fighting our way up several sets of rapids to the relative safety of a dilapidated hunting cabin. The next day, I knew, the pilot would arrive for Brent … but I wouldn’t be getting on that plane with him. Daunting as I found the prospect, I would have to remain behind to somehow finish the expedition on my own.
As of tomorrow, I’d be alone against the North.
INTRODUCTION
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.
—Herman Melville, Moby Dick, 1851
ITHINK I ALWAYS KNEW I was destined to become an explorer. Joseph Conrad, the great Victorian novelist and an experienced mariner, recalled that in his childhood he liked nothing better than to stare at maps and dream, as he put it, of “the glories of exploration.” That was in the 1860s. My childhood consisted of much the same thing. Only, unlike Conrad, I was told that I was born in the wrong century to be an explorer. I was told that there was nothing left to discover and that if I had a passion for adventure and the natural world, I should look into a career as
a park ranger or wildlife biologist. But whether from stubbornness or stupidity, I kept dreaming of exploring. The explorers I read about in history books loomed large in my imagination: they were heroic adventurers who undertook dangerous journeys sponsored by geographical societies to navigate wild rivers and map uncharted lands. I aspired to do precisely the same thing—no matter how improbable this goal seemed to others. And succeed I did. By the age of twenty-five, I was leading an expedition to a river that was so remote it had never been explored or even named. This book recounts that adventure and my other expeditions to unexplored rivers for the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.
PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME how I became an explorer. They wonder how I acquired all my wilderness survival skills. Did I take the best survival course offered anywhere? Had I been the most diligent of Boy Scouts? Was I an orphan who was raised by some grizzled old-timer in a cabin in the backwoods? The answer to all three questions is no. The truth is, developing survival skills and learning about the outdoors was the easy part. There was nothing to it: it was just an incidental part of my youth and a logical consequence of growing up with a passion for the outdoors in rural Canada. My backyard in Fenwick, Ontario, was a swampy deciduous forest, and there I roamed with my fraternal twin, Ben, and our dog from sun-up to sundown. My father, a woodworker who could make anything with his hands, taught us how to fish, trap, track, and enjoy the mystery of the woods. The hard part was figuring out how I could use these skills in a career. After the bloom of boyhood enthusiasm and dreams of exotic lands had worn off, I assumed that exploration was largely a thing of the past—that the whole world had already been explored. It was only when I started to study geography, history, archaeology, and anthropology that I learned that the age of exploration was far from over. This knowledge, rather than any physical skill like rock climbing or canoeing, was the difficult part of my journey to success as an explorer. I first had to appreciate that the world still contained hidden gems waiting to be revealed.
Over the course of high school, I became disillusioned with my prospects. I remember watching someone on the Discovery Channel say that there was nothing left to explore in the world—that the entire planet had already been explored. Not knowing any better, I resigned myself to believing that this was true. After all, the source was the Discovery Channel. It was only when I entered university that I came to realize, from better books and wiser sources, that the world still contained unexplored areas. This knowledge was invigorating. It made me realize that my childhood dream was—if not yet within reach—at least theoretically possible. To my amazement, I learned that new species were still frequently discovered (such as the Lavasoa dwarf lemur in Madagascar and a species of toothless rat in the Indonesian rainforest), that some parts of the world are yet unmapped, that rivers exist that no one has ever canoed, and that mountains exist that no one has ever climbed. As incredible as it seemed, some Stone Age tribes were still living in isolation from the outside world, deep in the Amazon jungle. It seemed, then, that the adventures of the past were not over, and that it was yet possible to live the life of an explorer.
What intrigued me the most was looking at maps showing wilderness around the world—they indicated that the earth’s greatest expanse of wilderness outside Antarctica happened to be in my own country: Canada. What a blessing to be born in a land of almost limitless wilderness. This vast area offered me the best prospects for exploration. Canada’s desolate northern wild stretches across more than five thousand kilometres—from the Alaskan border to the windswept shores of Labrador—and forms a wilderness region larger than the Amazon rainforest, the Sahara Desert, the wilds of Siberia, or the Australian Outback. Even today it’s possible to travel through Canada’s remote northern landscape for literally thousands of kilometres without ever crossing a single road. As I would soon learn first-hand, a person can journey for weeks into these wilds without seeing another soul or even any trace of humanity. There is nothing else like it on the planet. And this wilderness is even greater than Canada’s political boundaries: it continues westward into Alaska, all the way to the Bering Sea; eastward across the ice and frigid seas into the immensity of Greenland; and northward to the Pole. It comprises over a dozen distinct ecosystems, including the icy barren lands of the Arctic, the subarctic boreal forest, the snowcapped peaks of the Rocky Mountains, the lush temperate rainforest of the Pacific coast, the swampy Hudson Bay Lowlands, and the rugged northern cordillera.
The population density of this enormous swath of wilderness is less than 0.09 people per square kilometre, meaning that most of it has no population at all. To put that in perspective, the population density of India is 390 people per square kilometre and the population density of Mongolia, the world’s most sparsely inhabited country, is 1.76 people per square kilometre. In other words, Mongolia’s barren landscape is approximately nineteen times more populated than the immense wilderness cloaking northern North America. On a global map showing population density, Canada’s northern wilderness appears as one vast uninhabited wasteland—or a paradise, if your point-of-view is similar to mine. It’s little wonder then that mapping and exploring this territory has taken centuries and is still not finished today.
Leaving aside the excursions of the Vikings and aboriginal people, Europeans first began exploring Canada in 1497 with John Cabot’s voyage to the rocky shores of Newfoundland. In the centuries that followed, explorers gradually filled in the broad outlines of Canadian geography, mapping and exploring the major rivers, lakes, and coastlines. But this still left thousands of rivers and lakes as well as countless topographic features uncharted. In 1916, the Geological Survey of Canada estimated that the country still contained over nine hundred thousand square miles (almost one and a half million square kilometres) of unexplored territory that appeared as blank spots on the map. The Survey was founded in 1842 with the purpose of accurately mapping all of Canada, building off the work of early explorers stretching back to the time of Samuel de Champlain. But despite nearly seventy-five years of systematic fieldwork that involved dispatching parties of explorers to canoe rivers and map as much territory as possible, Canada is so vast that well into the twentieth century an aggregate area nearly the size of India remained virtually unexplored. Astoundingly, it was only in 2012 that the last 1:50,000 scale topographic map of Canada was finally finished, which completed the mapping of Canada at that scale—the standard scale for a topographic map. However, despite this accomplishment, considerable portions of the country’s wilderness remain unexplored and, in some cases, aren’t even accurately mapped. How is that possible?
Technology superseded actual exploration. By the 1920s, the Geological Survey began to rely on aerial surveys conducted with airplanes. With the newly invented planes (and later helicopters), surveyors were able to fly over remote stretches of Canada taking aerial photographs that could then be used to finish the process of mapping the country (safely, back in Ottawa). This type of surveying was a far cry from the traditional work of cartographers in birchbark canoes, trudging through wilderness with theodolites to painstakingly explore, map, and record the geography of unknown lands. Today, we have progressed to even more advanced methods with the use of satellites. But viewing the ground from high above in airplanes, helicopters, or satellites is no more like exploration than staring at the moon through a telescope in your backyard is akin to the Apollo moon landings. Deriving maps from satellite imagery and aerial photographs also ensures that some topographic features—such as waterfalls and islands—are occasionally missed. Ultimately, the only way to really know what’s out there is to do things the old-fashioned way, by seeking out the rivers no one has canoed, the mountains no one has climbed, and the caves no one has entered. As far as this sort of actual boots-on-the-ground exploration goes, Canada still contains plenty of territory that has no record of any person exploring it. When modern explorers venture into these isolated places, it remains possible to discover topographic features omitted from the map, as I began to
do myself soon after high school.
That brings us to what professional exploration has always been about: not the hair-raising adventures and narrow escapes that were the stuff of my childhood imagination, but the generation of new geographical information that adds to humanity’s stock of collective knowledge. You could think of professional exploration like a grand mural, with each explorer as an artist who contributes a little more detail to the big picture. Historically, explorers’ manuscripts and maps filled up the private studies and libraries of a privileged few in the capitals of Europe. Relics from explorers’ journeys to the far corners of the earth bedecked aristocrats’ wondrous cabinets of curiosities. Today, explorers’ reports are more widely available, thus enriching not a privileged elite, but anyone who takes an interest in their revelations. Exploration has always been a two-step process: a physical journey followed by the publication or dissemination of new geographical knowledge. Without engaging in both steps, one is not truly engaged in exploration.
In my own small way, I try to contribute to our understanding of Canada’s wilderness. I seek to add a few more brush strokes to the grand mural of Canada’s topography by being the first to photograph, film, canoe, or make written descriptions of a particular river, lake, or area whose features are yet to be drawn.
At this point, you might be wondering how the nomadic hunter-gatherers of North America’s past fit into the story of exploration. After all, didn’t they at some point in time paddle or travel every inch of Canada’s wilderness? While these nomads covered a lot of ground, aside from limited archaeological finds, we have no way of knowing exactly what areas they did or didn’t visit. This is because they created no maps nor left any written records behind. Their journeys have vanished into the unknowable mists of time. In other words, though they were in some respects among the greatest travellers who ever lived (they made journeys that no modern individual could hope to equal), ultimately they made no contribution to the mural of Canada’s wilderness. That is not to say that latter-day aboriginal people made no contribution—great aboriginal explorers such as the Chipewyan leader Matonabbee and the heroic Cree adventurer George Elson journeyed into isolated regions where neither they nor anyone they knew had previously ventured. Many European explorers could not have succeeded without the help and expertise of aboriginal people. But it’s an error to equate hunter-gatherers—or for that matter, fur traders, adventurers, sport hunters, and wilderness campers—with explorers. Explorers are a different breed altogether.
