Anderson River, Northwest Territories, 1999

[Alan Gage]

That fish looks like a huge whitefish with a huge mouth.

I had to look it up because I'd never heard of it. What I read said it was a type of whitefish. A big type.

Alan

 

[Canotrouge]

I had to look it up because I'd never heard of it. What I read said it was a type of whitefish. A big type.

Alan

We have them in the Yukon river, but not in big quantity and not easy to catch... And yes inconnue is unknown in french!!
Will be nice to meet you PaddlingPitt

 

[VernAK]

Here in Alaska they are called "sheefish".......huge ones are caught in Kotzebue area.

 

[PaddlingPitt]

It was a beautiful campsite covered in lush grass and flowers, including paintbrush whose colour comes from the bracts not the petals.

Seashore camomille, and

Tall Jacobs Ladder, which we read in our plant books grows primarily in the western arctic, likely surviving the last glacial advance in the Beringia refugium, which remained free of ice. Several northern species of Jacobs Ladder likely survived the ice age in this refugium, and have spread eastward since the ice melted.

As always, I organized our campfire for supper down near the water’s edge. I prefer to cook on sand or gravel. That way I don’t damage plants, and afterwards, there’s no blackened soil. It’s a very good approach, except of course, when camped only 15 km (9 miles) from the Arctic coast. During supper, the incoming tide flowed up the Anderson River, which crept 3 m up the bank and completely flooded out our campfire. Now this didn’t happen all at once. We could see the river rising. Every few minutes we would reassure ourselves that “It can’t come much higher. It’s bound to stop rising soon. After all, we we’re 15 km from the coast. How much farther up the bank can it come?”

Far enough to force us to abandon our campfire—that’s how far. At least now, though, we knew when high tide would occur tomorrow morning. That would be approximately 12 hours and 15 minutes from now. We would be ready to leave tomorrow on the falling tide and just ride the current down to Krekovick Landing. (Note: I’ve just reread Mackay’s paper on the Anderson River, and he wrote that “the tidal effects are said to be felt as far as Husky Bend,” which is about 50 km (30 miles) upriver.)

At 9:00 p.m. we heard the sound of a motor coming down the Anderson River. A few minutes later Jorgan Elias stepped out of his boat.

“We’re going down to the cabin at Schooner Landing for a few days. You should join us there tomorrow.” (Note: Schooner Landing is the local name for Krekovick Landing.)

“Sure, Jorgan. That would be great.”

I hoped we could make it tomorrow, I thought to myself. It’s only 15 km. We’ll have a falling tide plus the river’s current. We should be able to make it, even with a headwind.

“On the way down here from my camp,” Jorgan reported, “I passed three groups of canoeists. One couple is about two days from here. Two more groups of four are behind them.”

The Anderson River seemed to be getting crowded. Time to get to the coast. Only 15 km (9 miles) to go. We should make it tomorrow, one day ahead of schedule.

I slept soundly until 8:00 a.m. Kathleen and I enjoyed a leisurely breakfast in a warm, calm morning. We waited for the ebb tide to flow downriver, and headed off to Krekovick Landing. We drifted past low, gentle verdant hills looking almost manicured—stretching out endlessly away from the river.

In the early afternoon, 27 days after leaving our cabin at the north end of Colville Lake, we finally arrived at Krekovick Landing, where Jorgan, Roseanne, and Mary greeted us with warm hospitality and hot coffee.

Soon afterward, we headed 6 km (3.5 miles) back up the Anderson River in Jorgan’s powerboat to collect fresh water from a small lake at the head of a barely navigable tributary. You should remember this if you ever paddle the Anderson River. You might want to take fresh water with you to Krekovick Landing.

Jorgan’s son is a guide outfitter, and we stop to check up on his hunting camp.

We see caribou, and their signs, everywhere. Hunting should be easy here.

That definitely got Beency excited. Said he was looking forward to bagging his first caribou.

After supper, we chatted in the cabin until 1:30 a.m., stepping outside frequently to admire the midnight sun. A whaler originally built this Canadian Wildlife Service cabin in the 1960s. He intended to establish a trading post here but drowned before completing construction. The Canadian Wildlife Service abandoned the cabin around 1990, and it is now used primarily by native hunters.

Native peoples have used Krekovick Landing, which they call Schooner Landing, for many years. The first known Inuit site on the coast dates to 1350 AD. We found these sled runners, pretty much all that is left of the articles placed on the graves around this area.

After saying good night to our hosts, Kathleen and I crawled into our sleeping bags that were spread out on a bedroom floor. Nice not to have to make or break camp. Good to be out of the wind. Good to be out of the mud. We intended to sleep late. Our Anderson River paddling adventure had ended. Zero kilometres to go.

The following afternoon, we motored off in Jorgan’s boat approximately 8 km (5 miles) east along the Arctic coast to the site of Stanton, which was established in 1937 as a Roman Catholic mission. Several small cabins were built of driftwood at the mouth of a small stream. Originally, only one white trapper and his family lived there, but later, about five Inuit families also came to live at or near Stanton.

Margaret Brown’s father was a whaler from Texas, and she was born here to an Inuit mother. You remember Margaret. She is the wife of Bern Will Brown, our landlord at Colville Lake. Our host Jorgan was also born here at Stanton.

Nothing now exists of the small community except for the church and two graveyards, slowly deteriorating on a bleak and desolate beach at the edge of the polar sea.

The site for Stanton was chosen partly because of plentiful nearby driftwood and good fishing, which remains excellent to this day. In only minutes, Roseanne’s nets teemed with whitefish, and we headed back to Kreckovik Landing.

At 2:00 a.m. we sat on the beach enjoying barbecued fish and baked potatoes —our campfire fuelled by a forest of driftwood deposited here at the mouth of the Anderson River. The sun drifted toward the northern horizon with no intention of setting. Kathleen and I began this journey six months ago, January 31, at the north end of Colville Lake. We had come with our urban vision of wilderness as a vast, empty, unpeopled landscape. Instead, we had discovered a neighbourhood—a community of people—both past and present—sharing their journeys through time and space. We went to bed that night satisfied and content.

On July 17, after breakfast, we set off down the Anderson River in Jorgan’s powerboat to hunt caribou. Within minutes, we spotted a caribou on the ridge, on river right. Jorgan stood up in the boat and fired his rifle, sending up a puff of dirt at the caribou’s feet. The caribou didn’t move. Jorgan fired again, sending up another puff of dirt at the caribou’s feet. I’m not a hunter, but I was impressed with Jorgan’s marksmanship. The caribou stood a couple hundred metres away, and Jorgan was shooting from a moving, pitching boat. Even so, he came very close to hitting the unsuspecting caribou.

Jorgan fired a third time and seemed to miss completely—no puff of dirt. The caribou appeared completely unconcerned and simply turned to wander slowly over the ridge and out of view. We motored down and then back up the Anderson River for another 30 minutes or so without seeing any more caribou. We headed back to the cabin for lunch.

Back inside, Jorgan expressed surprise that he missed completely on his third shot.

“I shot higher. I should’a got ’em.”

Jorgan then looked down the barrel of his rifle and saw that the third bullet had lodged just before exiting. The bullet was truly jammed. Jorgan and I worked for over an hour to get it out. I don’t know why, or how commonly, bullets jam in rifle barrels. But I was very surprised. I’m also thinking that we were lucky that the caribou had wandered over the ridge. If Jorgan had fired a fourth time, with that third bullet lodged, I assume that someone could have been seriously hurt.

After lunch, we used Jorgan’s radio phone to call the float plane company in Inuvik about our pickup. We had originally scheduled our pickup for the late afternoon on July 18. We had planned to reach Krekovick Landing at the end of the paddling day on July 16. A full layover day on July 17, followed by nearly another full day on July 18 gave us an ample cushion in case we had fallen behind schedule. But, Kathleen and I were at Krekovick Landing now. We were ready to go home. Might as well leave earlier.

Jorgan also called relatives in Inuvik, asking them to buy groceries and supplies to take to the float plane company. No sense for the plane to come out empty. Kathleen and I were paying for the flight out to Krekovick Landing, so the plane might as well bring groceries. It was the least we could do to acknowledge Jorgan’s hospitality.

Our charter flight arrived in mid-morning on July 18, and we flew back to Inuvik, where last January 31, Kathleen and I lifted off the frozen runway at -40 C (-40 F). So different from today’s warmth. We taxied over to the float plane dock, where our friends Marilyn and Alan Fehr waited with our van.

Inuvik’s annual arts and craft fair was in full swing, and we decided to spend a few days in town before heading south, back down the Dempster Highway, toward our home in North Vancouver. Late in the afternoon, on our third and final day in Inuvik, we found a note jammed under the windshield wiper of our van. I don’t have the note anymore, but it said something like this:

“We see that you have a red canoe. You are probably the people who were a day or two ahead of us on the Anderson River. Why don’t you come over to the hotel pub this evening around six.”

That sounded like fun. I love talking about the river with other canoeists. So Kathleen and I showed up a few minutes before six, sat down, and watched people coming through the door. A few minutes after six, a man and a woman entered the pub, glancing around as though they were looking for someone. They sat down at an empty table, still looking around. They must be the note writers, so we walked over and introduced ourselves. I’m sorry that I can’t remember their names. I should have still been keeping my journal. But the canoe trip was over. I don’t keep a journal unless I’m on a canoe trip. I’ll call our new friends Bob and Mary. I’ll call them Bob and Mary from Toronto. The Toronto part is accurate. I remember that.

“Say, Bob. I’m curious. Why did you think that Kathleen and I were the people ahead of you on the river just because we had a red canoe on our van?”

“Well, you won’t believe this, Michael, but we were sitting in camp one night when a float plane landed and a man by the name of Bern Will Brown popped out and gave us a fresh-baked pie! He said he’d been out several times looking for you and your red canoe. He spotted our red canoe and thought it was yours. ‘I’ve landed,’ he said. ‘You have a red canoe. You might as well have the pie’.”

“Hey, Bob. That was my pie. You don’t happen to have any mail for me, do you?”

“No. But I would be honoured to buy the next round and drink a toast to all our great memories of the Anderson River.”

You gotta like Bob and Mary. We reminisced for a couple of hours. We shared with them our many, memorable images. Isolated lakes. Seemingly infinite boreal forest. Timeless polar ocean. Verdant tundra stretching toward the horizon. Canyons and rapids. Grizzlies and wolverines. Swans and geese. Unrelenting northwest wind. Absolute silence. Unending light. Unbounded freedom. Morning campsites adorned with wildflowers. Sunlit cliffs of ochre, glowing red and yellow. Hot bread and buttered popcorn shared with our footprint friends. Beach barbecues hosted by Jorgan, Roseanne, and Mary. Bern Will Brown bearing gifts from above. It was one heck of a trip. I had already forgotten about all that mud.

It had been almost six months since we lifted off that frozen runway in Inuvik at -40 C (-40 F) to spend an isolated winter at the north end of Colville Lake. Beautiful memories of our own snow-shoe trails. Winter camping. Dragging to town over the ice in an April blizzard. The explosion of birds returning from the south in Spring.

So many more memories since we left our cabin on Colville Lake 4 weeks ago to paddle down the Anderson River. But it was now the end of our adventure that began nearly 6 months ago.

Soon after returning to our positions at the University of British Columbia, Kathleen and I gave a slide show about our life at Colville Lake. After the presentation one of my colleagues commented that, “It must be hard to come back, Mike.”

“No, Jim,” I replied. “It’s more than hard. It’s impossible to come back. I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

I was right. I could no longer accept office walls, meetings and schedules. My stomach knotted every time I approached campus for another day of work. I sometimes became irritable and short-tempered. I tired easily. I often struggled for hours to complete even a short memo. I missed my quiet, unfettered life at Colville Lake.

Kathleen felt the same tensions, and left her position after only one more year, at the age of 48.

In September of 2002, I turned 55 and gladly accepted the generous buy-out offered by my sympathetic Faculty Dean. Kathleen and I (OK. Mostly me.) sometimes still worry that perhaps we were foolish to walk away from well-paying positions. But those worries usually last for only a few moments. As one of my academic colleagues once said, "No one on their death bed ever wishes they had more publications."

 

[pataneap]

Once again, a great trip report! Your photographs are lovely!..........................Tony

 

[memaquay]

Your trip report has been an inspiration to me! I'm going to pull the plug on this working bullpucky next year and spend much more time doing the things that feed my soul. Thanks so much for all your time and dedication in putting this most epic report ever together. It's going to be a longer winter now that you have finished. Are you finished? Are there a couple of more reports still waiting? You have created a demanding fan base!

 

[Canotrouge]

Your trip report has been an inspiration to me! I'm going to pull the plug on this working bullpucky next year and spend much more time doing the things that feed my soul. Thanks so much for all your time and dedication in putting this most epic report ever together. It's going to be a longer winter now that you have finished. Are you finished? Are there a couple of more reports still waiting? You have created a demanding fan base!

I'm with Mem... I still have to work a bit more(rest of my life most likely) but I will be thinking of that amazing trip report next time a possible big trip come up to not find excuses to not go!

 

[VernAK]

I too have met some interesting folks on canoe trips. I'm fascinated with the different gear and techniques adopted by
long time canoists.

 

[Dan Cooke]

Thank you for sharing this. Well done!

 

[PaddlingPitt]

Are there a couple of more reports still waiting? You have created a demanding fan base!

Thanks for all your support guys! I do have some more reports, but I think I will wait until early summer, or I will run out of material. Our first wilderness canoe trip, with two other couples, was in 1990, on the South Nahanni River, from the Moose Ponds down to Blackstone Landing on the Liard River. I didn't keep a journal, and we had only one camera. So I do not have the detail, or quality of images, of my later trips. We did prepare a slide show, however, and have given it many times in the past. Slides are already scanned. I think I will post that one next.

In 1993 Kathleen and I paddled by ourselves 37 days, and 950 km (600 miles) down the Thelon River, from Lynx Lake to Baker Lake at the head of Chesterfield Inlet on Hudson Bay. We both kept journals. Lots of detail for that TR. Slides are already scanned. I would like to post that after the Nahanni TR.

I have already presented our 1995 Coppermine River report.

In 1996, Kathleen and I paddled the South Saskatchewan River from the confluence with the Old Man River in Alberta, to just inside the western border of Saskatchewan. It was Kathleen's trick to get me to attend a family reunion in Saskatchewan. It's not a northern trip, from my perspective. But we did prepare a slide show for our canoe club, as sort of a humorous takeoff on longer, northern, more adventurous trips. We have given the slide show only once, and I have not scanned in the slides. As you might know, that's a lot of work. But it might be interesting.

I have already presented our 1997 Seal River report, and our 1999 Colville Lake/Anderson River Reports.

In 2001 Kathleen and I paddled the Snowdrift River, from Lynx Lake, where we began our Thelon River trip. This time, though, we went west, over the height of land, and then down the Snowdrift to near Great Slave Lake, where we took out to avoid lots of certain portages at the end of this river. Lots of detail, and lots of nice images. I would like to post this one after the Thelon River.

In 2004 Kathleen and I paddled the Arctic Red River, nearly from its source, down to the Mackenzie River, and then on to Inuvik. We mistakenly went with a couple that we barely knew. Our respective approaches differed quite markedly. We did not enjoy the trip. I stopped writing in my journal after the first couple of days, and took almost no pictures. A lesson learned.

From 2003 to 2008, we were on Pender Island, and did a lot of ocean canoeing. No trip reports for that.

We moved to Saskatchewan in 2008, and adopted four older sled dogs. There was no time for canoeing. The last dog died in 2016. In 2017 we paddled on Great Slave Lake. I already posted that TR.

Next year we intend to paddle the Yukon River from Whitehorse to Dawson City. It's only takes about two weeks. We have made other shorter trips, such as 10 days on the Dease River in northeastern B.C., and 7 days on the Bowron Lakes chain in central B.C. These shorter trips did not inspire me to keep a journal, or even prepare a slide show. There could be a TR on our pending Yukon River trip, but it's only two weeks! I'll try my best though, as I do like all the nice feedback I'm getting!!!!!

Looking forward to seeing you in Whitehorse, Canotrouge! I believe that's French for Red Canoe.

 

[Gamma1214]

PP, I'm curious: What did you do at the university? I ask because you seem to have a tremendous interest in Botany but you are a very engaging and entertaining writer. (probably taught Physics or something )

PS:

We didn't take any pictures of us standing innocently naked.

No offense intended but... Thank you.

 

[PaddlingPitt]

Gamma1214,

I taught grassland ecology/grazing management. Although not trained as a botanist, I knew about and was interested in plants.

In first year university, my English course required readings of books by Loren Eisley, a philosopher and great natural history writer. I wanted to be Loren Eisley. An unachievable aspiration.

 

[Jim Dodd]

You TWO are truly inspirational ! Some times we put our Dreams on the back burner, My time of such exploration, has long been gone, which made me enjoy your exploits even more !

Thank you !

Jim

 

[Gamma1214]

Ah, but ALL aspirations should be unachievable... If we shoot for the stars and miss, we wind up on the mountain. Shoot for the mountain and we're still in the trees.

 

[Jim Dodd]

I will think of you every time I make Bannock !

Thanks !

Jim

 

[recped]

Another great trip report!

We mistakenly went with a couple that we barely knew. Our respective approaches differed quite markedly. We did not enjoy the trip.

Sometimes it's not the "approaches" it's the people themselves. I've had good luck with complete strangers (ie: first meeting at put-in).

 

[PaddlingPitt]

Our paddling companions on the Arctic Red River demanded to travel by the clock, not by the conditions. I would say something like, "There's a great place to camp. We haven't seen anything campable for three hours. I think we should stop."

They would say something like, "But it's only 3:30. It's not time to stop."

So we paddled on.

At exactly five o'clock, they would say, "Five o'clock. Time to stop."

"But this is an awful place to camp. Just a narrow strip of mud covered in goose crap."

"Five o'clock. Time to stop."

Same for stopping for lunch. Had to be exactly at noon.

Kathleen and I always deferred, just so we wouldn't have to hear them whine.

Was it the people or the differing approaches? Either way, it was a wasted potential adventure from our perspective.

 

[Gamma1214]

Was it the people or the differing approaches?

Probably both. I think they'd have been on a solo trip by the 2nd or 3rd day.