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The World's Top Canoe Expeditions - From Voyageurs to Modern-Day Record Setters
The World's Top Canoe Expeditions - From Voyageurs to modern-day record setters, the definitive list of the world's top canoe trips (to be argued over until time immemorial) Several centuries ago, in the vast, roadless wilderness of North America, the canoe single-handedly opened our continent to commerce, communication and exploration. No other tool better served the people of the day, allowing them to venture into a jumbled mass of lakes, rivers, mountains and prairies. Can it be that this craft is the simplest, most versatile mode of transportation ever invented? In the days of exploration and mapping, of course, traveling by canoe was all in a day's work. Explorers used it because they had to. Voyageurs With nothing but basic equipment and an indomitable spirit, these early explorers set standards that continue to inspire modern paddlers. With natives utilizing birch bark and dugout canoes for centuries before Europeans arrived, many early settlers quickly set to the task of exploring, mapping and taking stock of North America's bounty with paddles in hand. Their names mark many of our biggest lakes and rivers: Samuel de Champlain, Alexander Mackenzie, Lewis and Clark. Relying on courage, survival skills and the goodwill of natives to survive, their goals largely revolved around trade and commerce. Champlain was the original French voyageur, and he paved the way for the fur trade with his 1615 canoe trip from Montreal to the Great Lakes. It would take more than a century and a half before Mackenzie would reach Arctic and Pacific shores by canoe. Lewis and Clark were a few years behind, pushing a route up the Missouri River, across three imposing mountain ranges and finally onto the Pacific in 1805. Here's a closer look at several of those early explorers who not only opened up the continent, but have inspired many of today's most celebrated long-distance canoe expeditions. Samuel de Champlain: Birth of the French Voyageur Samuel de Champlain may have been the first European to explore North America by canoe. With his courageous heart and knack for building relations with native tribes, his early exploits earned him a position as the Lieutenant of New France. He took it upon himself to build the fur trade into a booming enterprise, which meant exploring the eastern waterways to establish trade routes. Champlain s most famous sojourn was his 1615 journey up the surging Ottawa River to its confluence with the Mattawa. Champlain and his party were guided up the Mattawa by the Huron tribe, then across Lake Nipissing and down the French River into Georgian Bay, which he called a "freshwater sea." There he spent the next several weeks with native allies preparing for war against the Iroquois. Helping the Hurons against their southern enemies was the best way to encourage native cooperation, he reasoned, which in turn would help him to secure a trade monopoly across the north. By late summer Champlain and his men traveled on foot to Lake Ontario where they laid siege to an Iroquois village. Champlain was struck in the knee by an arrow, and was forced to winter with his native friends, learning much about native customs, establishing stronger ties between the French, the Hurons and their allies, and blazing the way for the fur trade. Alexander Mackenzie: First Across the Continent Alexander Mackenzie ranks as one of the greatest explorers on land, sea or river. The rogue Scot not only paddled to the Arctic Ocean in 1789 on the river that now bears his name, but he's also credited with the first crossing of the continent in 1793. His discoveries and surveys of the great Canadian north are a testament to the role fur traders played in unlocking many of North America's secrets. Mackenzie had a bulldog personality. Wealth and his ego were responsible for driving his explorations with the fledgling Northwest Company, and he stepped on many people along the way to achieve his goals. The wilderness provided him with a means to expand the British Empire, and an arena for his own profitable speculation. Mackenzie's 1789 voyage disembarked as early as the breakup of ice on Great Slave Lake would allow. Travelling north from Lake Athabasca with four canoes, the small party of Canadians and native guides were soon in trouble. The Slave River portages were numerous and long, and choked with ice, driftwood, and steep landings bordered by violent currents. One of the native canoes was swept sideways and the party couldn't keep it from plummeting over a falls. Once on the lake, a maze of broken ice threatened to puncture their birch bark vessels. After nearly a month of desperate searching, Mackenzie finally found the mouth of the river. For many more days and nights he relentlessly pushed downstream. Tormented by mosquitoes and a crew threatening desertion, it's a small miracle that the party even made it to the "Great Sea." But realizing this sea wasn t the Pacific, he felt like a failure. He returned to Lake Athabasca 102 days after setting out, having logged nearly 3,000 miles. Four years later Mackenzie readied himself for another push into the great unknown. This time he was bent on reaching the Pacific and ordered the construction of a 25-foot birch bark canoe that would carry 10 men and one and a half tons of provisions. As with so many early journeys, he relied heavily on gifts and trinkets to procure native cooperation. Even so, Mackenzie faced mutiny as they fumbled their way up the surging waters of the Peace. Impassable rapids meant unloading and bushwhacking with supplies up to four times every two miles. Hellish high-water eventually led the men into the mountains, where a native guide told Mackenzie to turn left onto the Parsnip River. The Parsnip led them up and over the Continental Divide near Arctic Lake, and finally down to Herrick Creek, where their canoe was destroyed in ferocious whitewater. They built a 30-foot canoe and eventually drifted down the McGregor River and onto the tumultuous Fraser, which Mackenzie mistakenly assumed was the Columbia. After descending the dangerous Fraser Canyon for 420 miles, Mackenzie decided to complete the final leg of the crossing on foot. His guides led them to a trail used by coastal tribes for inland trade. With huge packs and meager rations the men plodded on, over snow-covered passes and down canyon walls, and nearly a month later arrived at a small native village on the Bella Coola River. Natives paddled them the final 30 miles out to the ocean, shooting short falls along the way without scouting. "I had imagined that the Canadians who accompanied me were the most expert canoeists in the world," Mackenzie mused in his journal. "But they are far inferior to these people." On July 20 Mackenzie arrived on the Pacific shore, his dream of crossing the continent finally realized. Lewis and Clark: Corps of Discovery In the spring of 1804, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark led a group of nearly four dozen men across the Mississippi and started a long and arduous journey up the muddy waters of the Missouri River. Travelling with two canoes and a large keelboat, the party spent the next six months struggling against the Missouri's stiff current, poling or lining sections that were too shallow or choked with snags to proceed. Ropes broke and drifting logs rammed the vessels, nearly spelling disaster on several occasions. By the end of October the explorers were at the edge of the known world, and remained confident that the following spring would bring the discovery of easy passage to the West Coast. With Mackenzie's successful 1793 crossing, there was renewed pressure on the U.S. to establish a Pacific trade route. Thomas Jefferson was anxious to grow the nation and explore the unknown country beyond the Mississippi. The newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, not to mention the remote Oregon country, were still great question marks in the national psyche. After wintering in North Dakota, Lewis and Clark pressed on toward the western mountains, but it was not until September that they finally reached the Bitterroots, and while crossing them became lost, wandering for eleven days through blizzards with almost nothing to eat. They finally found Lemni Pass. Suffering from exhaustion and malnutrition, the expedition descended to the Clearwater River. There they met the Nez Perce, who fed them cama roots and salmon and showed them how to build canoes from ponderosa pine. It took the exploration party another two months to finally reach the Pacific, riding the whitewater of the Clearwater, Snake and Columbia rivers downstream. The Snake proved to be the most challenging, and progress was often limited because of frequent spills in the rocky rapids, resulting in the loss of many supplies. On the morning of November 7 the expedition finally approached the broad mouth of the Columbia. Greeting them were giant Pacific swells and torrential rains. A series of violent storms pinned them down for three weeks, their reward for a year and a half of struggle and toil. Not that it mattered much: the explorers were ecstatic that they had finally reached their goal. Now all they had to do was get back. Simon Fraser: Into the Jaws of Hell After Lewis and Clark successfully reached the Pacific in 1805, the race to secure a viable overland trade route to the West Coast was on. For that arduous task the Northwest Company chose Simon Fraser, whose instructions were to establish a string of trading posts west of the Great Divide, and to follow the river Alexander Mackenzie had found in 1793 to its mouth (which they assumed was the Columbia). A Scot, like Mackenzie, Fraser was grumpy and devoid of charm, but was nothing if not obstinate the perfect choice for the task at hand. On May 28, 1808, Fraser and his band of 23 Voyageurs and natives departed from Fort George (now Prince George) in four large canoes. They fielded reports from natives along the way that the rapids downstream were impassable, but that hardly stopped the determined Fraser, who generally viewed natives as inferior savages. Fraser likely wished he'd have listened, because his party was soon swept into a seething cauldron of whitewater. Running high with spring meltwater, the river eventually became so perilous that the men chose to hack footholds into the cliffs rather than paddle through the maelstrom, and they portaged the canoes along narrow ledges. It was a desperate situation, one crisis appearing after another. At several places the men were forced onto the river, and at one point a voyageur rode an overturned canoe for three miles through monstrous waves. Thankfully, Fraser's men located a rough native trail carved into the precipitous cliffs, which allowed them to avoid paddling Hell s Gate. They reached the Pacific July 2. The return trip was even worse, as the small band was plagued by hostile natives that dropped boulders onto their canoes from above, or showered them with arrows if they tried to pitch camp. "We had to pass where no human being should venture," Fraser wrote in his journal. All he really accomplished was to prove that the Fraser was not the Columbia, and that it would never provide a navigable fur trade route. Mostly, Fraser was lucky to be alive. David Thompson: The Great One David Thompson, despite a total lack of notoriety, may have been the greatest canoe Voyageur and geographer of them all. Armed with little more than a brass sextant and perseverance, he covered 80,000 miles and filled 77 journals with observations during his career with the Northwest Company, making maps that rival images gleaned from today's satellites. It's been said that David Thompson made Lewis and Clark look like tourists. Even Alexander Mackenzie marveled at his prowess, remarking after one particularly difficult 10-month trip that it should have taken Thompson two years to complete the reconnaissance. Thompson drove his men to the brink of exhaustion, much as Mackenzie had. Unlike Mackenzie, however, Thompson preferred anonymity. He prided himself on being a pious man among the wildly profane French Voyageurs, and was one of the few Europeans who refused to trade liquor and tobacco to the natives. His disdain for the spotlight ensured that not a portrait or painting exists of the man. Thompson may have been educated but he was also a true woodsman, and exulted in the spirit of wilderness travel unlike most of his peers. His journals vividly describe his canoe exploits, which often involved running rapids in huge, heavily loaded vessels. On one trip Thompson and his native guides were steering and lining their canoe around some turbulent water, when the canoe and Thompson were grabbed by the powerful current and swept over some large falls, burying Thompson in waves at the bottom. Thompson's foot was ripped open, and most of their clothes, food and weapons were swept downstream. They almost starved to death before stumbling onto a Dene encampment a week later. In 1807 Thompson crossed the Rockies at Howse Pass after the hostile Piegan tribe was drawn south to avenge the death of two Indians at the hands of Lewis and Clark. He discovered the source of the Columbia River and spent several years exploring its tributaries and tracking it all the way to the Pacific. Still later, Thompson discovered Athabasca Pass, an easily accessed and navigable route to the Pacific that had eluded Mackenzie and other explorers. For the next seven decades, Athabasca Pass carried the bulk of the continent's fur trade. John MacGregor: the Rob Roy Credit for turning canoeing from work to play can largely be handed to John MacGregor, yet another exuberant Scot with a magnetic attraction for publicity. During a trip through Canada in 1859, he paddled several canoes on the Ottawa River and immediately fell in love with the sport. Traveling onto Kamchatka he was soon introduced to northern kayaks, and when he returned to England he set to the task of building a canoe of European technology and Inuit design. His intention was to create a hybrid craft that was stable, durable and comfortable for long-distance tripping. In 1865 his canoe was finished, and he christened the covered oak boat the Rob Roy. With ample space below deck for supplies and religious tracts, he set off for a three-month paddling tour around France, Germany and Switzerland, which took him to more than 20 lakes and rivers, covering over 1,000 miles. The following year he published a book about his exploits A Thousand Miles in the Rob Roy Canoe which was quickly snatched off bookshelves on both sides of the Atlantic. His enthusiasm was contagious, and soon canoe clubs were spawned across North America and Europe, including the Royal Canoe Club, which was headed by the Prince of Wales a coup for MacGregor s mission. Gentlemen adventurers of the late 1800s turned from paddling around the European continent to grand explorations in the Canadian Northwest. Modern-day Marathoners The Voyageurs may have been the real deal, but that hasn't stopped a few hardy souls from making current canoe-tripping history. Nothing sounds more romantic than a birch bark canoe gliding silently across the great northern wilderness, loon-song shivering across a misty lake, the roar of unknown rapids around the bend. There s been thousands of canoeists who've dreamed this Voyageur dream usually after reading about their exploits in books and old journals. A few have grasped the gauntlet of challenge and paddled with it, hoping to make their mark. Almost all have utilized modern day equipment and maps, and as a result have completed some pretty spectacular trips that would have seemed ludicrous even to guys like Mackenzie. Take Verlen Kruger, a modern-day paddling messiah who has logged more canoe miles than any of the Voyageurs. Nearly 80, Kruger is close to logging his hundred thousandth mile by canoe. Yet he says, "Ever since I started reading about those early explorers they've been my heroes. What we do for fun, they did for a living." His age hasn't slowed Kruger down one bit. To celebrate his 80th birthday, he's planning to paddle the length of the Yukon River this summer, from Bennett Lake to the Bering Sea. It's only 2,200 miles, which is nothing for a guy who's completed two trips over 20,000 miles. The Fur Trade Route (Verlen Kruger and Clint Waddell) Verlen Kruger first stepped into a canoe while fishing with relatives in northern Canada, and he's never been quite the same since. In 1971 Kruger and Clint Waddell started in Montreal mid-April, bound for the Bering Sea. They spent the next few weeks fighting ice, and during the first five days they portaged their canoe and supplies along roads for over 40 miles, carrying more than 130 pounds each. "We were pretty gung-ho," says Kruger. "There was adrenaline flowing the whole way." Experienced canoe racers, the pair made excellent time on the Great Lakes, sometimes paddling for 40 hours straight to take advantage of good weather. They followed fur-trade routes across central Canada, crossing the height of land at the Churchill River and dropping down into the Clearwater basin, which required another 13 miles of portages. The toughest going, however, was slogging their way up the Rat River, over McDougall Pass and down to the Porcupine. In 40 miles they gained more than 1,200 vertical feet. The Porcupine led them down to the Yukon, and the Yukon led them out to the Bering Sea where the onset of winter nearly caught them. Less than 100 miles from the sea an Arctic gale whipped in and pinned them down in shrubbery for three days. When they finally reached the Bering Sea, at night and in pitch dark, they nearly got lost. Fortunately, while paddling through an ice flotilla they were lucky enough to see a flicker of light on shore. The pair paddled towards it and found an Eskimo and a photographer sitting around a campfire. They had paddled an incredible 7,000 miles in 176 days, the first time North America was crossed by canoe in a single season. The Ultimate Canoe Challenge (Verlen Kruger and Steve Landick) Even the fur trade expeditions seem like a boy scout trip next to Kruger's crowning achievement, a three-year, 28,000-mile canoe odyssey that criss-crossed North America several times. He and son-in-law Steve Landick launched on the Missouri River in April of 1980, paddled down its length, up the Illinois, across the Great Lakes and eventually out into the Atlantic. They then paddled along the Eastern Seaboard, around the Florida Keys and along the Gulf Coast before cruising back up the Mississippi. But circling back to the Missouri wasn't enough. They wanted to reach the Arctic Ocean before freeze up, which they did by early September of 1981. Then they paddled and portaged across Alaska, carrying their canoes and supplies over infamous Chilkoot Pass before descending to the Pacific Ocean. The Inside Passage was next, all the way down the west coast of North America and around the tip of the Baja Peninsula. They reached the mouth of the Colorado River in March of 1983 and, for some reason, still felt a strong urge to paddle home. So they portaged up the Grand Canyon in 24 days, carrying their boats about 200 times. In places they were hanging by their fingertips from narrow ledges, their boats slung between them. "Some things you do only once," says Kruger with a laugh. They proceeded across the U.S. and Canada before reaching Michigan in December, 1983. They arrived as heroes, yet, perhaps unsurprisingly, Kruger was greeted with news that his wife had filed for divorce. The Arctic to Antarctic Traverse (Verlen Kruger and Valerie Fons) You would think the three-year-long Ultimate Canoe Challenge would have been enough long-distance canoe tripping for anybody, but then Verlen Kruger is not just anybody. In June of 1986, Kruger and his new wife, Valerie Fons, left the Beaufort Sea bound for Cape Horn, South America. On the bow of Kruger's boat was painted the phrase: "With God anything is possible." Reversing the route he had taken twice before, Kruger and Fons paddled south and east across Canada and down into the Great Lakes. They then paddled across the U.S. and followed the Intercoastal Waterway to Miami. From there they began island hopping the dividing line between the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic. On a couple of occasions they accepted rides from larger boats, including a rickety banana boat that looked like it might sink at any minute. Once past Trinidad, Kruger and Fons paddled up the Orinoco River, taking advantage of maps a Venezuelan navy admiral had given them. He also typed an endorsing letter, which helped them paddle through red tape later in the trip. "Paddling in South America you had better have some letters," says Kruger, "because they really get impressed by that." Kruger's knack for planning ahead also saved the pair once they'd reached the tropics. He d constructed canopies to shelter them from the sun and rain, and by the time they'd reached the Paraguay River, the weather had turned monsoon. In fact, the pair found themselves in the middle of the largest flood Brazil had ever recorded, which they survived by catamaraning the boats together while sleeping. At one point they slept in the boat for 14 nights, eating from the 400 pounds of food they were carrying. Kruger and Fons entered the Atlantic Ocean just past Buenos Aires, where they became stuck on a huge mud flat for several days. Eventually they pushed the canoes out through thigh-deep mud and continued down the coast for a couple of hundred miles, then headed inland again. From Puentos Arenas they rode a navy boat for 250 miles to Port Williams, and from there paddled the final distance to Cape Horn through mid-sized rollers. The Honeymoon Excursion (Gary and Joanie McGuffin) Imagine two years of paddling from the Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean, starting from the St. Lawrence Seaway where the river is 50 miles wide. Now imagine two weeks of Hell dealing with huge sea swells, tidal bores and powerful rip currents that whip your tiny canoe between the shore and the middle of the river. Imagine cold sleeting rain and heavy winds. Now imagine this is your honeymoon, which is exactly what it was for Gary and Joanie McGuffin, possibly Canada's most celebrated paddling couple. When they first started out, the McGuffins had not expected such trouble from the St. Lawrence River. The north shore of Lake Superior was the place they feared most, yet when they arrived they found the lake in the grip of a long calm spell. The same cannot be said for Lake Winnipeg, which has an average depth of only 12 feet and was a huge frothing mud puddle with waves up to 12 feet high. At one point they were wind-bound for three days, and when the wind finally dropped, they paddled for 30 hours straight to get off the lake. As they reached the end of their first summer in central Manitoba, the McGuffins were lost in a maze of marshes on the lower Saskatchewan. They found their way out by following flocks of white pelicans feeding in tiny riffles of current. After wintering in The Pas, Manitoba, the McGuffins continued north along the Churchill, but rather than portaging over the height of land into the Clearwater, they paddled up the Reindeer River into Reindeer Lake and then spent 40 miles paddling and portaging over the height of land into Wollaston Lake. From there it was downhill all the way into Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River. They struggled against monstrous waves as the Arctic winter closed in on them, and at the mouth of the Mackenzie they were greeted by snow and heavy winds blowing off the icecap. Four days after they were finished, the icecap sealed itself against the Mackenzie's mouth. Superior Journeys (Gary and Joanie McGuffin) Few lakes inspire as much awe, respect and even terror as Lake Superior. The largest freshwater lake in the world is deep, cold and prone to huge storms that whip it into thundering fury. In addition, warm winds passing across the water's surface create isolated fog patches, making it easy to get disoriented while navigating through large swells and currents, even with a compass and detailed charts. Stories abound of Voyageurs who lost their bearings paddling from point to point in the fog, and ended up capsizing in monstrous swells in the middle of the lake. But the McGuffins were hooked. In 1989 they tackled a circumnavigation of the lake using two of Verlen Kruger's Monarch canoes. It was a 2,000-mile sojourn that took them 80 days to complete, the first time the trip was completed in modern times. Along the way they experienced 15-foot waves, bone-chilling winds and fog patches which threatened to swallow them up. At one point while taking pictures from under a tree well away from the crashing rollers a wave steamrolled up the beach until it had buried them to their waists in foam. The McGuffins also saw spray from Superior's waves whip the tops of 80-foot trees along shore. Ancient Forest Odyssey (Gary and Joanie McGuffin) In the summer of 1997 the McGuffins completed a 1,200-mile canoe odyssey through Northern Ontario, linking the last pockets of old-growth forest from Algonquin Park to Lake Superior. To raise awareness for the endangered forests they carried a laptop computer, a 32-pound satellite phone, solar panels, digital camera equipment and a 100-pound communication box. The McGuffins spent more than three months looking for old portage trails. At times it was like "bushwhacking with a canoe on their heads," struggling along faint game trails littered with deadfall. Weighing just over 110 pounds, Joanie sometimes carried 100 pounds of gear as they fought their way through 12 previously unconnected watersheds. Because of the difficulty, on more than one occasion the couple was reduced to tears. They used the sat phone to do weekly radio interviews, and their laptop and digital camera allowed them to submit articles to 58 newspapers across Canada. A Web site was created, films were made, and a book is in the works for later this year. Centennial Canoe Marathon (Don Starkell, Gib McEachern, Norm Crerar, John Norman, Wayne Soltois, Roger Carriere, Joe Michelle, Blair Harvey, David Wells, Jim Rheaume) Don Starkell's first experience with river travel occurred at age 8 when he was living at a children's home in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He climbed the chain link fence backing onto the Assiniboine River and was dismayed when the chunk of ice he was standing on broke away from the shore and started floating downriver. A foster home that he was later transferred to introduced him to the world of canoe racing, and from that point on canoes consumed his life. From 1950 to 1971 Starkell raced with Olympic paddlers in numerous competitions. His crowning achievement, however, was winning the 1967 Canadian centennial canoe race (the longest canoe race in history), which started just east of Alberta's Rocky Mountains and finished 3,300 miles later in Montreal. Starkell quit his job of 17 years to participate because they wouldn't give him the time off. It took Starkell and his Manitoba team 104 days to complete the journey, averaging 33 miles a day. Surprisingly, the most difficult part was attending the 60 banquets en route and then having to get up early to paddle like madmen. The six-man team put in 98 miles on Lake Superior in one day, an incredible feat considering there's no current. Paddle to the Amazon (Don and Dana Starkell) On June 1, 1980, Don Starkell and his two sons (Dana and Jeff) pushed off from Winnipeg, Manitoba, bound for the mouth of the Amazon River. Ten years of research and preparation had led them to this point, and there would be two years and 12,000 miles of hardship and crises they would have to endure before reaching their goal. Starkell calls their success a complete fluke, and maintains that if they knew what they were getting themselves into, they surely wouldn't have gone. During that first summer the three paddled their 21-foot fiberglass canoe Orellana down the Red and Minnesota rivers and over the height of land into the Mississippi. Paddling the Mississippi through nearly unbearable heat and mosquitoes led them onto the Gulf of Mexico. Once past Texas, the three men were pounded by the Gulf's powerful surf, time and again capsizing while trying to leave or access the shoreline, scattering food and supplies to the sea. Eventually stranded on Laguna Madre by strong winds, they were forced to winter in Veracruz. Jeff returned to Canada thinking that his father and brother were crazy. The following spring Don and Dana returned to Laguna Madre and inched their way along the Gulf shore until they had rounded the Yucatan Peninsula. In Central America they were arrested, shot at, robbed, jailed and set upon by pirates. After a second winter in Trinidad, the pair paddled up the Orinoco River into the heart of Venezuela. At one point they made a 45-mile portage on a cart track through the jungle. Food poisoning and starvation were nearly their undoing as they paddled through the Casiquiare Canal and then down the Rio Negro into the Amazon Basin. Once on the Amazon, it was another four weeks before they arrived in Belem, Brazil, setting a world canoe record. Expedition Britanica (Neil Armstrong and Chris Maguire) Neil Armstrong and Chris Maguire say there's no better way to beat a world canoeing record than to set off on a nearly impossible route with no planning or experience. Paddling out of Medicine Hat, Alberta, in an old Clipper Tripper in July 1993, these two Brits were supposed to be on vacation for three months. Little did they know they would spend three years retracing Don Starkell's "suicidal route" to the mouth of the Amazon River. Once on the Mississippi River their trip gained significant momentum, aided by the gallons of American beer they consumed along the way. They often stopped early to drink and tell tales until the bars closed, which meant sleeping in late the next morning. As a result, the two men nearly froze into the Mississippi during ice up. In Mexico the weather warmed, but the pair soon ran out of money. To finance the rest of their trip they learned how to make hats from palm fronds. On more than one occasion they also ran into would-be thieves. While camped in Nicaragua they were mistaken for drug smugglers and were fired on. They crawled for several hours through a mangrove swamp in the darkness before they managed to shinny down to the beach. Once in the water they let the current drag them out, and for the next two hours they drifted through the surf. It wasn't until the next day that they managed to find their belongings in a small native village. They told the chief their story, after which he proclaimed everything a big misunderstanding. Still, he insisted the Brits pay for the gasoline, flashlight batteries and bullets that were used while pursuing them the previous night. To avoid Colombia the pair opted to portage their canoe for 75 miles across the desert on the Guajira Peninsula, eliminating 210 miles of coastal paddling. Even with a modified boat trailer to help pull their gear, they suffered from heat exhaustion. The worst behind them, they arrived at Belem, Brazil in August of 1996. They had paddled more than 13,000 miles, breaking Starkell's canoe record. Modern-day Voyageurs (Ian and Sally Wilson) Few paddlers have followed Canada's Voyageurs with such authenticity as Ian and Sally Wilson. Not only did they spend more than three months following old fur trade routes from Lake Superior to northern Saskatchewan (1,200 miles in total), but they dressed in Voyageur clothing, cooked and ate pemmican and other traditional Voyageur food and even spent several weeks building a birch bark canoe. Making the canoe in a bush camp was the biggest challenge, using little more than an axe, hatchet, some crooked knives and an awl. The raw materials were birchbark and cedar, pencil-thin spruce roots and big globs of spruce gum that they mixed with bear fat to seal seams. The end product was a 16-foot canoe that would have been used as an express vehicle for delivering messages, rather than hauling freight and cargo between trading posts. The Wilsons were amazed at how well the canoe handled, although paddling through roiling rapids always posed some excitement. Even though the canoe was constructed with extra strong cedar ribs, the birch bark was no match for rocks. The portages were also a challenge (especially the 9-mile Grand Portage leading from Lake Superior to the Pigeon River), hefting the 90-pound canoe, as well as carrying supplies with a tumpline across their foreheads. |
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| Photos by: Rob Stimpson (lead image), Eckhart Matthäus & Ontario Tourism |
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