Water, Earth and Sky: Canoeing a Continent
In the Wake of Alexander Mackenzie: Ottawa to Bella Coola

Over 200 years ago, near Bella Coola....

“I now mixed up some vermilion in melted grease and described in large characters on the Southeast face of the rock on which we had slept last night this brief memorial”:

Alexander Mackenzie, from Canada, by land, the twenty-second of July, One Thousand Seven Hundred and Ninety Three.

Two years ago, near Bella Coola....

“Time to eat the cantaloupes”, Chris said, swinging his backpack to the ground. We had packed carefully, eliminating all but the most necessary items. Except for the cantaloupes. We toted two beauties almost 6000 feet up the Mackenzie Trail to Hump Lake, a lovely alpine lake rimmed by spruce trees and overlooking the Bella Coola valley. We slurped down the sweet, refreshing tropical taste of the cantaloupes under the watchful gaze of snow-covered Mt. Stupendous. Mt. Stupendous was putting on a great show for us, framed by a double rainbow, with shafts of sunlight highlighting the snow and bold black rock. The showers and thunder squalls that had followed us here were dissipating, and our first night on the trail promised to be a memorable one. Could anyone imagine a more beautiful home for the night - the dining room wallpapered with the setting sun and silhouetted mountains, the bedroom ceiling studded with stars, the bathroom with a view, well, as big as all outdoors.

Ahead lay a host of uncertainties. But tonight, with the stars blazing and Mount Stupendous shining in the evening glow, we are at peace.

More than 200 years earlier, Alexander Mackenzie stood on this same spot, gazed into the cloud shrouded valley of the Bella Coola River, and faced the unknown. But the uncertainties that he faced were exponentially bigger than ours. Great blank spaces on maps, starvation, hostile natives, unknown mountain ranges to cross. One thousand miles to the south and twelve years later, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark would face the same questions, the same uncertainties. Continent crossers all.

Alexander Mackenzie was the first European to reach the Pacific Ocean by travelling overland. His epic journey not only earned him a knighthood and a place in history, but also caught the attention of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of United States. Dreams of a route to the Pacific that, unlike Mackenzie’s rough northern trail, would be a route of commerce, spurred him to finance an expedition led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. Lewis and Clark reached the Pacific in 1805, 12 years after Mackenzie. The routes of both expeditions are now commemorated, as the Alexander Mackenzie Voyageur Route and the Lewis and Clark Trail. But despite official government recognition, Mackenzie’s route today is largely forgotten.

Two centuries after Mackenzie’s birchbark canoes had passed by my home on the banks of the Ottawa River, heading for unknown country, I found myself staring up the river, feeling the river pulling me. I felt the same pull when I stood on the shores of the Missouri, another great river leading to the heart of a continent, to the heart of the unknown. Mackenzie, Lewis, Clark, and untold numbers of other dreamers had stared at these waters. I could not resist, no more than a salmon can resist the urge to return upriver to its birthplace to spawn. Ottawa, Mattawa, Nipissing, French, St. Marys, Superior, Pigeon, Rainy, Sturgeon-Weir, Churchill, Missinipi, Clearwater, Blackwater, Bella Coola, Peace...their names ring like the songs of the voyageurs. Come hither rivers, leading into the unknown spaces of geography and mind.

On May 7, 1997, on a cold, blustery spring day, I carry my canoe, a Verlen Kruger designed craft appropriately named Loon, to the Ottawa River. Here I began my journey, retracing the route of Mackenzie across the continent, with a stuffed toy bear named Sir Alex tied securely to the bow as my lookout and his diaries at hand. My plan - to paddle 3,000 kilometres to Cumberland House, at the centre of the continent, by the end of July. The following year, I would begin on the Pacific Coast and paddle east to Fort Chipwyan in Alberta. The third and final leg would be across Alberta and northern Saskatchewan to Cumberland House. In total the trip would take more than six months and cover more than 7,000 kilometres and 135 portages. A most amazing trip.

Part 1: WATER

Mackenzie, 1784: “...the river ends at the first Portage de Chaudiere...the water falls 25 feet over excavated rocks in a most wild, romantic manner”

No city in Canada reverberates as strongly to the fur trade days as does Ottawa. Traces of the original portage trail around the Chaudiere Falls, in the centre of the city, can still be found - steps cut into limestone and worn smooth by the passage of thousands of mocassined feet.

For the Voyageurs, and for me, the Ottawa was the road to the interior. It’s a smoother road today, with many of the rapids flooded by hydro dams. But in springtime flood, it is still a big, powerful river. Near Portage du Fort, where the river is broken into many channels, I am stuck below a three-foot drop, and wonder how the big canoes had gone up this, as no portage was noted in Mackenzie’s diaries. I eddy out in a pool below the drop. A trench worn into the earth leads inland, overgrown now, but clearly the old high-water portage, still obvious after two centuries of disuse. I half float, half-drag Loon along this ancient trail, around the drop.

After a week of headwinds, rain, and snow, I reach the mouth of the Mattawa River, the first of eight Canadian Heritage River links in this transcontinental route. Here, I participate in a tradition that Mackenzie and his crew of Voyageurs didn’t dream of. I stop for raspberry pie and coffee at Valois’ restaurant in the town of Mattawa, before heading west up the river.

No one could guess that this little river was once the transcontinental highway of commerce. In its short course, it drops over 150 feet in 14 portages, and Mackenzie himself considered “la petite riviere” (Little River) one of the most dangerous in Canada, “...full of rapids and cataracts to its source.”. The Talon Portage “275 paces ...is the worst on the communication...a ridge of black rocks, rising in pinnacles...”. I paddle up the Mattawa on a cold, wet day in May, freezing rain dripping off my hat brim as I read the blue bronze plaque identifying this as one of Canada’s most significant waterways. I certainly identify with Mackenzie and the thousands of Voyageurs who had travelled this route, slipping on the same rocks they did, sweating and freezing at the same time as I portage around Talon Falls. As I stop for a hot lunch at Paresseux Falls, spectacular curtain of white in the floodwaters of spring, I think about how it had got its name. A brigade of Voyageurs had irreparably damaged a canoe here early one spring. Two men were left here with the salvaged gear while the rest of the crew returned to Montreal, with instructions to portage the gear to the top of the falls. When the crew returned in two weeks with a brand new birchbark canoe, they found their companions and all the gear still at the bottom of the falls, hence the name (‘paresseux’ means lazy in French). I feel a little lazy myself, but it is too cold to sit around, and I paddle on.

Or cut the next paragraph….

I finally pitch camp at the foot of Turtle Portage, and watch the rain turn to snow. I huddle in the vestibule and eat supper - beans and rice for four, followed by chocolate pudding for dessert. I pile my soggy clothes in a corner of the tent, and think about putting those clothes back on in the morning. Ugghh! After supper, I get cramps in my legs, and bounce around the tent, trying not to knock over the candles. I remember thinking that this is harder than it should be.

The Mattawa is connected to Lake Nipissing by the seven-mile La Vase Portages, crossing the height of land between the Ottawa River watershed and the Great Lakes watershed. It is hard to imagine that two hundred years ago, a well-trodden road connected these beaver ponds and muddy creeks to the little La Vase River and Lake Nipissing. There is not a trace of the trail left today. But there is the trans-Canada highway, a gas pipeline, a railroad, a hydro transmission line and a chemical waste dump. A friend in the nearby town of North Bay left a detailed map duct taped (what else!) to the back of the plaque marking this as a historical portage. Thanks to his map, I find my way through to Lake Nipissing.

Mackenzie, 1784: “The French River is very irregular...and is so interspersed with islands that in the whole course of it the banks are seldom visible...there is hardly a foot of soil to be seen from one end of the French River to the other, its banks consisting of hills of entire rock”

The French River, 70 miles long, was a pleasant day’s run for Mackenzie and his crew of Voyageurs in their big 36’ canoes. Protected as a Canadian Heritage River, the French flows from Lake Nipissing to Georgian Bay, little changed from the way Mackenzie saw it - rocky hills with forests of white pine. There is only one portage for me in my little canoe, around Recollet Falls. Rough wooden crosses on a rocky island above the falls are a reminder of the martyrdom of Recollet missionaries four centuries ago. Once again, I am struck by the skill of the Voyageurs, running the huge but fragile birchbark fur trade canoes through narrow, rocky channels. The run down the Old Voyageur Channel is a treat. The river is gushing, the channel constricted by smooth rock walls, and I’m flushed like a piece of flotsam out into Georgian Bay.

A few days later, I am camped on the St. Marys River, a Canadian Heritage River, just downstream of the twin cities of Sault Ste. Marie (Ontario and Michigan. Toads are trilling, geese are calling, barred owls hooting, bitterns bonk-a-wonking, stars are blazing and in the distance, the lights of “The Soo” are twinkling.

If Mackenzie could see the huge lake freighter heading my way, filling the channel, what would he think?

I paddle up to the locks on the Canadian side, being reconstructed by Parks Canada exactly as they appeared in 1895, when they were the most advanced in the world. The fur traders built one of the first locks in Canada here to bypass the rapids blocking the entrance to Lake Superior. A Parks Canada employee offers to take me and my gear around hydro dam in his pickup truck. Ahead lies 450 miles of the world’s biggest body of fresh water, Lake Superior.

Mackenzie: “Lake Superior is the largest and most magnificent body of fresh water the world. It is clear and pellucid, of great depth, and abounding in a great variety of fish, which are the most excellent of their kind...the last and best of all the Ticamang, or white fish. ... of superior quality in these waters”

If anything defines Superior, it is rock and icy, crystalline water. Canoeing on Superior is like flying over an alien planet. Thirty feet below, I gaze at rocks painted in ochre and cream bands, like contours on a map, and ground into smooth earth curves, like a Henry Moore sculpture. I paddle through ice caves and rock caves, alongside looming cliffs, at the foot of tumbling waterfalls, and beside the exposed bones of the Canadian Shield.

Bill Mason, famous for his films, paintings and writings on canoeing and rivers, had his ashes scattered on Old Woman Bay on Lake Superior. This was his favourite place in the world, and I feel privileged to share it.

Grand Portage, at the west end of Lake Superior in Minnesota, was a six-week trip from Montreal for a crew of Voyageurs. It took me six weeks, plus a ten-day layover recovering from an infected hand, a throwback to a scorpionfish encounter a year before, but that’s another story.

Grand Portage was the great transhipping point between east and west, much like Chicago in the heyday of the railway. Every summer, ‘les hommes de nord’ traders from the interior (men who had spent the winter in isolated posts) met with the ‘bourgeois), their Montreal partners brought here by the ‘mangeurs de lard’ (the rank and file paddlers on the Montreal to Grand Portage circuit) to trade and party. Today, the reconstructed pallisaded fort and houses appear much as they did in Mackenzie’s time.

But there is no partying for me. I am blown into Grand Portage after my hardest day on Lake Superior, fighting five-foot rollers blowing straight from Duluth. The Voyageurs had a tradition of arriving in their finest clothes. I arrive with a wet butt.

Grand Portage is named for the gruelling nine-mile trail bypassing the cascades and canyons of the Pigeon River. The trail is good, but I sweat so much that every square inch of clothing is drenched. Horse flies and mosquitoes torment me relentlessly.

Grand Portage is also the start of The Boundary Waters-Voyageur Waterway, that follows the International Boundary between the mouth of the Pigeon River at Lake Superior and Quetico’s Lac la Croix. The route consists of narrow river channels, ponds, swamps, lakes large and small, and the muddiest, buggiest portages of the entire trip. Most important, the waterway drains in two directions from an almost imperceptible height of land, on a boggy portage between tow seemingly insignificant lakes, called North and South lakes. One trickle drains to Lake Superior and the Atlantic, the other to Hudson Bay. One hundred and fifty miles of the route was designated in 1999 to the Canadian Heritage Rivers System for its legacy as a fur trade route, its pristine forests and waters, and for its recreational values as a canoe tripping Mecca.

A canoe-tripping Mecca it may be, but I’m not having much fun:

June 27: “…It’s hot and muggy and my whole body is itching from bug bits. There are no- see-ums crawling all over me, and I’m looking at several thousand black flies, about a dozen deer flies, and one moose fly on the roof the of tent. Outside, there’s a ka-zillion mosquitoes trying to get in. …. Dehydrated, overheated and exhausted. Today, the rudder cable for Loon snapped...the zipper on my bug shirt broke, and the sole peeled off one running shoe. Bad day. Spirits rock bottom….”

This is Sig Olsen country. Here is where he found his singing wilderness, in the lake country of Quetico-Superior, where travel is still by pack and canoe over the ancient trails of the Indians and the Voyageurs. Olsen led the way to set aside large tracts of land in the Boundary Waters region in a rich legacy of provincial, state and national parks, a treasured sanctuary for thousands of canoeists each year. What better legacy could anyone leave?

I celebrate Canada Day, July 1, at Cache Bay, on Saganaga Lake, Sig Olson’s favourite wilderness lake. For the first time on my journey, I meet other canoeists. One paddler asks me if my permits are for the American or Canadian side of the waterway. I looked at both shores, shrugged, and tell him that it all looks like one country to me. Besides, I don’t have a permit.

Mackenzie and I continue coursing along the southern edge of the Canadian Shield. The Rainy River stands out in my memory as one of the most beautiful sections of the route, with meadows of wild flowers, lush deciduous forests, and prosperous farms with old wooden barns painted dark red. A young woman, sitting with her daughter among the high grasses and daisies, waves as I paddle by. I don’t know who she is, but I’ll never forget her. Mackenzie also waxed poetic about the Rainy River: “...one of the finest in the Northwest...its banks covered with rich soil...clothed with fine open groves of oak, maple, pines and cedar”

My spirits hit rock bottom on the Winnipeg River, considered by Mackenzie to be the most beautiful river in Canada.

“There is not...a finer country in the world for the residence of uncivilised man...it abounds in every thing necessary to the wants and comforts of such a people. Fish, venison, and fowl, with wild rice, are in great plenty...”

Today, seven hydro dams have drowned most of its rapids, and I have a different reaction to this river:

July 14: Its been pouring rain all night...Rained 3” the night before. What kind of stupid weather is this for July? I’ve had it. You go out for a pee, and the tent fills up with mosquitoes...As I look out of the tent, the vestibule is dripping water drops and mosquitoes. They hang there like stalactites, water drop, mosquito, water drop, mosquito.... No parking space left empty. There is no sound but the hiss of rain on nylon and water, and the whine of mosquitoes...I’m in a BAD MOOD...”

Lake Winnipeg was dreaded by the Voyageurs. When the wind goes down on Lake Winnipeg, it is usually just changing direction. On Lake Winnipeg (or Lake Windypeg, as I coined it) there are no hiding places. The shorelines are low and rocky, or low and swampy. Limestone cliffs and offshore rocks prevent landings for long stretches. To avoid the wind, I decide to paddle at night. But it is hard to distinguish the pelicans from the shoals, and the wind often comes up before dawn. Once I bump into a particularly smooth chunk of granite, and I decide to sleep there till dawn. The pelicans must have laughed at this guy in a purple rain jacket sleeping in the middle of the lake.

The westward-bound Voyageur leaves Lake Winnipeg via the North Saskatchewan River at Grand Rapids. The huge Grand Rapids hydro dam, one of the first major dam projects in Canada, has drowned the rapids that Mackenzie had to portage. Mackenzie extolled the bounties of Cedar Lake, above the rapids:

“Its banks are covered with wood and abound in game, and its water produces plenty of fish, particularly the sturgeon...the neighbourhood of Fort Bourbon, abound with geese, ducks, swans.... and was formerly remarkable for a vast number of martens (obviously trapped out by Mackenzie’s time).

Today, Cedar Lake, its water level raised by the dam at Grand Rapids, is a vast swamp, sixty miles long, and too wide to see across. “Ghost” forests of dead, silver tree trunks define the old lake’s shores. On an island in the middle of Cedar Lake, the only solid land in this vast wet mess, is an old church, the only building left standing of the old village of Chemawawin. The community once stood on the banks of the Saskatchewan River where it entered old Cedar Lake. The church is in remarkably good shape. The wooden pews are still in place, and one can imagine it filled with people singing hymns to the creator. There is a meadow on the island, filled with the sweet smell of clover, patrolled by thousands of dragonflies. I spend the afternoon in the church. The day before, I had supper with Chief Clarence Easter, at his home in the new community of Easterville. He told me how his people had been quite prosperous until the dam ruined the sturgeon fishery and flooded the traplines. Unemployment and a loss of purpose are challenges he and his people are still struggling with.

My challenge is to find the mouth of the Saskatchewan River, somewhere in the middle of Cedar Lake. For thousands of years, the muddy Saskatchewan River meandered through this flat land, depositing sediments along its banks, until the banks became the highest land. When the dam was built, the water rose over the river banks, spreading out over the land. The river now enters the new, expanded Cedar Lake somewhere in its middle, still flowing through now submerged banks. If you miss the mouth, you could paddle twenty miles or more, and end up in the tangle of dead trees that rims the reservoir. To makes things even more difficult, large patches of rushes grow in the middle of the lake, obscuring the view from a canoe. I don’t really know what I am looking for - some clue, some anomaly. I paddle in the general direction of the old river mouth, and see a lone weathered tree trunk. I paddle to it, and see another, and another, and if I squint, I can imagine that these line up to follow a submerged meandering riverbank. I followed the tree trunks, like joining the dots of a puzzle, until they end at a clump of willows. I puzzle about where to go next, when I notice that the water beneath me is muddier than before, and I am drifting backwards. I have found the river, or rather, it has found me.

Two days hard paddling up the North Saskatchewean River, past endless marshes that look like they belong in Africa than in northern Saskatchewan, takes me to The Pas. Here, I am amazed to see a banner stretched out on an overturned canoe on the shore: “Welcome to The Pas, Max!”

Chris Taggart and Tod Marder, two other cross-continent paddlers, had heard I was coming, and waited for me. Together, the three of us now continue up the Saskatchewan River. Three loners together, in three very different craft, lines intersecting in the centre of a continent. At the merging of the Saskatchewan River and Cumberland Lake, I bid farewell to my two companions, as they head north, and I head west to the community of Cumberland House. This is the oldest community in Saskatchewan.

Mackenzie, 1789: “On the west side of these alluvials is Cumberland Lake on the east bank of which is situated Cumberland House...This House was the first inland trading post the Hudson’s Bay Company made, remarkably well situated for the trade of fine Furs; it serves as a general Depot for all dried Previsions made of the meat and fat of the Bison under the name Pemmican, a wholesome, well tasted nutritious food, upon which all persons engaged in the Fur Trade mostly depend for their subsistence* (one and a half pounds of pemmican per day will support a hard-working paddler, or is the equivalent of ten pounds of fresh meat) during the open season...by receiving the turbid waters of the Saskatchewan, it has remarkably fine Sturgeon, a fish that requires such water to be in perfection”.

Today, the community is in the same place, but the lakeshore has moved, so that the town is now between the lake and the Saskatchewan River, on a small overflow channel called the Bigstone River. Finding the channel leading to the town in the vast marshes is confoundingly confusing. I can see the tall steel radio tower, but it takes three passes to find the channel leading to town, marked by a stick with a Javex bottle on top.

From Cumberland House, traders could travel north into the boreal forest, west to the Rocky Mountains, and east to Hudson Bay or Montreal. It truly was the crossroad of a continent, and a fitting place to end the first leg of my journey. I walk into town, have a beer at the local hotel, and take a photo of myself beside the stone cairn where a bronze plaque recounts the importance of this place in Canadian history. I arrange for a trip downriver by motorboat to The Pas, and then head off to Australia to kayak the coast of Queensland. But that’s another story.

Part 2: Earth

Bella Coola. B.C., May 28, 1998:
“...Steve from the Bella Coola Motel lent us his canoe, and we drifted down the Bella Coola River, past steep green-flanked mountains, past bobbing seals, past bald eagles perched high up on dead trees, down to the sea. We cupped our hands and tasted salty water, then turned our gaze to the east...”

Mackenzie himself was much less dramatic:

July 19, 1793.... We went on with great velocity, ‘til we came to a fall, where we left our canoe and carried our luggage along a road...for some hundred yards, when we came to a village consisting of six very large houses...from these houses I could perceive the termination of the river, and its discharge into a narrow arm of the sea.”

In the spring of the following year, I met Chris Taggart in Bella Coola. Chris and I would travel together to Prince George, British Columbia, on the Fraser River, completing Chris’ cross-continent trip, and I would continue on over the continental divide to Fort Chipwyan, on Lake Athabasca in Alberta. This was the route Mackenzie followed in his final dash to the Pacific through what was then completely unknown country to Europeans.

Mackenzie and his crew walked all the way to and from the Fraser River. However, Chris and I decided that we would Mackenzie’s overland trail only 80 miles, over the Coast Ranges to Eliguk Lake, at the headwaters of the Blackwater River. There, if all went according to plan, a canoe would be waiting, and we would paddle down the Blackwater River, paralleling Mackenzie’s route, to the Fraser

It takes us eight days to reach Eliguk Lake. Mackenzie walked the entire return trip to the Fraser, some 250 miles, in 10 days! I’m always amazed at the rate Mackenzie and his group of Voyageurs travelled.

The hike over the mountains is so beautiful that we forget about how much our muscles ache, how sore our feet are, and the weight of our backpacks. It is easy walking on firm snow crossing Mackenzie Pass, and we will never forget our first view of the Rainbow Range, orange and copper peaks shining in the setting sun.

Mackenzie himself was moved by the scenery:

“Before us appeared a stupendous mountain [now called Mt. Stupendous], whose snow-clad summit was lost in the clouds...“Such was the depth of the precipices below, and the height of the mountains above, with the rude and wild magnificence of the scenery around that I shall not attempt to describe such an astonishing and awful combination of objects, of which indeed no description can convey an adequate idea”

On the last day on the trail, we climb a hill that affords us a good view to the west. From here, we can see the snow-covered peaks of the coast range. Mackenzie himself had climbed this hill, where he first viewed “a range of mountains, covered with snow, which, according to the intelligence of our guide, terminates in the ocean”. I wonder how he felt, knowing that those snowy mountains lay between him and his goal.

On June 4, we arrive at Eliguk Lake. Our canoe is waiting for us. Now we begin our descent of the Blackwater to its junction with the Fraser, 250 miles away.

The Blackwater is a very special river. The upper section ripples through vast natural meadows, with the snow-covered, ancient volcanoes of the Ilgachuz Range as a backdrop. Split rail fences follow the river and groups of horses and cattle follow us along the banks. This is perhaps the most remote ranching country in North America, still inaccessible by road.

Soon, however, the forest closes in. Moose and deer replace horses and cattle as the river hurries towards the Fraser, tumbling over waterfalls, twisting through black basalt canyons, rushing over innumerable rapids and swifts. Fresh-caught trout rolled in chilli mix and cooked with wild chives is our staple food for several days.

Halfway to the Fraser, the Blackwater begins to cut through the soft sediments of the Interior Plateau, forming long sinuous canyons, up to 500 feet deep. At one point, the entire river surges through a crack just over a yard wide, barely wide enough for the canoe to pass. A glance at the topographic map of the last twenty miles of the river sends chills through us. It drops at an unrelenting forty feet/mile through a twisting canyon all the way to the Fraser. Once we commit ourselves to this run, there is no turning back.

To our relief, all the rapids in the final stretch are passable. As we are swept around each bend, we congratulate ourselves on another rapid behind us, another ten or fifteen feet closer to the level of the Fraser. Only twice do we gasp. Once, a sweeper blocks the entire river. Luckily, we are able to scramble around it. A little farther on, a landslide blocks the entire river, creating a small waterfall. Judging from the fresh green leaves on the branches carried down by the slide, it was very recent, maybe just a few hours old. We portage over the slide, tiptoeing across. As we load up on the downstream side, dust and gravel starts to fall around us. We get out of there in a hurry! We feel a little of the feeling John Wesley Powell may have felt on his descent of the Colorado. Excited and anxious. Glad to be here. Glad to be out of here.

With a mixture of relief and exhilaration, we arrive at the confluence of the Fraser on June 12, one week after starting out on the Blackwater. We celebrate with our last Mars [chocolate] bar and our final drops of rum. Mackenzie and his companions also celebrated their return to the Fraser.

July 24: “On examining the canoe and our property, which we had left behind (one month earlier), we found it in perfect safety. We pitched our tent, and made a blazing fire, and I treated myself, as well as the people, with a dram”

Now the hard work begins, for Mackenzie and for us - paddling up the Fraser River.

August 8: We…. proceeded with continual and laborius exertion, from the …rapidity of the current...The salmon were now driving up the current in such large shoals that the water seemed, as it were, to be covered with the fins of them”.

The current in the Fraser is about ten miles per hour in the middle of the channel. We creep up the shores, crossing the river only occasionally to take advantage of the eddies on the inside of the bends. We curse the ball-bearing-like rocks on the banks when tracking the canoe upstream. On June 15, we arrive at the city of Prince George, exhausted but elated. For Chris, this completes his trek across Canada.

I continued on alone, over the Continental divide to Summit Lake and down the Crooked River, to the headwaters of the Peace. Mackenzie and his party had followed a much more difficult route over the divide, by way of the Parsnip River. It’s a route few have since followed, one of those few being Chris Taggart. I take the easier route. Now, I would be travelling downstream all the way, except for the final few miles, to Fort Chipwyan.

Where Mackenzie had portaged rapids on the upper Peace, I now paddle the placid waters of Williston Lake, the reservoir of the WAC Bennet Dam, and the biggest lake in the province of British Columbia. The lake passes through the heart of the Rockies. The grey limestone mountains soar thousands of feet, straight up from the water. One morning, a lynx padded down to the shore to watch me as I paddled by. As I paddle east, the thin grey line of the WAC Bennet Dam appears on the horizon, where Mackenzie had reported: “ the river…as far as we could see was one white sheet of foaming water”.

Mackenzie and his band cut a nine-mile portage trail around the rapids. I portage the 600-foot high dam in tour bus.

Downstream of the dam, I paddle through Dinosaur Lake, the fourteen-mile long head pond of the only other dam on the Peace River, the Peace Canyon Dam. The lake is bounded by cliffs of shale and sandstone, cut through with horizontal seams of coal. Meadows and forests of aspen carpet the cliff tops. The mountains are behind me, and Connie, my next paddling companion and my one true love (who would soon become the mother of our son) waits for me in Hudson Hope. Together we will paddle down the Peace River eight hundred miles to Fort Chipewyan, Alberta, the site Mackenzie departed from on October 10, 1792.

The Peace, or Unijgah, as the natives called it, is a prairie river. There is a perception that prairie rivers are boring, dirty, buggy and dull. But the Peace enthralls us, as it did Mackenzie, with its beauty, its abundant wildlife, and its peacefulness.

Mackenzie, May 10, 1793: …The river…displayost beautiful scenery I had ever beheld…this magnificent theatre of nature has all the decorations which the trees and animals of the country can afford it: groves of poplars…enlivened with vast herds of elk and buffaloes…The whole country displayed an exuberant verdure…which no expressions of mine are qualified to describe”

His description holds true today, except for the herds of elk and buffalo, which, sadly, are long gone.

On July 8, we pass the site of Fort Fork, the advance post Mackenzie had built on the Peace near the junction of the Peace and Smokey rivers. He spent the winter of 1792 at Fort Fork. Mackenzie liked the setting – large, extensive meadows abounding with grazing animals, groves of poplars, and, just out of sight to the west, the unknown mountains.

The craft his men built for the final push to the Pacific was a birchbark canoe, 25 feet long, light enough to be carried by two men for three or four miles without resting. His team consisted of two Indians as hunters and interpreters, his “Assistant”, Alexander Mackay, who was only 22 years old at the time, six “Canadian Voyageurs”, the professional paddlers and packers of the fur trade, and a big brown dog known simply as Our Dog.

Canadian Voyageurs were the engines of the fur trade, the canoes were the transport trucks, the rivers the highways. John Jacob Astor of the American Fur Company said one Canadian Voyageur was worth three American canoemen. Not many people today would be able to qualify for this tough and demanding job. Voyageurs paddled up to 18 hours /day at an average pace of 50 strokes/minute, were able to carry two 90 pound packs on portages, and did all this on a diet of pemmican (dried buffalo meat and berries) and rubaboo (a stew made from pemmican, flour and water).

It took me 41 days to travel to the site of Fort Fork from the Pacific. Mackenzie and his band travelled here, on the return trip, in 33 days.

A sense of peacefulness, serenity, and timelessness envelope us as we continue down the Peace. The only portage is Vermillion Chute, where the muddy waters of the Peace churn, looking more like chocolate milkshake than water. We paddle past the gypsum cliffs of Peace Point, where the Cree and Beaver peoples had settled ancient, bitter quarrel and gave the river its name. Here we meet Charlie Simpson, a Cree Indian who lives in Fort Chipewyan, but spends much of his time here trapping. For Charlie, being out on the land with his family is a big part of his life, and his heritage. We have tea, fill up containers with clean, fresh water, and meet his wife Bev, and son Richard, before continuing on past innumerable swimming bears and endless sweeping meanders, to the confluence with the Quatre Fourches (literally “four forks in French, locally called the “catfish” river) River. As we steer our canoe up the Quatre Fourches, we bid goodbye to the Peace. For almost 1000 miles, we have ridden on its waters and watched them change from crystalline to opaque. We feel as if we are leaving an old friend.

After a seemingly endless succession of bends that all look identical, we find the channel leading to Lake Athabasca. The flat soggy expanse of the Peace-Athabasca Delta, the world’s largest freshwater delta drops away behind us. Ahead lies Lake Athabasca and the native community of Fort Chipwyan. The wind swings around to the west and we hoist our tent-fly sail. Across the lake, we see a white church, and a cluster of buildings backed by the rocky spruce-covered hills and pink granite outcroppings of the Canadian Shield. Fort “Chip” is a fitting place to end our travels for the summer. Mackenzie himself returned here for the winter after his trip to the Pacific. Fort Chip was the regional headquarters for the fur trade for almost two centuries, and is the oldest community in Alberta. We glide into shore among a welcoming crowd of children. One of them yells out our names. He is Richard Simpson, the son of the trapper we had met at Peace Point. We feel as if we have come home.

Part 3: Sky

Its mid-August, 1999, and I’m back on the trail again, lining the canoe up the sun-warmed waters of the Clearwater River with Chris Taggart. Chris came out to travel with me up the Clearwater to Ile-a-la-Crosse, at the headwaters of the Churchill River, in Saskatchewan, 250 miles away. He’s already paddled this section, but said he was so tired the first time that he didn’t really see it. Its good to have Chris back again in the bow. But I do miss Connie, who is home taking care of our newborn son, Isaac Thelon.

My plan is to paddle to Cumberland House, Saskatchewan, about 800 miles and 35 days to the east. To paddle back to the middle of the continent, to where I had ended my first summer of travel two years ago. To paddle back to meet myself.

The Clearwater is a gem of a river to travel up. The current is swift, and the river shallow. Lining the canoe up is a treat, a refreshing stroll compared to the Fraser. Shallow rocky rapids are interspersed with long sandy sections. Spruce and aspen forest, broken occasionally by meadows of wildflowers, cover the rolling hills. On the lower reaches, patches of asphalt creep down to the river in waves, like a tiny black glaciers, leaving oily slicks where they meet the water. Each evening, we are treated to a display of northern lights dancing across the sky.

The entire Clearwater River is a Canadian Heritage River, and it’s easy to see why. An important link in the historic fur trade route, it is also one of the best wilderness canoeing rivers we’ve paddled (but we both agree that next time we would like to paddle down it).

We line and paddle and drag up the swift current of the Clearwater, past dolomite spires, sulphur springs, sand bars, and spectacular waterfalls. After five days and eighty miles, we cross the Saskatchewan border. The river now meanders across the floor of a deep, broad valley, over shifting sandbars and low islands. At an open grassy flat on the south shore, in the belly of a meander, a metal chair, the kind one sees at community centres and meeting halls, sits on the bank, looking very out of place. We land and clamber up the steep sandy bank to investigate. A well-defined trail heads south. This is the famed and feared 13-mile long Methye Portage, the longest portage on the entire fur trade route across Canada. Here, we leave the Clearwater and head overland.

In 1778, Peter Pond, son of a shoemaker from Connecticut, crossed the Portage La Loche, or Methye Portage, which links the eastward flowing waters of the Churchill to the Athabasca River watershed. This opened up the rich fur country of the north to the fur merchants of Montreal.

The trail is not used much today, but it is still wide enough for a wagon to pass. As it begins to climb out of the valley, the passage of thousands of traders and travellers has worn a deep trench into the side of the hill, evidence of its once much heavier use. We feel close to the Voyageurs as we lug our packs and the canoe up the trail.

Mackenzie writes in his diary: “Within a mile of the termination of the portage, a very steep precipice rises upward of a thousand feet above the plains beneath it and commands a most extensive romantic and ravishing prospect... From thence the eye looks down on the course of the little river, by some called the Swan River, and by others the Clear-water…, beautifully meandering for upwards of thirty miles. The valley...displaying a most delightful intermixture of wood and lawn..., where the elk and buffalo find pasture”.

The view today is not as breathtaking as Mackenzie describes. Perhaps trees have grown up and screened the view, or perhaps we were just too tired to appreciate it. Shortly after the summit is reached, we set up camp at a lovely round lake with sandy shores, called Rendevous Lake. That night, we stand by the shore of the lake, facing north. All around, the land is flat, the sky a big dome speckled with star and streaked with northern lights. All water runs downhill from here, down to the Arctic Ocean, down to Hudson Bay. We feel on top of the world. There is no greater high, as Chris says, than crossing a height of land.

From the lake, the trail runs straight and level eight miles to a beaver pond on a swampy creek. This is the headwaters of the mighty Churchill River. A short distance downstream, where the creek runs into La Loche Lake, there is a stone cairn and bronze plaque marking this historic portage as a vital link in the fur trade. That night, August 21, we can see the lights of the village of La Loche twinkling across the lake to the south. To the west, jagged white lightening bolts sizzle and split the sky. To the north, the sky glows red from forest fires. Now, it is all downstream travel. We celebrate by going to a native “old-time” dance in the town. The dancing was more exhausting than the portage.

The La Loche River leads out of La Loche Lake, to eventually become the mighty Churchill. At the community of Ile-a-la-Crosse (named, according to Mackenzie, after the game of lacrosse, which was introduced to the natives here by Iroquois voyageurs), Chris goes home, and I continue on with two friends, Jill and John, biologists from Ontario.

The Churchill River (its Cree name is Missinipi, meaning “big water”) is the fifth longest river in Canada. The section I am paddling, from Ile-a-la-Crosse to Frog Portage, is nominated as a Canadian Heritage River for its significance as part of the continental fur trade route, and because it still appears much as it did in the days of Mackenzie. Here, the passing of the fur trader seems very recent. Instead of trading posts, people shop at “Northern” stores, which are still owned by the Hudson Bay Company, the oldest surviving company in North America (founded in 1673). The country is largely untouched by roads. Native people still live along the river, netting whitefish and walleye from its pristine waters, trapping, hunting, moving with the seasons. All the historic portages are still in use, although wooden skidways have been built to allow outboard motorboats to travel up and down. The River is still the main highway here, connecting people upstream and down, connecting to the arctic and to the populated south, connecting the past and the future. The Churchill River is truly a crossroads.

The Churchill courses the edge of the Canadian Shield, alternately passing through rugged country in a maze of rocky channels, and then dipping down into the prairies, where it flows through broad wetlands. The upper Churchill is more lake than river. A maze of bays, peninsulas, islands and channels, connected by rapids and waterfalls.

Paddling the Churchill fills us with memories. A great grey owl staring at us from a tall spruce tree, its round yellow eyes seeming to look into our souls. Flocks of white pelicans escort us down the rapids, while golden eagles and bald eagles perch like sentinels on pointed rocks and snags. We “discover” hidden pictograph sites on sheltered rock faces. Each evening, we pitch our tents on soft sphagnum moss, and retire to sun-warmed, glacier- smoothed, rocks etched with veins of gleaming white quartz, to watch the sun set slowly as it does in these northern latitudes.

We feast on fresh walleye and blueberries as big as grapes. Blueberry pancakes, blueberries in the oatmeal, blueberry custard sauce, blueberry crisp, blueberry bannock. Like bears, we get down on our hands and knees and butts and browse on blueberries. The seats of our pants are stained blue.

Mackenzie: “…the abundance of the finest fish in the world to be found in its waters, the richness of its surrounding banks and forests, in moose and fallow deer (caribou), with the vast numbers of the smaller tribes of animals, whose skins are precious, and the numerous flocks of wild fowl that frequent it in the spring and fall, make it a most desirable spot…”

Jill and John leave at the community of Otter Lake, one of the few places where there is road access to the Churchill, and I continue towards Frog Portage. Although this route is on the fringes of settlement, I am always conscious that along the route are some of the oldest communities in Canada. The church in Stanley Mission on the Churchill is the oldest building in Saskatchewan, built in 1851 and still used today. The stained glass windows were brought by ship from England in 1860 to Montreal, and by canoe from Montreal by the same route I am travelling. Just to be in this church is truly a spiritual experience.

I leave the waters of the Churchill at Frog Portage. This short portage connects to the southward flowing waters of the Sturgeon-Weir River. According to Mackenzie, Frog Portage, or, “Portage of the Stretched Frog Skin”, derives its name from the Cree, who dried and stretched the skin of a frog and hung it up at the portage to mock another native group’s ignorance in hunting beaver. The name has stuck.

To Mackenzie, the Sturgeon-Weir was known as the Riviere Maligne, or Bad River “as it is a continual rapid for about thirty miles, the poles in use nearly the whole way”. For me, the Sturgeon-Weir was The Road Home. I rode its rapids south past rocks encrusted with orange lichens, out of the Canadian Shield and back onto the prairies. Along the way, I meet two people who etched themselves indelibly into my memory. The first is Eli Custer, 84 years old, pulling up his nets in Wood Lake with his 14 year-old grandson. Here, I thought, is a man who has everything he could ever want, a cabin in the woods, a good boat, family, friends, forests and lakes. A day or two downstream, a big man in orange overalls waves me over to shore. His name is Jimmy (Sugar) Custer. He tells me he is the world record holder for flour packing. This is a competition held in northern communities. The person who can carry the most bags of flour 30 feet is the winner. Jimmy lugged over 1,000 pounds.

The Sturgeon-Weir dumps into Namew Lake, a typical prairie lake with low rocky shores, and no shelter. I get a big prairie welcome, 40 mile/hr winds out of the Southwest. Progress was slow and wet, but my final destination, Cumberland House, is just a big prairie marsh away.

I set up camp in the vast marshes north of Cumberland House, on a dry little knoll. The next morning, I paddle into Cumberland Lake. I am now paddling the same route I had paddled two years before, in the same boat, with the same paddle. I find the same channel leading to the community of Cumberland House. I pull Loon onto the shore at the same place and walk into town. I take photographs of myself at the historic monument, where I had taken similar photographs two years earlier. Then I walk over to the one restaurant in town, where I had eaten two years before, and order fried eggs and toast. The long trip is over.

I feel relieved, happy, and a little lost. The concept of not paddling tomorrow is hard to accept. I have seen North America the way it used to be seen - from a canoe on the first trans- Continental route. I have seen Canada’s water routes and the land through the eyes of Mackenzie as well as mine, across two centuries and 7,000 kilometres. This journey across Canada has opened my eyes to the tapestry of land and waterscapes, cultures and communities, which make up the fabric of Canada.

But what this experience has indelibly etched on my consciousness is that Mackenzie’s cross- continent route is, along with the route taken by Lewis and Clark, the most significant historic trail in North America. Mackenzie’s route embodies a wellspring of Canadian heritage and history. To a large extent, the route defines Canada and what being ’Canadian’ means. But to most of us, Mackenzie the explorer, and the route he followed, is unknown.