At the time I’m writing this we have no internet connection to be able to upload a blog so I’m going to copy and paste it up when I can.
We are in Tsiigehtchic (SIG-uh-chick) and have been for the past six days. The band office offers internet service but I would need it for the whole afternoon which isn’t really fair on them. At the moment we are recuperating in a house that has been loaned to us for “a few good days” (more on that later) and are currently pondering the fact that we need to pack up and drive to Inuvik rather than actually doing anything about it.
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| The view from the house we are staying in....amazing. |
It’s strange; as soon as we got off the water down on the beach there we slowed to a crawl and none of us has any energy left at all. The past six days we’ve done nothing but eat extraordinary amounts of food that isn’t dried or tinned, stay up late talking and then sleep until noon, and go for the occasional trip to the shop or the band office or the school. We did go to Fort McPherson on Friday though. It is a town of about a thousand people an hour’s drive down the Demster Highway and we were very kindly taken by the Chief of Tsiigehchic who gave up his afternoon to show us around.
The Demster has no tarmac. It is literally a long, straight dirt track road. If you think about it, the winters here are so cold that a tarmac road would be in constant disrepair so a dirt track road does make a lot of sense and everybody here drives huge trucks anyway. Driving an estate car or our little red VW Fox down the Demster highway would be impossible.
During our stay here we acquired a new member of the family. Damien, from Australia, has been paddling the Mackenzie River solo in an open canoe which didn’t seem so much of a big deal to him as it did to us. Prior to this he walked for five months up through the west side of the US and over the border to Canada. Even though he set off from Hay River three weeks after we set off from Fort Providence he managed to arrive in Tsiigehtchic about five hours before we did. We met him down on the beach and invited him up for dinner and then for breakfast and then dinner again and then he stayed until yesterday when we waved him off as he put in to paddle the last bit to Inuvik. We’ll probably see him there though; Inuvik isn’t that big in the grand scheme of things.
So, that’s our wonderfully lazy week and now I’ll tell you all that happened in between that and Norman Wells. It was the longest stretch of the trip being about 547km (273.5 Nautical miles). It would have been slightly easier, I think, had we been able to stop in Fort Good Hope but as it was everyone was out of town on their way to an annual meeting so there was really nowhere for us to stay. We stopped for a couple of hours to pick up some food and then carried on. This meant that by the time we arrived here in Tsiigehtchic we had been on the water about 19 days with only two rest days and no showers. The bit after Fort Good Hope was the most isolated stretch. We saw no-one for six days straight. Surprisingly, given my absolute fear of the isolation at the start of the trip, I didn’t mind too much. My world had shrunk slightly to include only myself and my family so whether we saw anyone or not really didn’t matter to me. Being in a settlement for such an extended period now I have begun to miss the silence that you find out there. When the water is calm and glassy and the land is gliding slowly past the silence is almost impenetrable. Here, even though it is hardly a noisy place, there are the sounds of cars, dogs, people, the heating switching on, the ferry’s distant rumble and you really miss the hush of the wilderness.
I didn’t always like it.
At the beginning of the trip, in the first week, I hated the silence. It scared me because I knew there was no-one but us for a very long way. There is a great quote in our guide book that I really identified with back then but now it makes me laugh. I think that this shows how much I’ve changed over the weeks we’ve been here:
“One year while flying with my father, we spotted a red life jacket
on the shore of Mills Lake, so we landed. A German tourist came
running from the shore, through the shallow water towards the plane
as we landed. That man he just grabbed on to my Dad and wouldn’t
let go. Thought the world had ended. Said “It’s so quiet out here,
it hurts my ears.””
Kim Crook, Fort Providence (2005) (Mackenzie River Guidebook 2011)
Perhaps what took us so long to do that stretch of the river from Norman Wells was the fact that it was the end of a very long trip. Waking up every morning I found it increasingly harder to get up and get on. Everyone did. I felt tired right to my bones, that heaviness that sits on you and presses you down, that makes everything such an effort and I couldn’t shift it. Mum maintained that it was because we often paddled late into the night and got to bed about two of three am but as far as I can see that wasn’t it. We always got eight or more hours sleep which is far more than I was getting at home in the lead up to exams and things yet I felt so much more tired than I had then. I have a theory that it was the constant moving on. We never really stayed more than a day in a place and consequently there was this feeling of never actually being rested. We had been on the move for about two months and we realised it was time to stop. Even though we could have gone on to Inuvik and finished where we said we would the decision to pull out in Tsiigehtchic was the right one.
The last blog, if I remember correctly, ended as we were packing our stuff and leaving the hotel to go food shopping. As it turned out the shopping took longer than expected and by the time we had sorted all the food out and packed it into the barrels it was about quarter past ten. Mary and David who had already done so much for us let us stay in their house. They also gave us a cooler and heaps of food.
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| With Mary and David who were so kind |
The cooler has been very useful; no longer did we have to eat greasy, sweated cheese or eat our bars of chocolate with a spoon. We were also gifted a vase by the manager of Rampart Rentals to thank us for the sheer amount of STUFF we bought from his store. We are determined to get it home to sit proudly in our dining room. To protect it from the water we duct-taped the entire box so it was relatively water-tight and it was strapped carefully on top of mine and Maya’s canoe every day as we set off. When we hit the beach it was always first off and was carried to a safe spot away from where the action was. At night it lived in an empty dry bag that usually held the tent. We had a ceremonious opening of the box the other night and the vase is intact with not so much as a scratch on it. We’ll see how it fares when we hand it over to the freight company….
When we finally put in at Norman Wells the Coastguard boat that we had been invited on to at Blackwater River was there. Some of the crew were being flown home having finished work for the season. Two of them came out to say hello and wish us luck. It was nice to catch up. We didn’t paddle much more than 13 nautical miles that day. The next day we called in at the cabin of a man called Wilfred who is Mary’s Uncle. She had said we would be more than welcome but he must have gone hunting or something because his boat wasn’t there. We went up and knocked on the door just in case but there was definitely no-one at home. The cabin was very pretty, small and well-kept with the beginnings of a beautiful garden. The view from up there was spectacular and the sun picked out the details of the land in sharp and vivid detail as it stretched before us beyond the smooth and lazy river.
That day was a long one. We continued on through the heat for 26 nautical miles to make up for what we hadn’t done the day before. The river widens out considerably here with a series of islands separating it into different channels and there is virtually no current. It felt like we were wallowing in gloopy treacle as the bulldog flies buzzed incessantly around our heads. At last the river funnelled and the current picked up ever so slightly. It was late in the evening, maybe ten o’clock, so the sun was starting to drop down and the heat was less intense. Oh how pleased I was when I had to get out a jumper because it was chilly! We were looking for an island that was on the topographical map we had and looked as if there was good camping. We rounded the corner next to the Carcajou ridge and paddled on for a bit in puzzlement. Finally, Dad called over to me,
“Hannah, can you see an island?”
“I was going to ask you that” I replied turning my map this way and that just in case the evening light was playing tricks on us.
“Ah. Well it’s quite possible it doesn’t exist anymore”
“Oh. Ok what’s plan B?”
This quite often happened to us. We either found things that weren’t on the maps or couldn’t find things that were on the maps. The topos were made in the fifties and sixties by aeroplane survey. A lot can change in fifty to sixty years on such a huge body of moving water. Along the way we constantly saw areas of erosion where huge shoals were collapsing into the river but we also saw new areas of deposition where mud flats and sandbanks were forming new shoals that weren’t on the maps. Sometimes this made navigating a little bit harder because you were thrown off for a second thinking you’d read the map wrong and were in a different place from what you thought you were but, take the time to look around and match what you saw to the map or fire up the GPS if you had to and everything became clear again.
We paddled slowly next to the shore looking for a good spot. The banks were steep on this side and sheer lime stone cliffs on the other. Purely by chance we found what has to be one of my favourite camping spots of the entire trip. The thin beach river left levelled out at one point to provide an almost perfectly flat campsite long and made of soft white sand with hardly any rocks to poke up through our sleeping mats and no mud to clart everything. At the end of the flat section was a huge tree trunk carefully balanced on a massive boulder like some sort of abstract artwork. We had a direct view of the Carcajou ridge from our tent door and we sat and ate our dinner round the campfire staring at the magnificent rock as it dropped into the river. The sunset behind it made it a burning shadow against the cool evening sky.
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| My favourite campsite...this doesn't do it justice though |
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| A natural work of abstract art |
The day after that we paddled to the Mountain River at the start of the Sans Sault Rapids. We thought it unwise to continue and do the rapids that evening but camped in full view of them. While eating our dinner (Cooked by Maya. Not many people would attempt a Bechemel sauce from scratch in a thin mess tin on a camp stove at eleven o’clock at night and succeed in providing a delicious dinner for four hungry, grumpy paddlers, but she did) we were entertained by a Barge powering upstream through the rapids. It was slow going but they did it. As they passed us we waved at the crew on the bridge of the tug boat. They didn’t wave back but gathered to stare, coffee cups in hand, at the crazy people with the yellow boats and the green Tipi jumping up and down on the shore.
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| The barge after coming through the rapids |
We woke late and it took us ages to pack up camp what with phone calls home and losing things all morning it was late afternoon before we set off for the rapids. We could hear the quiet rush of the water going through the rapids. For all the warnings we had about how many people had died it was a big none-event. I’ve seen bigger and scarier rapids on rivers back home. Dad had bought a nautical chart for the Sans Sault rapids and using this we plotted our course. There is a completely clear channel river left next to the cliffs and if you avoid the sand bars all you get are some bigger than usual waves that aren’t more than half a foot. We had a series of compass bearings that we lined up with and we were fine paddling along those. After that we stopped for lunch and, much more interesting than the rapids, had a debate about if we were eating too much chocolate and did we have enough to get to Fort Good Hope. In the end we decided to ration it. After lunch we got caught in a storm and got drenched in stinging rain. It fell so heavily the noise of it on the surface of the water was deafening. Maya and I drifted sideways for a bit because paddling forward the rain lashed our faces cruelly. And then suddenly it wasn’t raining anymore. Just like that. Someone up there switched it off and it was clear, if a little cooler than it had been. We got caught in the weather again around eight pm and stopped to eat dinner and take shelter. Then we paddled on for another two hours to a place near Hume River about 25 miles from Fort Good Hope.
You’d think, that from there it would only take a day to get there at a push but you’d be wrong. All along we’d been taking it slowly and on top of this the deep, thick fatigue was beginning to set in. The next day we paddled across the river and did a grand total of about seven miles. We had a lovely campsite at the Tsintu River. We made camp early and in the morning we were able to wash some of our stinking clothes and refresh ourselves as best we could in the river. It made no difference; I was dirty again by the time we pushed off.
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| Sunset at the Tsintu River |
That day we did the Ramparts Rapids. Again we had been warned repeatedly about this bit but with the right charts and a bit of forward planning we made it through unharmed. We plotted a course that took us through the buoyage system for the barges and although we could hear the rapids the water around us hardly rippled. The rapids are at the gateway to a section of the river called the Ramparts. This is about a seven mile stretch of river where the banks sheer cliffs of Limestone a couple of hundred feet high. The sun shining off them turns them soft golden like the top of a crumble pudding.
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| Approach to the Ramparts |
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| We stopped at the foot of the Rampart cliffs to take some pictures |
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| The Ramparts...beautiful |
Exiting the Ramparts we headed towards the white blocks clustered on the far bank. Fort Good Hope was in sight! Sadly we got no showers or any other luxuries like that and stayed only a couple of hours before paddling on. There was really no-where for us to stay as everyone was out of town. We didn’t even get to see inside the famous church. Everyone we have talked to about that church has sucked in their breath, wide-eyed and said “Oh it’s beautiful”. I think we missed out on something big. We did look around the churchyard but even a visit to the store to buy more chocolate rations and teabags couldn’t make up for not seeing inside that Church.
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| The Church that wasunfortunately locked |
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| It's a shame we couldn't stay longer |
The evening was heavy with heat as we paddled away from the township. I can’t describe how lethargic we felt as we paddled pathetically down the river. I thought I would fall out the Canoe because I couldn’t keep myself upright; the heat just took the energy right out of you.
We finally stopped a few miles downstream of the township on the end of an island. The campsite was perfectly flat and covered in soft green grass. We nicknamed it “Parklands”.
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| Sunset at Parklands |
The next day I got my exam results. I had signed up to have them sent via email and had fixed up with my boyfriend that I would ring him and he would go into my email and tell me them. I got up early and faffed about making tea and tending the fire and organising breakfast and actually doing nothing of any great use until I finally plucked up the courage to ring him. I walked a good distance away from the camp behind a bush and dialled up.
“It’s ok you got into Edinburgh” he told me and the relief made my legs buckle.
After I hung up I looked around me. I looked at the willow bushes and the gelatinous mud and the endless dome of pastel sky and the sunlight skimming the water. A mosquito dive bombed my ear. I wondered how many people have received their exam results in such an unusual setting and fashion; camped on the banks of the second longest river on the North American continent through the fuzzy, burbling reception of a long distance sat phone call. Not many, I decided.
After I told everyone the good news (“Well you’re getting rid of me for four years at least”) we celebrated in true camp style with a campfire breakfast of porridge and granola, fresh coffee, fried bacon and baked beans. Then, we set off in the stifling heat of midday. It was another hot day when the air is still and the sun is high. I could feel the sweat prickling my skin; it felt like thousands of insects crawling all over me. We stopped to get water at a beautiful stream that tumbled down a cliff over heaps of boulders and through a rich grassy plain. When we stopped for dinner we had a caesar salad to start as a treat and we also had cherry turnover pastries. We paddled on as the air cooled until we found a camp.
