Return to the Peel Journal - Day 2

July 18th. Day started out with spitting rain. Cool temps. Have to admit my first thought on waking up and hearing the rain was “God, I hope it isn’t like this for the next two weeks.” But the sun eventually broke through. And spirits rose. We spent much of the morning re-organizing our gear and got a late morning start after a breakfast of camp coffee (grounds in a kettle, well boiled), and hot oatmeal.

Our campsite on the first night out.

We canoed through a section of the Wind that was largely narrow channels in a steep valley that gradually opened up into a much broader mountain valley as we headed towards the Bear River. The mountain peaks are bare and rugged with jagged tops. When the sun catches them, they turn these vibrant array of colours. There are thin black spruce growing up the mountain side for a couple of hundred meters, then giving way rock and brown and red mosses.

Terry paddling, with Graham ahead in kayak, on upper Wind River.

We had sun most of the day which was good after a day of rain. Paddled lots of swift narrow channels, lots of sweeping bends. A lot of having to avoid sweepers, which are trees that cave into the river when the banks give way. They are the main reason people dump on the river. The rapids themselves were class 1 and 2. Very manageable, not a lot of boulders. Graham in the kayak has been our river pilot. Being lighter and more nimble on the water, he goes ahead and plots out the best channels and paths through the rapids. At 17, he has the most recent whitewater experience of the three of us, having paddled down the Hood River in Nunavut to the Arctic Ocean two years ago, and also having run rapids on rivers in Northern Ontario and Quebec over the past several summers. He helpfully shouts advice to us as he runs ahead, “Shoot the V!” and in rockier moments “Don’t grab the gunnels!”

Me and Graham with our official RCGS Expedition Flag.

It’s good to have him along, and he seems happy to be with us. “It’s so incredibly beautiful, every time I look up I can’t believe I’m up here,” he said as we took a midday break on the river bank.

For Terry, who grew up in the north, it’s the history that is on his mind, “I think back to 1905 and what the conditions were like then. They had no amenities that we have today. I just think about organizing logistics for a trip like that, it must have been incredible. For us, we both have full time jobs, with a few phone calls and emails, we set it up. For them, they had to pre-stage supplies in Fort McPherson before their trip to get re-supplied when they got to Fort McPherson and the whole trip seems insurmountable. It’s hard to comprehend what it was like then.”

Charles Camsell, left, on a 1914 exploration of the Tazin and Talston Rivers in the NWT.

He’s right and there are probably advantages in the longer lead time to a trip in terms of preparation. On our first day out, beyond dumping in the first 500 meters, my main camera shorted out, because it wasn’t sealed in its bag properly, we forgot to turn off our camp stove, and emptied one of our six propane canisters we have for the entire trip, we burned a pair of work gloves that were drying by the fire, Graham melted the shins of his rain pants (since patched with duct tape (Terry said Red Green would approve), in the morning one of the tents was blown into the river as we were taking it down, snapping a pole (easily fixed). And my Sat Phone won’t connect to social media like it was meant to be able to do. Nothing deadly in all that, but hopefully this is a day of working out the kinks that is now behind us.

Campsite on our second night.

We camped on a gravel bar, beside a mountain stream, several kilometers south of the Bear River, the only other main river that flows into the Upper Wind. It was a hunting and trapping route used for centuries by the Gwich’in people.

From Camsell’s 1905 Geological Survey report: "This enters from the east at a point about 25 miles below Nash Creek. It debouches into the Wind by several channels which spread in a delta about ¾ of a mile wide… It is not easily navigable by canoe, but according to Indian report, it is occasionally used by the natives as a route to and from the Bonnet Plume River with which it is connected by a number of small lakes and portages.”