Return to the Peel Journal Day 10

As close as you get to a sunset in July on the Peel River, just north of the Snake River.

July 26, 2018, about noon Overcast and about 18c.

Camped near the mouth of the Snake River at the bend where the Peel heads north to Fort McPherson. Today is finally cooler, but temps for past 4 days have been crazy hot. Up around 30c (90’s F) each day.

With few clouds, it means we are getting pounded by sun from above and from the reflection from the water below. It’s physically sapping. We spend a lot of time thinking about shade. “Will those cliffs ahead give me some? Is that lone cloud going to?”

Fascinating formations in massive cliffs along the Peel River. For perspectice on their height, that's Graham paddling on the left.

My wife, Renee, wisely packed us some re-hydration salts when we left. I was skeptical that we’d need them, but with this heat, we’ve used them to good result the last three nights.

Yesterday, we sailed through the Peel River Canyon with no problem: stick to the right then paddle hard past the giant whirlpool before the bend.

Then it was through a meandering series of S turns to the Snake.

We paddled by some incredible formations in cliff faces: shale that looks like Lego blocks; a series of oval shaped yellowish rocks that looked for all the world like giant eyes watching us drift by.

Eye shaped rock formations in the cliffs along the Peel River.

It was along this stretch of the Peel that Camsell nearly got separated from his expedition. After his crew set up camp one evening, he went up onto the tops of the towering cliffs to scout out the muskeg plains and to sketch the landscape. He had instructed his colleagues to light a large fire, to guide him back home:

"It was ten o'clock when I reached the point on the river bank where I thought I'd seen the smoke. But here was a cut bank a couple of hundred feet high running right down into the water. There was nowhere to camp at this point. While I sat there with the sun almost down, I saw a great chunk of peat break off from the top of the bank and roll down into the river. It sent up a huge cloud of dust. I realized that is what I had seen, and not smoke." It took four more hours of backtracking and climbing up and down the steep river bank, but an exhausted Camsell finally found his campsite again.

We also have seen this landslides along these cliffs. They are dramatic enough to make you want to stay a safe distance from the shore, even if the cliffs are providing much needed shade.

Rock slides!

Our campsite is on a gravel bed that is meant to have mammoth fossils. People even occasionally find mammoth tusks poking out of the riverbank. We spent an hour last night combing the beach, but no luck. In his memoir, Camsell wrote that at the Fort Simpson Hudson’s Bay Company post where he grew up, mammoth tusks were pulled from the river and carved into a set of billiard balls.

We’re leaving the fast-flowing mountain streams behind and descending into the slower, muddier river ahead. That also means more mosquitoes and black flies.

Fewer rapids, but a steady current make for perfect drifting conditions on this stretch of the Peel River.

Charles Camsell’s 1905 Survey notes: “For 35 miles beyond the Snake (river), the Peel has an absolutely straight course of almost true north. For some miles above, the river flows almost against steep banks of clay and sandstone almost 700 ft in height. Directly opposite our camp of July 22, about 3 miles above George River, is what is called the ‘Alum Hill’ a little of white deposit of salt is seen all along the river from Snake River to George Creek. But it occurs

in greater quantity at the ‘Alum Hill.’ Some moose and caribou frequent the place for the sake of licking the salt.”

Today we paddle north into the heartland of the Tetlit Gwich’in people, flat arctic plains and spruce forest.

Graham and Terry paddling east along the Peel.