Voyageurs 1959:

Camsell River to Great Bear and the Mackenzie

In 1959 the Voyageurs paddled 500 miles from the Camsell River to Great Bear Lake and from its outlet on the Great Bear River to the Mackenzie River and the community of Norman Wells.

It was the farthest north Sigurd Olson would ever paddle, satisfying a lifelong dream to see the Far North, and during a stop at a Hudson's Bay Company outpost on Wollaston Lake he mailed a letter to his wife, Elizabeth, in which he said the following:

You may not get this until after I get home but I wanted to write to you in any case to tell you how much you mean to me and how I love you....Listening Point seems far away but wonderful to think of. That spot suggests all of this, in fact looks much like this Far North. I think of you as I paddle, and know I love you more than anything else in the world. .... The loons are calling just like at home. The dogs are tuning up. What a wild, lovely sound. How I wish you were sitting here with me. You are wonderful darling all my life you have been that and I love you.

It was not an easy trip, by any means. On August 27 he wrote a letter to his friends Charley and Marion Woodbury, describing it as "a wonderful experience through some of the most savage, bleak and beautiful wilderness I have ever known....It was bitterly cold with winds sweeping off the ice of the Arctic Coast and we fought our way northward into the teeth of terrific gales."

Four years later, in Runes of the North, he described the beginning of the trip in a few pages of an essay called "Jumping-Off Places." Here's what he wrote:

The third jumping-off place was at the start of an expedition along the Camsell River to Great Bear and the Mackenzie, the farthest north our canoes had ever been. To the south was the bold, rocky coast of Great Slave Lake with its many islands and enormous vistas leading east and west. To the north was a bleak and barren land once occupied by a tribe known as the Yellow Knives, natives who in the long ago had fashioned spears and knives from the strange yellow metal they found in the Coppermine region to the northeast. Now they were gone toward the west, and the land lay deserted and alone.

We were on the shore of a little lake, had chosen a campsite on a glaciated point. The rocks were strewn with equipment and supplies and we hurried, for the sun was dropping swiftly. It was a wan, yellow sun, masses of dark clouds hemming it in. A thin stand of spruces straggled bravely up the high slopes around us, then gave way to lichens, mosses, and scrub brush.

There was plenty of room for the tents, a good cooking spot close to the water. Quickly I found the kettle pack, emptied its contents on a poncho, placed the grate across two rocks, and with twigs from a dead spruce started the fire. It flared instantly and we were at home once more. The food packs were also dumped and I selected what I needed for supper--luxuries that first night, beans, ham, tinned fruit, fresh bread, and tea--chose an eating place nearby, laid out cups, plates, and tools. I was so busy I did not notice Denis standing behind me.

"Bourgeois," he said casually, "I think there are about 240 all told and allowing for a few still flying around who can't make up their minds, I should probably add another ten per cent. "Let's see," he mumbled, "that would make it about 275 or thereabouts."

"What on earth are you mumbling about?" I asked without looking up.

"Flies," he explained patiently, "bulldogs, the big ones that take off a pound of flesh in a bite, black gnats--the bleeders who are more polite, mosquitoes, deer flies, and sundry other varmints."

I stirred the beans now coming to a boil, turned the han, moved the teapot to one side.

"Just how," I asked, "did you arrive at such a figure?"

"Well," he said, "it really was easy. You've got your checkered shirt on which is a sort of a grid, and all I did was count the number on each square and multiply. Twenty squares with a dozen or so per square would make it 240 and as I said, ten per cent additional for transients would make it close to 275.

"It looks like a good trip, Bourgeois," he said cheerfully, picking up the axe. "If the weather stays nice and warm, we'll be eaten alive before we reach Great Bear."

I knew what the fly situation could be in this country, portages intolerable, and camps as well. I stood up, shrugged my shoulders and the air was full of buzzing and wings. I looked at the backs of my hands and they were covered too. The others had also been too busy to comment. Tents were going up, sleeping bags, air beds, personal gear strewn all over the rocks. Elliot was brushing a cloud away from his head, Denis calmly chopping tent poles.

The sun dropped below the horizon. Suddenly it was cold and the flies were gone. We ate supper quietly, but there wasn't the usual banter at a first camp. Somehow the realization we were heading into the high north for the first time, and into conditions we had never experienced before, surrounded us. Gales would be blowing off the Arctic Coast, spray freezing on paddles, and if we had to line and wade, the cold would be bitter indeed. If anything happened, we would be far from help.

I glanced over the shoreline, thin, ragged spruces reaching for the sky, ledges covered only with caribou moss. One of the slopes where a fire had swept some years before was as desolate as the surface of the moon. Different from the Churchill, Reindeer, Athabasca, this land was savage, bleak and cold.

The canoes lay near the water. They were scarred and patched, had gouges in the gunwales, bulges along the sides, the same old Prospectors that had carried us so many wilderness miles. They would run new rapids now, ride the waters of sub-arctic lakes. It was reassuring to see them there, they were so familiar, so much a part of all the trips we had made. If all went well, they would reach Eldorado on the Bear, and then the Mackenzie some five hundred miles to the northwest. This was no summer holiday with swimming before supper, or drifting along with our shirts off enjoying the sun. If a canoe should overturn, the situation could be desperate.

I prayed for an impossible favor--good weather: cold enough to stop the flies, for winds that would permit crossing of the larger waters without hazard. To me that night, a pall seemed to lie over the land that colored rocks, trees, and water, as well as my own spirit. The gray shores, the leaden waters, the stark, almost barren hills crushed in on me with overpowering menace. That night it was the apprehension of what lay ahead that heightened my perceptions and brought everything into sharp and indelible focus. Danger and hazard strangely enough have the same impact as beauty and delight.

Sigurd's Runes of the North contains another anecdote about this trip in the chapter "Ghost Camps of the North," and the chapter "Rendezvous on Conjuror Bay" focuses on this trip.