This story, “Hudson Bay and Back by Canoe,” appeared in the Sept. 1963 issue of Outdoor Life. The choice to leave life jackets behind to save on weight and bulk may not have been unusual at the time, but PFDs are non-negotiable (if not legally required) on any kind of modern paddling trip.
It didn’t look like trout water. We’d come ashore in the evening, when the tide was starting to ebb, worn out from 40 miles of paddling in the open sea, and made camp on a treeless island where the Sutton River splits into three or four channels to spill into Hudson Bay.
That far northwest corner of Ontario is bleak. The shore was a flat, empty salt marsh running back to boggy tundra. When the tide went out, it uncovered two miles of rock-strewn mud, gashed by the winding river channel.
We drank tea and ate a supper of bannock and rice. We hadn’t had a decent meal for four days, since leaving the mouth of the Winisk River almost 100 miles to the west, but tomorrow we’d be up the Sutton, in good trout water, with all the fish we could eat.
We ate breakfast at sunup, knowing we could leave the island only at high tide, took down the tents, and loaded the three canoes. Fifty feet offshore, in water no deeper than the length of a paddle blade, a fish jumped. It looked like a speckled trout, though the water seemed too salty and shallow for that. But Eric Sailer, in the lead canoe, yelled, “Look at the fish! They’re all over the place.”
I peered into the clear sea water in time to see six big fish dart away from our canoe. Then another school slanted off, and another, until there were fish all over the place, and they were big speckles.
Related: It Took Rescuers Days to Find Us in a Remote Canyon. It Took Even Longer to Figure Out How to Get Us Out
Eric, the most enthusiastic fisherman of our party, rigged his spinning outfit with a red-and-white wobbling spoon. I took my movie camera out and waited. The spoon hit the water and I saw a long fish run the lure down.
When the trout quit fighting, Eric slid two fingers into its gills and lifted it. It was a heavy-bodied speckle about 18-inches long and not less than three pounds.
“Who says we won’t eat this noon?” Eric whooped.
In the third canoe, Jon Fairbank and Chuck Bishop were putting their spinning rigs together, but I kept my camera on Eric. He laid the spoon out 17 times and landed 15 trout, the smallest 15 inches and the largest 21. If there were any little ones around, he didn’t find them.
I’ve traveled a lot of wilderness water, but if I were asked to name the best trout stream I’ve ever been on I’d pick the Sutton. Tumbling out of the swampy highlands of Ontario and spilling into Hudson Bay, it can’t be beat.
We had come to that far-off place the hard way and knew the river would give us a bad time, for we were starting at the mouth and would climb upstream all the way to Sutton Lake, on the homeward leg of a long summer trip. We had been out three weeks that July morning when Eric took the 15 trout, and had come 450 miles by canoe. The hardest part still lay ahead.
There were six in the party. I’ve been a canoe enthusiast since I was 15, and have run some of the toughest rivers in Canada, including the Albany, Moose, Abitibi, Rupert, Ogoki, English, and Eastmain. I told the story of my trip down that last one, the most savage of all, in “Furious River,” in OUTDOOR LIFE for August, 1961.
I am a lecturer and I make a trip each summer, picking my rivers for the material they can supply as well as for the fun and action they promise. Most of those I had run empty into James Bay, but I had never dipped a paddle in Hudson Bay. Cold and forbidding as it is, that huge arm of the Arctic Ocean is still one of the most fascinating places on earth for me, and I had itched for years to paddle down one of the rivers flowing into it. Now I decided to make my dream come true. For my 1962 trip, I’d run the Winisk, rising in roadless bush 300 miles north of Port Arthur and flowing north through country as wild as any in Canada. ‘Though it is the biggest river between the Albany and the Severn, it’s smaller than either, about right for a good tough trip, and would provide a natural canoe route to Hudson Bay.
Related: I Canoed the Northwest Passage Solo. The Arctic Nearly Killed Me — Twice
I make it a practice to take boys on my trips, young men in their teens or a little older. They toughen quickly, take to the bush, do their share of work, put up with discomforts, and are cheerful companions. This time I chose three of college age, around 22. Jon Fairbank, of Shaker Heights, Cleveland, had graduated from Dartmouth in June. Chuck Bishop, from Cleveland, was just out of Trinity College in Connecticut. He reported at the U.S. Naval Academy at Newport 10 days after we got home and is now an ensign. Eric Sailer, of Somerville, New Jersey, was a medical student at McGill University in Montreal. He married a Montreal girl in May of this year, and began his internship in June.
All three were strong athletes, and had done a fair amount of canoeing and camping. Jon had taken part in the annual Dartmouth canoe race on, the Connecticut River, and was a first-rate canoeist.
Chuck, Jon, and I left my home at Wyncote, in the outskirts of Philadelphia, on June 28 and drove to Pembroke, Ontario, where Eric met us. From there we went by train to Nakina on the Canadian National 75 miles east of Lake Nipigon.
I had ordered three 18-foot canvas canoes shipped there from the Chestnut Canoe Company in Fredericton, New Brunswick. I grew up using canvas canoes, and still prefer them over aluminum, because they are less noisy when not fully loaded, and for reasons of sentiment. The canvas is easily torn, but knowing that, you rely on your skill to avoid sharp rocks, and any cut can be patched quickly.
Double-ribbed for extra strength in fast water, these three canoes weighed 85 pounds, but started to take on added weight as soon as they got wet inside and finished the trip at 110. That’s a brutal load on a portage, but I knew that lighter canoes wouldn’t stand up where we were going.
We had three tents, axes, spare paddles, sleeping bags, clothing, fishing tackle, cameras, cooking gear, a medical kit that Eric had put together (we used the kit only twice, to patch the canoes with tape), and four homemade wooden wanigan boxes, three for supplies, and one for my movie camera and outfit. We’d use no packsacks or boards. I prefer to make loads in big bundles and carry them over the portages with tumplines.
We started light on supplies, for two reasons. We’d catch all the fish we needed and could add to our grub list at a couple of trading posts. We began the trip with 300 to 350 pounds of food, including flour, lard, rice, macaroni, cereal, cheese, dried fruit, dried potatoes, vegetables, soups, milk, sugar, salt, baking powder, tea, and cocoa. No canned goods, no bacon, and no desserts except the fruit. In an emergency, we’d live off the land.
At Nakina, we lashed our canoes to the pontoons of an Austin Airways Norseman and flew north to Lansdowne House, a remote Hudson’s Bay Company post on Attawapiskat Lake. The long summer trail stretched before us now, and it would be paddle, pole, and portage all the way.
I wanted two guides, preferably Indians who had been down the Winisk to Hudson Bay, but none could be found. That’s a trip the Ojibways at Lansdowne House undertake very rarely, if at all, and of the 200 summering at the post, not one had made it.
The guide most highly recommended, on other grounds, was Adam Suganaqueb, about my age, slender and wiry, and reputed to be a top hand in the bush. His winter trapping grounds lay between Lansdowne House and Winisk Lake, along the route we’d travel. We were warned it would be easy to get lost on that part of the trip, almost 100 miles through a maze of lakes. Adam’s knowledge would be valuable.
But when we went to talk with him, we found he spoke no English. That meant we’d have to pick a second guide as an interpreter, and we chose Adam’s 14-year-old son Mathias, who had just returned home from an Indian school. Mathias was reluctant to make the trip. He could not swim (neither could his father, for that matter, and to save weight and bulk, we had no life jackets along), and was frankly afraid of the rapids we would encounter. But at last we talked him into a compromise. He would go as far as Wabeque, a small Indian settlement and Hudson’s Bay Company outpost on Winisk Lake. There his older brother Solomon would take his place. But when we reached Wabeque, Solomon’s wife was ill and he could not leave, so Mathias made the entire trip, and despite his youth he could not have done better.
We left Lansdowne House on July 2. Save for the Ojibway settlement at Wabeque, we wouldn’t be likely to see another human until we reached the post at the mouth of the Winisk, almost 400 miles north. Our maps showed that we’d be on rivers that dropped more than 800 feet from Attawapiskat Lake to salt water. That meant rapids and portages galore. On the map, the first 80 miles looked easy, but it wasn’t. There were 12 portages, the worst a backbreaker more than a mile long.
We paddled through big, beautiful lakes, finding our way in and out of countless bays and passages. This was country Adam knew and it was lucky he did, for none of the portages were marked. The brief northern spring was at hand, bringing the year’s first short burst of hot weather. Blackflies were as bad as I’d ever seen, and at sundown mosquitoes swarmed on us. But the fishing more than made up for the discomfort. There were no trout, but I’d never been on better water for walleyes and northerns.
We had no time to stop and fish for fun, but we were picking up about 10 a day — walleyes two to three pounds, pike up to 10 — and were eating fish at every meal. We could have taken a canoe load any time we wanted to. This was ideal country for initiating Chuck and Jon, who were not experienced fishermen. And Eric, an old hand and very good at it, was in seventh heaven on these unfished waters. We were using spinning rods, and wobbling spoons were the deadliest lures.
We reached the south end of Winisk Lake on the morning of July 5, and landed at Wabeque shortly after noon to be welcomed by most of the population. It was an interesting place, with no whites and about 150 Ojibways, two thirds of them in tents, the rest in neat cabins. The women dressed in bright colors and carried their babies in back cradles, but the men had gone modern and were wearing black leather jackets and caps, despite the hot weather. Winisk Lake is 20 miles long and full of walleyes, whitefish, and sturgeon. The Indians make their summer living by fishing, and planes fly the catch out at regular intervals. In fall most of them disperse to trapping grounds for the winter.
Prices are high at these remote posts ($5.75 for 25 pounds of flour, 30¢ a pound for sugar, 50¢ for rice and macaroni), but we picked up some supplies and left Wabeque the next noon. We were on our own now, in country even Adam had not seen. We camped that night at the head of a rapids where the Winisk River pours out of the lake, and Eric, fishing for our supper, caught the first speckled trout we had taken, a five-pounder.
Compared with the rivers with which fishermen over most of the United States are familiar, the Winisk is a giant. Now and then it narrowed to 100 yards, but far more frequently it widened to half a mile, a few times to three quarters of a mile.
It’s a rowdy giant, too. For more than 50 miles from Winisk Lake, it plunges like a millrace, tumbling and racing down. There were no falls, but in places it dropped down rapids as steep as a pitched roof. We lined the canoes down whenever we could and unloaded and carried when we had to. Some days we did well to make 10 miles.
Adam was proving his worth as a cook, skilled with ax or paddle, carrying heavy loads, and with a bushman’s instinct for finding campsites and picking the best way around rapids. Mathias was doing his share, too, and the boys and I were hardening to the work.
We were eating enormous meals of fish three times a day, but short on bannock because of our limited supply of flour. (We used 150 pounds on the trip.) Adam baked the best bannock I have ever eaten — or maybe it just tasted that way because we were famished all the time. His recipe was simple. He put three cups of flour and a tablespoon of baking powder in a bowl, poured in a cup of water, kneaded it to a thick dough, punched it down, set it on top of the fire in a frying pan until it stiffened, then stood it up in front of the fire until it was brown and crusty.
The fishing turned spotty now. There were places where we caught a few trout up to 5½ pounds, but in other reaches we had to work hard for enough to eat. We never went hungry, however. We could always pull up where a smaller stream ran in and take enough pike for the frying pan. Those northerns proved something I learned a long time ago, that they’re the fish to rely on if you intend to live off the land. You can usually catch them when you need them, anywhere I’ve been in the north.
We were running as much of the white water as we dared but taking no chances, for in such country a smashed canoe would be a real disaster. In spite of our precautions, we had a close call. We went ashore one morning, leaving the canoes drawn up on the muddy beach. We were not gone more than 10 minutes when the wind worked one off and it went bobbing downstream, headed for a bad rapids. We pushed off, paddled hard, and overtook it barely in time.
On July 12, 10 days from Lansdowne House, we came to the bend where the Winisk turns abruptly east and changes character completely. Rocky shores grown with alder had given way to high clay banks. We had two days of rain and fishing fell off sharply. We camped at night in wet bogs, on moss that oozed water like a sponge. There were few blackflies, but the mosquitoes were worse than ever. There was one big consolation, however. We had left the rapids behind. The Winisk was fast, deep, and smooth here, and we made as much as 40 miles a day.
Wolf and moose sign was common, and we began to see families of Canada geese, the young not yet feathered for flight and the old birds in summer molt and unable to take wing. Adam ran a big gander down and only the fact that we had just taken a catch of pike kept him from wringing its neck for the pot. Game regulations allow the Indians to take whatever they need year-round. They hunt or go hungry. But we had enough fish for supper, so Adam let the goose go.
He had brought along his rifle, the only firearm we had, an ancient .30/30. It didn’t look safe to shoot, but Adam had no misgivings on that score. So far he had had no chance to use it, but the day after he caught the goose, a cow moose appeared and started to swim across the river just ahead of us. We drove a canoe up on either side of her to keep her in midstream, and I picked up my camera. We had her between us, only a paddle length away. It was a great chance for a wildlife sequence, but about the time I tripped the shutter I felt the canoe lurch. I jerked around to see Adam standing up in the stern, drawing a bead on her.
“No, Adam, no!” I shouted, waving him down. He put the rifle down very reluctantly, disgust written all over his face. In his book, moose were to shoot and when you got that close to one only a crazy white man would pass up the chance. When we reached the post at Winisk, he sold the .30/30 to another Indian for two bucks.
We got into caribou country now and their tracks were plentiful along shore. We didn’t see them, but I’m sure a day’s hunting would have got us meat. This was the border zone, where timber gives way to the barrens. Open muskeg ran back from the river, and the wet moss so thick that we sank into it almost to our knees. Fifty miles above its mouth, the Winisk bent north and turned wild again, forking around islands, plunging down long chutes, with limestone cliffs replacing the clay banks. But we had gamed experience and these rapids were deeper and less hazardous than those we had encountered above. We were able to run most of them. We landed at Winisk post, a few miles upriver from Hudson Bay, on the afternoon of July 16. Our supplies were gone, the fishing had been poor, and we had had no lunch that day, but Roy Turner, the post manager, invited us to supper, our first kitchen-cooked meal in two weeks.
Winisk is a lonely post, out on the treeless barrens, and most of the 160 Crees summering there lived in cabins. Here we encountered a contradiction of a kind that could be found in the wilds of northern Canada only in these cold-war times. Across the river from the post was a military installation manned by 120 people. There was even airline service to Winnipeg and Montreal once a week. It had taken us two weeks to come from Lansdowne House, through some of the wildest country in Ontario, and now we could have flown home in six or seven hours. But somehow that installation didn’t spoil things for me. It was only a pinpoint on the vast barrens, with Hudson Bay to the north and tundra, forest, lakes, and rivers stretching to the railroad 400 miles south. No roads, no trails led out from it. This was still the northern wilderness, untamed as ever.
Now that we had reached the Winisk, I had no firm plans for getting home. I had put that off deliberately, thinking it would be best to decide when the time came. To go back upstream against the roaring current was out of the question. The nearest railroad we could hope to reach was at Moosonee, almost 400 airline miles to the southeast. There was no boat, and we couldn’t fly unless we left our canoes and much of our equipment behind. Anyway, that was not what we had in mind. I had planned from the start to travel to Hudson Bay and back by canoe, not just one way.
However, if we went by salt water, following the shore of Hudson and James bays, it would mean 500 miles of paddling in the open sea, along desolate coasts beset by tides, fogs, and gales. I had gone by canoe from the Albany to Moosonee, less than 100 miles, almost 30 years before, and I knew that would be foolhardy to try the much longer trip from the Winisk.
It was John Hunter, chief of the Crees at the post, who suggested a way out. We could travel along the coast 90 miles to the Sutton, he said. It was fast but shallow, and we could pole up. It would take us into Hawley and Sutton lakes, and from there we could follow small streams through swamp country to the Ekwan River. “Plenty of beaver, plenty of water,” the Cree assured us. The Ekwan would lead to James Bay, a short paddle north of the post at the mouth of the Attawapiskat. There we could dispose of our canoes and fly by bush-plane to Moosonee.
It was a long route, at !east 450 miles, most of it inland, some of it not even mapped, and it didn’t sound easy. But the Indians traveled it now and then, Hunter said, and if they got through we should be able to. We bought supplies at Winisk and paddled out of the mouth of the river into Hudson Bay on the morning of July 19. I was where I had long dreamed of being and I had come the way I had always wanted to, by canoe.
The day was clear, with a light, cold wind out of the north. Five or six miles out we could see ice rising from the sea, and now and then we paddled past big cakes that had broken free. The coast was so flat and level that in one place, two miles offshore at high tide, we could touch bottom with our paddles.
Early that afternoon, staring off across the water at the distant ice packs, I noticed a patch of whitecaps. That seemed strange, for the wind was only a breeze and the rest of the bay was calm, so we changed course to investigate. As we paddled toward them, the whitecaps raced in to meet tis, and suddenly I realized that we were watching a school of white whales. Five minutes later we were in the middle of them and I counted 14, the biggest almost as long as a canoe.
I was busy with my camera when Adam let out a startled grunt. I looked up to see a big one barreling straight for us. What provoked the charge we’ll never know, but probably the whale was a bull that took a sudden dislike to our canoes nosing through his school. He came like a streak, right at the top, and I was sure he was going to ram us. I stole a glance at Adam and he was hanging onto the gunwales with both hands, ready for the smash-up. I dropped my camera and braced myself, scared stiff. Then, when the whale was only half his own length away, he went down two or three feet, shot under the canoe and surfaced, so close I could have swatted him with my paddle. He popped his big ugly head out of the water and blew almost in our faces, as much as to say, “Now clear out!”
Adam blurted the only two words I heard him attempt in English on the whole trip, “Beeg feesh!” and we got clear of the school, paddling for dear life.
We went ashore at high tide and made camp on a gravel beach. There were no trees for tentpoles, but we managed with the paddles. We gathered some driftwood for a fire, but there was no fresh water. We moistened macaroni with sea water and heated it. That was all we had for supper, and it tasted pretty good.
Before dark, the receding tide had uncovered a rocky mud flat a mile wide, stranding us on the beach. We’d have to leave on the high tide in the morning. A canoe party along that coast moves only when the tides permit.
We were so hungry that morning that we used salt water to cook porridge and make bannock. They tasted terrible, but we gulped them down because we needed food. We were suffering badly from thirst, too. We paddled away, staying as close to the beach and watching for a fresh-water creek. We found one in midmorning, boiled tea, and made three good bannocks. While we were eating the tide dropped enough to leave us half a mile inland, but we dragged the canoes across the mud and got going again.
Icy rain began to fall soon after, and in minutes we were wet and shaking with cold. I became violently nauseated, probably from the salt-water food I had eaten. I could go no farther. We landed on a mud flat and lugged our gear to a low ridge of sand. Adam and the boys got a tent up to keep the rain off and they put me in my bag, sick and wretched. A mile back in the marsh they found fresh water. I gulped down some hot tea, slept for 12 hours, and felt all right again.
A strong onshore wind was raging in from the bay at daylight and we couldn’t move until it abated. Then we’d try to make the mouth of the Sutton in one day. We’d had all we wanted of tides and salt water. We left on July 22, with a brisk wind to push us along, and paddled 40 miles between tides.
The Sutton comes into Hudson Bay through a marshy delta, and the channel where we camped that night is a mile wide when the tide floods it, but on that flat coast it would be easy to miss a river even of that size. We kept as close to shore as the water permitted and just as the evening tide was starting out we saw the river.
There were only a few rapids bad enough to portage, but the farther upstream we poled the faster the current became. It was like working on a rock-pile. We blistered our hands, the blisters broke and bled, our palms wore raw.
Once we left tidewater, the Sutton was swift, calling for poles, but it would be another day before we’d see a tree of any kind. We poled with our paddles, waded and dragged the canoes through shallows, put in one of our hardest days, and made only five miles. But the next forenoon, we found a few stunted spruce and cut poles.
We settled down to the steady grind of climbing this tumbling river. There were only a few rapids bad enough to portage, but the farther upstream we poled the faster the current became. It was like working on a rock-pile. We blistered our hands, the blisters broke and bled, our palms wore raw.
There was one compensation. I’d never seen such trout fishing. Schools of speckles darted ahead of the canoes and we could take a fish on every cast, most of them 18 to 20 inches. Eric put his fly rod together and tied on a big brown streamer. It proved just as deadly as the spoons. At one pool, he hooked 10 trout on 10 casts, none under three pounds.
Moose, caribou, and beaver were plentiful. This was a travel route of the Crees, too, and we began to find their winter campsites — big pole wig-wam frames covered with moss.
Six days from salt water we reached Hawley Lake. Our long climb was finished. Here we found three Indian families who live at the lower end of the lake year-round, fishing and guiding in summer, hunting in autumn, trapping in winter. We also met Ray Cool, a conservation officer from the Department of Lands and Forests. Since this remote section of Ontario was reopened to outside fishermen in 1962, quite a few parties fly in, and Cool was there to keep tabs on them. It’s a good fishing trip, incidentally, easily arranged with Austin Airways, and Bert Sutherland, one of the Indians who speaks good English, can provide guide service.
Cool had a cabin on Hawley Lake and invited us to stay there. We rested a day while we waited out rain and winds. This was a lake-trout hot-spot, the first laker water we had seen. We trolled with big spoons and caught five in an hour or two, running seven to eight pounds.
Hawley, and Sutton Lake above it, are long and narrow, separated by Sutton Narrows where the water drops from one into the other through a U-shaped gorge, running under huge rocks that have tumbled from the cliffs. The portage is an easy one. We stopped for lunch and climbed to the top to see the magnificent view. Save for that one portage, we had 40 miles of easy travel and reached the south end of Sutton Lake on July 31. The good going was behind us now. Ahead lay the water-laced swamps between us and the Ekwan.
We found a small swampy stream running in from the south, and started up. Beavers had flooded the whole country. On the first portage we waded in water to our belts, and we camped that night in a wet bog on the shore. The next four days we struggled through a maze of ponds, small lakes, and streams, some barely wide enough for the canoes. At one point, we lifted over six beaver dams in three miles. We kept finding the winter trails of Cree trappers, but the trails never seemed to lead in the right direction to help us.
We caught no fish in the ponds or the streams, but we stopped at one of the dams and in the fast water below it Eric landed a five-pound trout. After that we tested each beaver spillway before we dragged the canoes across, and most of them yielded one or two good trout. Chuck varied the routine at one place by taking seven pike out of a pool.
Somewhere in the swamps we portaged over a height of land without knowing it. The night of August 1 we camped by a small lake, and the next morning we found a shallow river flowing south of it. We concluded this was the Little Ekwan, running south to the Ekwan itself. There was no longer any danger of getting lost. Any water we followed now would take us where we wanted to go. We told ourselves our troubles were over. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
Any water we followed now would take us where we wanted to go. We told ourselves our troubles were over. We couldn’t have been more wrong.
The Little Ekwan was only six inches deep in places and beavers had taken it over. We crossed 12 dams the first afternoon and then came to an even worse barrier. Dead trees, some a foot in diameter, killed by fire years before, had fallen into the river, clogging it for miles. Indian trappers had cut through some of the jams but the ax marks were old, and as far as we could tell nobody had come this way by canoe in the last 15 to 20 years. We hacked our way through the smaller jams, dragged the canoes over some of them, and portaged around the worst ones.
The morning of August 3, we awoke to find frost on the ground, so thick it looked like snow, and our wet shoes frozen stiff. We were getting out of this wild country none too soon. The next noon we paddled into the Ekwan. The four days from Sutton Lake had been among the hardest of the trip. So far as we knew, we were the first whites who had ever come through that unmapped country.
The Ekwan is a shallow river, big, wide, and fast, but not good for canoe travel. Too many rocks, shoals, shallow rapids. Probably for that reason, the Indians never made much use of it. We found only a few rapids we could not run, however, and covered as much as 30 miles a day, spurred on this final lap by the cold weather and frosty nights of early autumn.
Here fishing failed completely, and for the second time on the trip we ran short of food. There were plenty of geese, the old birds still flightless and few of the young able to take wing. And if the geese on the Winisk had tempted Adam, these tempted him far more.
“Catch goose?” he asked half a dozen times through Mathias, but each time I explained that it was all right for him to catch a goose, but the four whites were not supposed to hunt out of season. He gave in reluctantly, shaking his head. Then we surprised two black bears hunting geese in the willows, and he rebelled. If the bears could eat geese, so could Adam. He barked something to Mathias and the boy translated, “My father say catch goose for supper.” It wasn’t a question this time. “All right,” I agreed, “catch goose. We’ll be your guests.”
Before the afternoon was over Adam had run down six young Canadas, not quite big enough to fly. He boiled them and we ate all six. It was one of the best meals we had. Then, in the lower reaches of the Ekwan, we found good pike fishing once more.
On August 8, the river opened out into James Bay. We had only 25 miles to go now to the post at the mouth of the Attawapiskat, and remembering the wretched nights we had spent on the salt flats of Hudson Bay, we were determined not to camp along this coast if we could help it. We raced south, and as the evening tide was beginning to ebb we beached at the post. Marshall Campion, the manager, welcomed us, and we ate supper around a table.
Read Next: Six Against the River: Canoeing 600 Miles Through the Canadian Wilderness
I sold our canoes to Campion next morning and we made ready for the Austin Airways plane that would take us to Moosonee. We had come to the end of our long summer trail, 38 days at the poles and paddles, 850 watery miles. It added up to the hardest canoe trip I had ever made, and the best, and all four of us agreed we’d try another like it in a minute if we ever got the chance.
Read the full article here
