Author: Justine

In August 2009, I have the chance to canoe down the remote and beautiful Mountain River in northern Canada. I will film this amazing journey for a forthcoming canoeing DVD. I hope to make a 30minute documentary about the trip.

The trip is a 2-week adventure organised by Blackfeather – the wilderness adventure company. For over 30 years, Black Feather adventurers have paddled untamed rivers, hiked amidst glacier-capped mountains and sea kayaked through sparkling ice fjords. The director of Blackfeather, Wendy Grater is one of the guides on Justine’s trip. Wendy has been canoeing and guiding for decades. Easygoing, yet committed to excellence, her energy and enthusiasm for sharing her love of the wild is contagious. 

THE RIVER
The Mountain River is visited by less than 150 canoeists every year. It’s considered Canada’s best wilderness river by the Blackfeather guides. To get there is an adventure in itself – from Edmonton we fly with Canadian North Airlinesto Yellowknife, which I always thought was very remote, but that is just the start! From there, Canadian North takes us even further north to Norman Wells, a small town with no road access. In Norman Wells, we meet the group, and take another plane – a Northwright Air float plane this time – to Willow Handle Lake at the start of the Mountain River. Northwright will land the float plane on this beautiful lake – surrounded by mountain peaks.

For the next 12 days, we’ll canoe 370km down the fast flowing Mountain River to where it empties into the Mackenzie river about 80km north of Norman Wells. The river drops over 1200metres in elevation, with large volume rapids, fast currents and five beautiful canyons. We start in the MacKenzie mountains, a northern extension of the Rocky Mountains which reach heights of 2700metres. They dominate the background with rock colours of bluff, grey, cinnamon, green and maroon. They are home to many types of big game, including caribou, moose, Dall’s sheep, wolves, wolverine and grizzly bears. The river flows in constant meanders with grade 2 and 3 rapids that can change drastically due to often rising or falling water levels. With spraydecks on our canoes, we should be able to run them all. We’ll take some time out to explore and hike. It’s possible to ascend rocky slopes and ridges to get great vistas of the surrounding wilderness.

Lower down, the Mountain river runs quickly through sandstone and limestone mountains, with interesting tufa formations and even a natural spring. The canyons offer some challenging paddling – third canyon requires some tricky manoeuvering as there’s a ledge in some water levels and big standing waves. By now we have dropped 1000 metres in height and the vegetation is lusher with thick stands of black spruce and aspen crowding the banks. In a couple more days we burst into the wide Mackenzie Valley lowlands and continue to the confluence with the Mackenzie river. A chartered boat takes up upstream up the wide river, back to Norman Wells.

I should just mention the food!! I have a copy of Blackfeathers camp cook book http://www.amazon.com/Camp-Cooking-Black-Feather-Eating/dp/1896980317
Even looking at the pages made my mouth water and I know I’m not going to be losing any weight on this trip!!

SPONSORS

Thank you very much to the sponsors who have made this trip possible. Blackfeather have given me a reduced price trip & Wendy has helped greatly with logistics. Canadian North has donated my airfare from Edmonton to Norman wells and Northwright Air have sponsored my float plane journey to the start of the river. Sanoodi have provided a high tech rechargable battery and solar panel so I can recharge my camera batteries and record a GPS route of our journey, which I’ll upload to the internet once I get back.

I’m really excited about this trip…. now I just have to pack!

Technology is moving so quickly these days with high quality video cameras becoming smaller and cheaper. I’ve been spending quite a lot of time lately trying to adapt my filming techniques to make the most of these advances and to create a camera mount which will sit on a canoe, as opposed to a seakayak. My canoeing DVD, and future DVDs will all be shot entirely in widescreen High Definition which means that the minicam system I was using with a pencil-cam on a pole is OUT! That system is 4×3 and standard definition. Plus I can’t use the suction mount that has been fantastic for me on my seakayak because there isn’t a suitable flat surface on most canoes.

So I’ve bought a couple of new cameras and I’ve been working with Barry and a local whizz, Clive Hartfall to make a mount. The results can be seen in the pictures. We have 1 mount which can hold 3 different camcorders, depending on which is the most suitable for what I’m trying to film. The largest is the Sony HC3 which sits in the big clear waterproof housing. With a wide angle lens, this is the best quality footage, but it’s also heavy and bulky! The yellow camera is a waterproof and High Definition camera from Sanyo. Its not full HD but the picture quality is very impressive. I can check what I’m filming by looking in the screen and delete clips that I don’t want, but the downside is that the camera is not very wideangle. The tiny black camera is designed as a helmet-mounted camera, the Contour HD camera – this is full high definition and very widescreen but the camera isn’t waterproof which could be a bit of an issue!! And you can’t check the image before you start recording or play back your footage to check you haven’t just filmed 10 minutes of the sky! So all 3 cameras have plus points, but none are perfect!! The challenge now is to get good at playing to their strengths & getting some fantastic canoeing shots!! I fly to America and then Canada next Tuesday for 3 weeks of filming and canoeing.

CONTOUR HD CAMERA

ONE OF A GROUP OF SOLO CANOEISTS WE MET ON THE RIVER

Yesterday Jim and I went back to the river Dee to run a longer section by canoe. We paddled up the canal from the shop/ cafe to the Chain Bridge and then carried the boat to the river and paddled back with the aid of gravity!

I am really enjoying learning something new, and I’m finding that tandem canoeing is really good fun. We spent a couple of hours dropping just a couple of miles down the river, practicing ferry gliding, reverse ferry gliding, maneuvering and breaking in and out. We also ran the most fun rapids several times, usually picking different lines each time. Our route can be seen here on the Sanoodi website.

I now feel much more ready to go on a 2 week remote canoeing trip in the far Canadian north!! 

JIM WAITING FOR A HORSE DRAWN BARGE TO PASS US ON THE CANAL

PS. To the mint tea drinker who asked where Barrington Shaw was – he’s busy working – one of us has to earn a living! But he’ll be out playing at the weekend!

We spent the weekend at the tip on the Llyn Peninsula visiting various wonderful islands! On Saturday, Barry, Tara and I paddled into the wind to Bardsey island where we caught up with our friends the farmers, Steve, Joanne, Rachel and Ben Porter. It was a choppy, quite challenging paddle which we all enjoyed. We saw lots of birds, including a dozen or so puffins.

After a refreshing cup of tea and a chat, we headed back against the last of the flood, with the wind at our backs. The wind had dropped a bit but still gave us a bit of a push home. The current was still flooding out of Abadaron bay quite quickly with 1-2 metre waves forming a race off the headland. After one last exhilarating surf we were back in the bay and heading for fish and chips! That evening we joined Jim Krawiecki and Pete Astles on the beach as they camped overnight nearby. The rain drove us back to the van for the night and we even managed to sleep in!

On Sunday, John Dommony joined us and we headed to the Tudwel islands – the first time I’ve ever paddled there! We had a great day, exploring both islands, poking our noses into caves, listening to all the birds squawking and watching the seals. The was an exciting swell on the exposed sides of the islands. We even saw Bear Grylls bear bum…. but that’s another story!

Last stop was Porth Ceriad for lunch and enjoyed a bit of fun catching a few waves in the warm water. What a lovely weekend!