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In
absence of mail (no one writes anymore!) we thought we would
present you some highlights from the annual Canoeing &
Wilderness Symposium held every year in the dead of winter
in the dead of Toronto.
This is the 18th annual Luste-fest,
known for its creator, Toronto physicist and paddler George
Luste. The title this year was Northern travels and
Northern Perspectives II, a general enough label to cover
a wide variety of matters.
The event was kicked off by the
man himself; as George Luste, desperately torn by his own
rules for time constraints, presented his incredible four
decades of northern paddling in a wonderful slide
reminiscence.
You would be hard pressed to find
someone with a more varied and stellar career of northern
paddling. His first big trip was a 1963 solo journey from
Algonquin Park to James Bay via the Abitibi River. The next
few trips with newlywed wife Linda were of the distinctly
budget variety i.e. no tent and no sleeping bags. As George
noted, “I grabbed some excess plastic sheeting from the lab.”
In 1968, they paddled the
Churchill (Hamilton) River in Labrador and were the last canoe
party to view the incredible Churchill Falls before the hydro
project reduced it to a trickle.
The next year found him with John
Lentz doing the length of the Dubawnt River in the NWT. One
incredible find atop a hill overlooking the frozen expanse of
Lake Dubawnt was a cache with a note from the ill-fated
Moffatt party of 1955. It was dated August 28, very late in
the year to be there, and a week before Moffatt drowned
running a rapid in a hurry to get to Baker Lake.
Other great trips include the
Lands Forlorn route, the Stikine River, the Torngat
crossing via the Palmer and Korok and a very scary “I won’t do
that again,” April trip down the Missinaibi River in full
flood. George noted he could see the portage signs several
feet under water!
His circumnavigation of the
Labrador Peninsula ranks as one of the most extreme feats of
paddling. With his 24-year old daughter Tija, they paddled
through McLelan Straight at the tip of the Peninsula, a
tide-tossed treacherous piece of water for a sea-going ships,
never mind a canoe.
Three long Nuvavut solo trips have
been his latest adventures including one from Yellowknife to
Coppermine where his partner bowed out the first week with
illness and he carried on! And we hope he continues to carry
on for many more miles.
Other talks of note included Levi
Waldron’s party. This young Toronto-based group did an
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route (one that was on the HACC’s
To-Do List!) of descending the upper Coppermine and going up
the Fairy Lake River to Takijuk Lake and over the
height-of-land to the Hood River. At Wilberforce Falls,
because of the very low water, they ran the canyon below the
falls, once famously tried by Bill Mason. They made it and his
slides showed a fun-loving yet not reckless group of paddlers
which reminded me a bit of our group 20-odd years ago. Sic
transit gloria mundi!
Jim Stone and Max Finkelstein (see
Expeditions) presented the A.P. Low
story about their last trip and some of the history of the
mysterious Low. The pair are working on a biography of the
famous geologist - some well earned notice for this largely
forgotten traveller of northern Quebec who’s always the shadow
of the greater-known J.B. Tyrrell. The peripatetic Herb Pohl
also added to Low’s travels around Richmond Gulf with his
arduous solo circuits in the area up to the gorgeous
Clearwater Lake and back.
John Jennings of the Canadian
Canoe Museum has a lavishly illustrated talk on native craft
and canoe routes and the celebration of them. A couple of
great photos include a horse portaging a canoe and a pickup
truck with a 40-plus foot west coast canoe on it that canoe
museum founder Kirk Wipper drove across the continent!
A pair of paddling artists showed
a beautiful alternative to those annoying cameras. Don
Morrison of Oakville, Ontario and Bill Hosford from Ann Arbor,
Michigan presented journals full of watercolours as well as
separate paintings that capture a different and unique feel of
a trip. Former teacher Morrison must have felt at home in the
Toronto high school as he got the entire 700-plus crowd up on
their feet to sing along with Stan Rogers’ Northwest
Passage.
Gwyneth Hoyle told the story of
the subject of her latest book, Flowers in the Snow. Isobel
Hutchison, a wealthy Scottish adventurer, traveled through
Greenland and northwestern Canada and Alaska gathering plant
samples in the 1930s. Along the way she met many famous
northern explorers, including Knud Rasmussen, and had stories
published in National Geographic.
Another Che-Mun subscriber
Bob Dannert from Arizona is a veteran northern solo paddler
with several 50-plus day treks. He showed a trip from 2002
that started near the source of the Back River and ended up
going down the Western River which flows into the bottom end
of Bathurst Inlet. One notable observation was finding an eddy
filled with caribou hair 200 feet long and a foot deep and
wide. |
