MOONSCAPE -- Sam Woo and Rob Strassi head downhill as Rosi Kerr stands by the pool and Jim "Doc" Abel walks amongst the rocks on Abel's 62nd birthday and a day away from their first watershed, Walker Lake, northwest of Hudson Bay. The epic 70 day, 1200 mile trip passed through the most remote area of the mainland North America. The trip was another in a series of long, gruelling trips headed by Jim Abel who is accompanied every year by much younger paddlers that he introducers to the joys - and pains - of northern wilderness canoeing.

BAY SLIDE -- Members of the Repulse Bay to Baker Lake trip on Hudson Bay at the start of their 70-day journey in summer 2000. The canoes are being taken by an Inuit komatik to an river flowing into The Bay they would ascend to get eventually to the Quoich River which flows to Chesterfield Inlet.

Here I am, very far from anywhere. I really don't even know where here is. But I am here. And I'm repeating, "Welcome to Hell," like a monk's mantra. "This must be where they send you when you're bad." I think. Images of places I'd rather be edge out almost every thought except those devoted to my numb feet.

I am not near any of the places for which my mind pines. Instead I am waist-deep in swift, cold water, pushing a canoe packed with 700-pounds of gear, supplies and food. Upstream, is my partner John, at the bow end, pulling, as we watch Volkswagen-size chunks of ice ride downstream on the current we are fighting. The rocks are sharp and slick: it's one step forward, two back. And with each step the choice is between trying to walk on the top of the rocks and staying more dry but being more unstable and at risk of slipping, or wading in the hollow spaces between the rocks that are more stable but get you more wet and cold. Having spent the 24 previous days the same way, this passes for routine.

I had, ostensibly, joined a canoe expedition. It resembled more of a sick hiking trip. In fact, it was beginning to look more and more like an exercise in Sisyphusian joy, that peculiar kind of repetition that springs out of absurdity. Despite being a canoe expedition, and despite being on it for 24 days, we hadn't yet done any down-stream paddling. That wouldn't happen for another 12 days. And even then, things being the way they were we would have to portage around the first downstream trickle on account of the low water. What made this day exceptional was the air temperature, which was hovering in the upper 30s F, and the wind, which was steady at 30 miles an hour and gusting up to 40. This put the temperature somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 degrees for exposed skin. To keep my mind off my numb feet I sang The Star Spangled Banner over and over and over. Thankfully, we decided to stop scrambling upstream and warm ourselves.

Though we were not in a place where portaging was necessary, we chose to because it was the most effective way of getting warmed up. We had had at least one portage everyday of the expedition so far, and by the end, some 46 days hence, portages would out-number our total days in the wilderness. Because each canoe had seven packs, in order to make one mile of progress we had to walk five to seven miles, and this while humping packs approaching 100 pounds. We would often double-pack in order to make fewer trips. The terrain alternated between unstable and very uneven rocks and thick, bog-like muck. I never decided which of these I hated more.

This particular day was too cold and windy for the legion of mosquitoes and blackflies to bother us. We completed our portage, ate lunch, and began discussing our next move. I was in no mood to continue, but I could not suggest that we stop for the day. We were 200 some miles from Repulse Bay and we had, quite literally, a thousand more to cover before getting to Baker Lake, our destination. We were already over a week and a couple of hundred miles behind schedule. I didn't offer up a word. But in the end we didn't continue that day and set up camp instead. The horizontal snow was the deciding factor. Thus began our first day of rest in 24 days.

This journey began in late June in Repulse Bay, a place those from Arctic towns a few lines of latitude further south call "the moon" on account of the endless horizon and sparse flora. The region is also appropriately called "The Barrenlands." Our route would traverse the Keewatin District of the newly formed Nunavut Province. Keewatin, I would later find out, is the wind god of the Inuit. Appropriately named too, given that we had a tail wind only twice in 70 days.

We were eight; each arriving by different but converging roads. At 23, Evan Perkins, our leader, an exceptional one I would add, was the youngest of the group. Having been on five previous expeditions, as something of an apprentice under Doc Abel, Evan's wisdom and his skill as a paddler and a leader far exceeded his age. This was his first time to be shouldered with the weight of the role of leader. It did not take me long to see that he was not only qualified, but that he had a gift and a natural knack for inspiring confidence among those who would rely on his decisions.

On the other end of the age spectrum, and rounding out the leadership team, was Jim "Doc" Abel, a pediatrician and the organizer of the trip and leader of twenty-one previous expeditions. He had his 62nd birthday during the expedition. The only year in the past 21 that he has not celebrated his birthday in the Barrenlands, he celebrated it by canoeing in Alaska. He is, quite simply, the most driven, if compulsive, man I have ever met. Sam Woo, a 47-year-old chemist who had also been on five previous expeditions with Doc, comes from San Francisco and spends his playtime kayaking the rivers of Northern California. Rob Strassi, a 32-year-old bread baker and sometime mountain bike competitor, comes from Amherst, Massachusetts. The rest of us, John Tye, Nate Macdonald, Rosi Kerr, and I, 24-year-old college grads and novice whitewater paddlers with a love of the outdoors and a desire to challenge ourselves. The four of us have been across the globe and have put ourselves in testing situations, but nothing any of us had ever done could have prepared us for what awaited, nothing. And I doubt even another expedition of similar or greater magnitude will ever compare to this our first leap past the veil of the guaranteed-or-your-money-back world that hides a precipice of risk.

Nate McDonald (stern) and Jim "Doc" Abel on the upper part of the Quioch River.

My initial rapture upon arriving in this Arctic desert quickly gave way to a realization that the next months would be the hardest of my life. Standing on a rise in Repulse Bay, bracing myself against a biting June wind, gazing over the endless horizon of a frozen Hudson Bay, I felt a shiver run through me. I had never been so full of fear and joy at once. The next months certainly would be hard. And in that, I found, I was not disappointed. The experience, I would find, would be burned into my memory like a tattoo.

Some of the men and women from Repulse Bay loaded our gear onto their komatiks and helped us cross 34 miles of frozen water to get to the mouth of the unnamed river we would spend the next month ascending. We spent the next weeks scrambling, lining, portaging, and every way possible dragging 2800 lbs. of gear in four canoes up 1500 feet of elevation over a distance of some 300 miles. Most of our time was spent scrambling, which meant that on a daily basis we could expect to spend some six hours, give or take, waist deep in Arctic rivers. If we weren't doing that we were portaging over the uneven, unstable rocks and the bog-like muck of the tundra. If we weren't doing that, we were dragging our canoes across frozen lakes hoping to not fall through (which did happen) or get sucked in the candle ice. And finally, as a last resort, if we couldn't do any of those things, we would paddle.

On the 10th day the one significant mishap of the expedition occurred. The day before we had portaged above a 25-ft. waterfall and stopped early for the day. The next morning was July 4th and after loading the canoes we stood in them to sing The Star Spangled Banner while heading up stream in a reversal. We sat down and had to cross a current line that looked mellow, but was deceptively powerful. John was in the stern; I was in the bow. We crossed the current line with too great an angle to the moving water. Even before it happened, I knew what was coming. In a blink we were swimming with the fish. When my head surfaced I heard Doc barking commands as John and I and everything in the canoe were floating quickly towards the falls. We were pulled ashore with about 30 more feet of safe shoreline. But the boat and its contents went over the falls.

Doc had gotten out of his canoe and run to the falls just in time to see the capsized boat sail over the lip of the falls and into the white water at the bottom. As soon as John and I got out of the sub-zero water, our digits seized up and we found it difficult to breathe. Nate and Rosi had to help us get out of our wet clothes. Fortunately, the day was sunny and warm, relatively speaking. John and I waited and warmed up while everybody else ran after all the gear floating down river. They got everything back, but had to go as far as where we had started the day before in order to find the canoe. Through this event, the group galvanized and became more of a cohesive team. And we learned a valuable lesson about mellow looking eddy lines.

On the Day 13, we achieved our first landmark: Qamanialuk Lakes. We had been hoping to be able to paddle the lake, but it was mostly frozen and so we did the next best thing, we hauled our canoes workhorse style across the ice. After two hours of dragging under a blazing sun we got across the ice dam and were able to paddle the edges of the lake, as the center was still well frozen. The water was glassy placid, crystal clear, and the ice, frozen to the lake floor, looked like fish scales. We continued up river through Stewart, Curtis, and Pearce Lakes, then proceeded overland to Walker Lake. On Doc's birthday, Day 33, we achieved Walker Lake, our first watershed. We celebrated the event with Sam's special sauce (Yukon Jack spiked with grain alcohol) and the "Tumble on the Tundra," a much anticipated wrestling match between Evan and Nate. Evan and Rob had packed in four pints of Guinness for the celebration, which we had no difficulty relieving them of.

On Day 35, we finally reached the headwaters of the unnamed river we would follow to the confluence with the Hayes River. The water was going our direction, which was good. But the water level was low, which was bad. The next day, after portaging around the bony top section, we got our first day of paddling with the flow of the river. We ran about five rapids that first day and the next day, Day 37, we didn't travel. We spent that day trying to repair our wounded vessels. John and I had managed to rip our boat up pretty well. We applied fiberglass strips and turned the seats around making the bow the stern and vice versa. This day also marked the halfway point of our anticipated route, which meant that we made the switch from tortillas and cheese for lunch to tortillas and peanut butter. Being halfway would have been good news if we had been on schedule. As it was, we were well behind by a couple of hundred miles and perhaps two weeks. While on this stretch of river, we saw sandhill cranes, a harem of musk oxen and several wolves (two came to check us out while we were eating lunch. maybe they wanted our peanut butter.) Later we came across a wolf-eaten musk ox carcass, an astounding crate full of air.

Sam Woo warms his cold feet on Evan's belly with John Tye, Nate McDonald, Rosi Kerr and Rob Strassi looking on along another unnamed river.

We continued down this unnamed river for 150 miles in all until we met up with the Hayes, which we joined and followed to the confluence with another unnamed river, about 200 miles east of the Hayes' confluence with the Back River near Chantrey Inlet. Getting to this confluence was the axis on which this journey turned. We were weeks and hundreds of miles behind schedule. We had to decide whether to continue down river at a more leisurely pace, or head up river again for 150 miles and cross overland to the headwaters of the Quoich River. We ate lunch, considered the water level at the river's mouth, thought about our goals, our ambitions, our apprehensions, discussed the matter and decided that we hadn't had enough of going up river and we wanted to do it again. We covered eight upstream miles after lunch that day, 27 miles the next day and 22 the day after that. After lunch on Day 47 we gained nearly 200 feet of elevation over eight miles. We were moving well and on Day 50 we achieved the 1000-foot elevation mark, "summiting" for the second time. We had given ourselves 10 days to get to the watershed and we needed only six to cover 700 feet over 144 miles. I had been doubtful, but I was proved wrong. This had probably been the lowest week of the journey for me, and John and the rest of the team pulled me through. But getting to that watershed was tremendously gratifying. We camped that night at the headwaters of the Quoich and for the first time, I think, I felt completely at home with my teammates, the trip, and with being thousands of miles from nowhere.

But that feeling didn't last long. We spent the next five days alternately portaging and paddling across small lakes until we reached navigable water. From here it was 350 miles on the gravy train to the mouth of the Quoich where we would head 100 miles up Chesterfield Inlet and into Baker Lake, our final destination, at the opposite end of the lake from the inlet. In all we covered roughly 1200 miles, most of which we walked. Every inch of that 1200 miles was fought for. We had cold, wet feet every day for 70 days straight. Some nights I would delusionally hang my socks out to dry. Sometimes it worked (only so that I could get them wet again first thing). But more often before I could get my feet into them, I had to thaw the rock-hard socks by putting them in my sleeping bag while I ate my granola breakfast. Putting on frozen socks, though, wasn't the worse thing. I had an infected blister for a while that made just putting my boots painful. Then I had to get out there and walk on it all day, getting it wet and aggravating the infection. In addition to always having cold, wet feet, I was always hungry. Meals, though good and always welcome, satisfied for only about half an hour, after which all I could do was think about the next meal.

I am often asked by those who know of this trip, "Did you have fun?" Fun is not a helpful category in this case. One goes on a float trip down the Colorado River for fun. Fun does not even approach what we did on this expedition. It was far more severe than that. It was the hardest thing I have ever done. It was simultaneously the most demanding and the most gratifying thing I have ever been part of, perhaps will ever will be part of. This experience may also be the most important thing I have ever done. I am also often asked why someone would want to do this.

The journey along the Quoich was two weeks of paradise: down river, covering upwards of 30 miles a day. It seemed impossible when compared to the seven mile a day average we had at the beginning of the trip. We ran rapids, scouted, ran rapids, scouted, ran rapids. One day had nearly 20 miles of continuous rapids which left us exhausted. But we finished the day at the confluence of two rivers: they pooled and continued on together.

We were weathered in at St. Clair Falls, a spot that had been camped at for thousands of years, a story told by the tent rings nearby. I was so happy about finding the only flat spot on the hill. But with the rain, that also meant it was the only spot that collected water. It didn't take long before I had a puddle covering a quarter of my floor space. I had to pull rocks into my tent and weigh down one corner in order to isolate the water. And every so often I had to bail the puddle. We celebrated Rosi's birthday here and the next day made it to Chesterfield Inlet and pointed up stream towards Baker Lake against a tremendously strong dropping tide and into headwinds. We made little progress to speak of and stopped shortly after lunch to wait for the tide to come in and be in our favor. We pulled our canoes up on shore and within 10 minutes the tide had dropped so far that they were completely aground. In 10 more minutes they were some 20 feet from the water. Such was the speed with which the tide was dropping. As we waited I lay out on a rock and let the sun warm my bundled body like a balm.

We ate an early dinner and began paddling around 5pm and continued until midnight, paddling through dusk into the night. Chesterfield Inlet narrowed until we were in a canyon framed by cliffs on either side. The sun was setting and cast long shadows across the water. The half-light pounded against the cliffs to our right and the cliffs looked like orange embers from the deep fire. Soon, darkness fell. Heading west into the setting sun the sky was a ribbon the color of a Georgia peach on the horizon against a silhouette of ragged tundra hills. Georgia peach faded to light airy blue and then darkened until directly above was a deep midnight velvet sky littered with stars. Time elapsed and Evan looked behind us, gasped. We looked. The moon, large and golden, was rising directly behind us, directly in line with the inlet and framed by cliffs. The moon was halved and perched in place on the horizon, its gold reflection dancing in the water and it looked as if there was a cobbled gold walkway leading directly from where we sat right up to it. We turned again into the sunset, moon to our backs but continued on trying to burn this sublime image onto our brains. We were silent. Darkness became more complete and the moon rose and became pale, casting a silvery film across the water.



Soon, the other canoes became only silhouettes against a river of mercury. Nothing could be heard except the regular cadence of our paddle strokes. The rest was silence. And it looked like we were floating or gliding, we moved with such fluid grace. It was all I could do to not cry I was so overcome by the beauty of it. And in this moment I lost myself: I was nothing but eyes and ears and heart and soul and a paddling partner. John and I had achieved a marriage. We paddled in silence. Stroke after stroke. We spoke through our movements. Our strokes were of a perfect cadence, powerful, and effortless. There was no place else in the world. Perfect. Midnight, and just shy of darkness, the moon still showed but had diminished in size and luster. We pulled onto a dark shore, following one another's voices because we could not see. We set camp and looked up: the Aurora Borealis shifted across the sky like a fast green fog. So foreign are the northern lights to the common imagination that they defy description. They left me with nothing to say except inadequate banalities like "awesome."

The next day on Baker Lake we came across the first person we had seen in 68 days, Charlie, an Inuk taking some folks from South Carolina out on a caribou hunt. Given the ease with which we had found we could approach caribou, making a kill could not be a very difficult task. Charlie asked if we needed anything. We looked at each other and asked him if he had any pulled pork sandwiches. We needed nothing other than what we had. This was a big realization for me. This was the first moment at which I realized exactly what was about to come to an end.

For so long I had thought with relish of our arrival at Baker Lake. Every day of this expedition had been the hardest of my life. I had to thaw my socks out in the morning just so I could put them on and start wading through freezing Arctic rivers. Sometimes it just hurt to walk. I was hungry all the time, thought constantly of food, and lost over 30 pounds. I missed my friends and family. My body ached. I hadn't taken a true bath in nearly 70 days, the closest thing being a jump in the cold river, a soap down, and quick rinse. But now that the end was in sight, I did not want it to end. The lifestyle I had had to live over the past months had been so consuming that I had lost sight of it. And when it was finally brought home to me that I would be leaving it to go back to my normal life, I did not want it to end.

I had wondered the entire time about what compelled Doc to return to the Arctic every year to heap pain and discomfort upon himself for several months. Until this moment, I could not answer that question. But now, as we approached the final days of our expedition, I knew why, at least in my own small way. We had carried ourselves and everything we needed for two and a half months over 1200+ miles. We had been completely self-sufficient. We had been completely anonymous. We had lived deliberately. We had worked hard everyday for 70 straight with little rest to speak of. We had come together and overcome significant obstacles, faced potentially life-endangering situations, and did battle against personal fears and limitations. For a brief period we were complete and inseparable and living fully, truly living.

Our last day, we were weathered in and started paddling after dinner at 6:45pm. There were 54 miles between us and the town of Baker Lake. As night came on, the lake glassed out and we paddled strait through the darkness, strait through the night. The sun set and the moon rose and the stars came out and the northern lights danced overhead, morphing into different shapes. One looked like an angel towering heavenward. A bank of clouds blanketed the sky and we were sent into complete darkness. I could do little more than follow the boat ahead of me. We had little to use as a reference except a few stars we could see through breaks in the clouds. Nevertheless, Evan was flawless. And when the clouds cleared, we had made it to exactly where he had aimed. We paused to warm up with some hot coffee and then kept paddling.

As rosy fingered dawn crept over the horizon to our right, and within sight of Baker Lake, a large shooting star streaked across the sky, almost from horizon to horizon, as if to put an exclamation point on the occasion. I was dumb and I was here. It was hard to say were exactly here was. It was far from where we started and far from anywhere I had ever been. But I was here and it was paradise.

MYSTERY FALLS -- Evan Perkins (stern) and Rosi Kerr paddle below a falls on the Quoich River which was not marked on their topo maps.

This story first appeared in Che-Mun Outfit 103 in 2001.