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The Hide-Away Canoe Club will be onriver.online again this summer bound for Hudson Bay via the Winisk River. As a followup to 1997's live to the Internet trip, North to Ungava, down the mighty George River in Northern Quebec we will head west to Ontario and travel the jewel of the far north in Canada's most populated province. The Winisk River's source is Winisk Lake at the edge of the Canadian Shield in northern Ontario and flows mostly north 250 miles to the flat lowlands of Polar Bear Provincial Park in southern Hudson Bay. The HACC's trip dubbed Winisk to The Bay will be online beginning July 29 when we board Via Rail's famous train The Canadian and head north. The trip will run until we return to Toronto Aug 16. It can be found on the Web at www.canoe.ca/winiskriver on Canada's busiest website, Canoe, which gets more than 50 million hits per month. Incidentally, the George River trip is available for viewing on the website at www.canoe.ca/ georgeriver . The same crew that did the George will paddle the Winisk. This includes three Peake brothers, Michael, David and Geoffrey, plus the Rev. Peter Scott and Peter Brewster and Tom Stevens. This will be a relatively tame trip by HACC standards. There is no upstream travel, as is our usual custom, perhaps a sure sign that old age is creeping up on us!
Now the Winisk is not the George - but what is? And while it can offer some great scenery and rapids it doesn't have the human history which makes the George so compelling. The river was never a fur trade route and had no large role in exploration history. However, the Winisk was in the news relatively recently. In 1986, the town of Winisk, situated at the mouth of the river, was almost wiped out by a massive ice jam at spring breakup. This was the worst of many near misses and smaller floods and it caused the community to be moved upstream some 20 miles and renamed Peawanuck. So there currently is no town at the end of the river which means if you want to paddle to salt you either have to paddle back up to Peawanuck or arrange a ride with an outfitter. We're hoping to do the latter and combine it with a look around a bit of Ontario's largest provincial Park. Polar Bear Provincial Park is six million acres of rebounding Hudson Bay lowlands. Recently freed, in geological time, from the oppressive weight of the retreating glaciers, the land around the Bay is rising at the nearly alarming rate of about four feet per century. It's a true tundra area, the most southerly located in the world.
And while it may be Ontario's biggest and most northerly park, it certainly has the fewest visitor facilities - none. That's right, you won't find any picnic tables or interpretive centres here. Just mile after mile of flat shoreline. along with the occasional polar bear. Also residing in the region are the elusive woodland caribou as well as moose, fox, beaver, black bear and many other animals. The Winisk River itself is an Ontario Waterway provincial park, containing a third of a million acres bordering the river's length. Again, there are no visitor facilities. Our lead Expedition Patron on this year's trip is Canoe Frontier, a new and comprehensive guiding service operating along with North Star Air out of Pickle Lake. Their superb website (www.canoefrontier.com) shows how connected they are to both worlds. Woods Canada, our longtime supporter is the other Expedition Patron, and we will be sporting their famous packs, bug jackets and tents.
This trip is a logistical dream. We leave from the venerable Union Station in downtown Toronto. We board the The Canadian, the famous cross-country train, and ride in sublime comfort for 24 hours where we will be thrown off the train in Savant Lake. Here our friends from Canoe Frontier will pick us up and head north to the end of the highway in Pickle Lake. Form there we fly in to Winisk Lake to begin paddling. We simply reverse the procedure to come home. We hope to begin filing pictures and stories July 29, the day we leave. As we found on the George River trip, the train is a great place to meet and chat with some very interesting people. We hope you'll find time to travel along with us. Look for a full written account in the next Che-Mun. WINISK TO THE BAY SPONSORS Expedition Patrons: Canoe Frontier, Woods Canada Sponsors: Via Rail, Dagger Canoe Technology Sponsors: Infosat Telecommunications, Nikon, Apple Computer, Toronto Sun, Remy Canada | | |||||||||||||||||||||||
