Canoeing – Page 3 – the life of a nature photographer

Canoeing on Ice

Camping, Canoeing, Photo of the Day, Tundra, Water

Friday, January 11th, 2019

Ice on Cave Lake beside our first campsite.

To canoe in the arctic you either have to wait until late in the summer or encounter ice at some point. There was still plenty of ice on the lakes when we started on the Hood River in late June.

On Cave Lake, we started by trying to skirt the shore where the ice was mostly melted. We quickly ran into solid ice right up to the shore. The ice was still thick enough to support us in most spots. With the normal canoes, you could take a run at the ice and if you had enough speed, the front of the canoe would pop out of the water and you’d launch yourself onto the ice. Then the bow paddler could quickly jump out and pull the canoe all the way up.

With pakboats it was a little more tricky. You would have to sidle up to the ice and try to step out onto a relatively slippery surface without pushing your boat away from the ice. And since the bottoms of the pakboats are a sticky rubber material, we had “crazy carpets” that we would tie to the bottom of the boats so they would slide easily on the ice, similar to the regular canoes.

Then we would pull the loaded canoes across the ice, sometimes for quite a few kilometers at a time. Occasionally there would be breaks in the ice where we would have to get in the canoes, paddle for a meter or two, and get back out and pull further.

The trick for not falling through the ice is to stick to the whiter areas. The darker spots are where the ice is starting to melt and get soft. Usually it was still pretty thick there, but the lighter colored ice was definitely more solid.

No one fell through the entire trip!

Pulling canoes over Esker Lake a few days later.

Ice piled up on the shore of Cave Lake. You can see a little band of water we had to canoe over in the distance.

The trickiest parts were where water and ice mixed.

Canoeing the Milk River

Badlands, Camping, Canoeing

Friday, January 4th, 2019

The Milk River near Poverty Rock with the Sweetgrass Hills in the background.

The Milk River is in the extreme south of Alberta – it flows from the US and back into the US. But there is a spectacular stretch in Alberta that’s definitely worth canoeing. This is a shallow river where you want to be really skilled at dodging rocks though. And there are a few big rapids although you might not expect them given the leisurely flow of much of the trip.

Just Anna and I went on this trip in early summer – it was a chance to spend time together before I left for the arctic.

No posts for a while again as I’m off on another few weeks of trips.

We started off from the town of Milk River with a couple of beautiful warm days.

Hoodoos started showing up as we got close to Writing on Stone Provincial Park.

The soft prairie landscapes were so peaceful.

We did get a solid day of rain as we left Writing on Stone Provincial Park – still beautiful but cold.

The rain cleared up for our final campsite and left us with quite a sunset.

Still a few showers here and there.

The variety of rock formations is fascinating.

Sunset and sage brush.

We scared this guy on our final day as he was having a drink in the river.

Sunlight

Camping, Canoeing, Landscape, Photo of the Day, Travel, Tundra

Saturday, December 15th, 2018

Camped for the evening on the south shore of Cave Lake on the Hood River, Nunavut. If you look closely you can see tents on the bottom right.

Sitting at home writing this in the evening, I’m wondering about this place now. I wonder if there would be a glow of lights on the horizon from a distant mine or if it would be the complete darkness I imagine. Although complete darkness isn’t accurate – there would be stars and reflected light from the moon – all reflected off a sea of endless snow.

When I was there in late June it was light all the time. The night was one long sunset/sunrise. People ask me if I had trouble sleeping – not at all. It was a tiring trip and I usually fell asleep quickly, but I really wished I had energy to explore the area at night. Sometimes we would go on hikes until around midnight and the sun was still up. But mornings came early, and with them the constant work of camp life and paddling.

Backlog from 2018

Business, Camping, Canoeing, Landscape

Wednesday, December 12th, 2018

A red fox kit near Cave Lake in Nunavut

Hey! It’s been a long time – I really need a social media manager or something. I’ve been all over the place since I last updated: the Milk River in Alberta, the Hood River in Nunavut, Jolly, Courageous, and MacKay Lakes in NWT, the North Saskatchewan River from Rocky Mountain House to Drayton Valley, rural Montana, and Golden BC – those are the ones that come to mind at the moment. I hope to get a bunch of new photos in the store within the next month or so. I’m so far behind on going through photos it will take me a while to catch up, and the official jobs always get priority. I’ll leave you with just a teaser of what’s to come.

Oh, and the Royal Alberta Museum is now open and it’s great! You can see my photos in the Human History room on the main floor (the large ones in the middle) and surrounding the Manitou Stone upstairs (the stairs right by the main entrance before you get to admissions).

The photo is from the headwaters of the Hood River in Nunavut. We left in June and there was still a lot of ice on the lakes that far north. One smaller plane (a Cessna Caravan) went ahead to scout for open water which we needed because the planes were both on floats. A little later the rest of us (there were 12 on this trip) piled into a Twin Otter and flew north. There was a bay on the south side of Cave Lake that was free of ice, so we landed there. As we were taxiing up to shore, I caught a glimpse of a fox watching us. Unloading the plane was a flurry of activity as there was three weeks of food to unload along with all our personal gear and some pack canoes. As we were building the pack canoes, we could see the foxes peering over the edge of a bank watching us. I’m sure we were a curiosity – there are not a lot of people up there. This is the lighter colored kit, there was another that was a bit darker and more shy, and we watched the parents trot off to hunt siksiks (which I’m sure I’ll post pictures of at some point here).

Trip Guiding

Camping, Canoeing, Landscape, Marshes, Water

Wednesday, July 5th, 2017

For the first part of this summer, I put my outdoor experience to work guiding groups of students in our beautiful Rocky Mountains. I loved the opportunity to share the challenges and beauty of the outdoors with these students. The people I was working with are amazing and made the whole experience a lot of fun! But guiding is busy and constant work and helping others enjoy nature is not conducive to finding peaceful moments myself. As guides we are always the last to bed and the first to wake up, and these are the times when we’re most likely to be able to take a little bit of time to just enjoy being.

This is one moment, early in the morning beside the North Saskatchewan River between Nordegg and Rocky Mountain House. It may look like a peaceful moment, but really I was sprinting around with my camera because the light was so amazing and I had to start making breakfast and pack up before the students woke up.

25mm, f6.3, 1/400 of a second

Adventures on the Brazeau

Camping, Canoeing, Photo of the Day, Water

Wednesday, November 9th, 2016

The middle part of August was spent on the Brazeau River. The trip started with a drive to the put-in and a portage to get the boats and gear down to the river. It was supposed to be a roughly 2km portage, but it turned out the river had moved and there was no good place to put in where we had planned. This required a short planning session, a bit of exploration, and eventually a longer portage.

To get the boats down the steep bank to our new campsite and put-in, we built a pulley system to lower the canoes with gear in them. The portage and lowering took until after 9pm, at which point we were all hungry and tired.

But we were finally at the river. We had canoes and gear and could start our trip. Despite being tired, I couldn’t resist staying up a little later to see the stars come out, watch the moon rise, and listen to the river rushing by. Tomorrow we would be canoeing this beauty, and that was exciting!

The next day dawned clear and bright. After a breakfast of toast and beans warmed over a fire, we packed up our tents and sleeping bags, loaded the canoes, and started paddling.

At almost every corner there were significant rapids and we would stop to scout them. Often they were not a big deal, but every once in a while there would be some high-consequence rocks to avoid.

Sometimes they were just fun!

We were canoeing into two groups. I was near the back of the second group. Then there was a fairly long section of big waves followed by a tricky corner with no place to stop and scout from. A lot of the canoes had been taking on a bit of water in the long section of whitewater. I didn’t see what happened to the first group at the corner, but I saw the leader in my group flip over. The next canoe got pushed into a rock and dumped. Then the canoe right in front of me dumped. At that point I knew there was a good chance of me and Bjarke going over, so we just focused on picking a good line, not pushing through the big waves (to get less water in the boat) but having enough power to get through the current to the other side before getting pushed into the rock, and just getting through so we could help people out on the other side. We made it, but had quite a bit of water in our canoe. We eddied out on the other side of the turn, but it wasn’t much of an eddy and was trying to push us further downstream. We saw a beach on the other side and ferried across in our now-tippy canoe to assess the situation. There was one other canoe and five other people there. Across the river we could see one canoe and four people.

There were 21 in our group. Eventually, we heard that the leader of the first group had been able to keep 5 canoes from getting too far downstream and people were scattered along both shores, separated by water and cliffs. Eventually we accounted for everyone and all the canoes. Amazingly, the only damage was one broken yoke and a lot of cold, wet people. Duct tape “fixed” the first problem and lots of fires, shared warm clothes from accessible canoes, and movement fixed the second one. After a few hours (including a thunderstorm that stalled our efforts for a bit) we managed to collect everybody and everything in one spot and set off to find a place we could stop and camp. The corner is now affectionately named “Carnage Corner” by our group.

Exhausted and hungry, we pulled into our new campsite on a sandy island. Unloading, setting up camp, changeing out of wet clothes, and making supper took a long time, but we all had lots of stories to tell and listen to and the time flew by.

We had a good few days on the island, learning all kinds of plant identification, wilderness skills, and enjoying being completely immersed in nature.

We had time to reflect on the different roles in emergency response, what our response was and what we wished it had been. It was decided that we would end the canoe trip early as there was a section further down the river where the consequences for a similar debacle would be much more severe. There was a canyon where, if someone dumped, they would be swimming for kilometers instead of meters. With water that cold, hypothermia would not only be possible but likely in such a situation. So we had time for chatting, campfires, and some much needed rest.

After a few days I was happy to get back on the water. As we went downstream there were still rapids but they seemed to get less constant and more easily avoidable. The cliffs on each side lowered a bit. Maybe it was just that I was well rested, but the canoeing seemed a lot easier and maybe a little less exciting.

We got to our new take-out spot early in the afternoon and started the process of unloading canoes and loading up trailers. And we started thinking about the next section of our trip – backpacking.

Whitewater Instruction

Camping, Canoeing, Photo of the Day, Water

Sunday, November 6th, 2016

During the first bit of August I was learning to be a better canoeist, canoe instructor, and whitewater rescuer. These were full, intense days mostly on the Kananaskis River. I’ve taken a Paddle Canada Moving Water course before, but it was a long time ago and even then my skills needed a lot of work. The skill development involved much ferrying (getting across the river without being pushed downstream) and many eddy turns and s-turns. Paddle Canada has changed some of their teaching methods recently so we learned the older PATS (Power, Angle, Tilt, Stroke) and got a taste of the newer MITH (Momentum, Initiate, Tilt, Hold) methods for eddy turns. I actually enjoyed seeing the difference between the two. I learned more by trying both than if I had just learned one. I’m sad they’re losing the angle of the canoe in the transition to MITH because I found that a very important factor to consider depending on the speed and angle of the current and where I wanted to end up. But the end result in either case is that you have to feel the canoe and water working together smoothly to get where you want to go. We worked on our form come rain or shine, on warm days and cold days.

We also did a quick trip down the river from Canoe Meadows to Seebe to work on our river reading skills and have a bit of fun. There was one hole where a few people dumped, but it was an easy self rescue as the river was pretty calm for a while downstream.

In the evenings we dried all the wet gear we could, made supper, washed dishes, filtered water, sometimes fixed and modified canoes, and then went to sleep in our tents in Canoe Meadows.

Some days we switched it up and did some whitewater rescue work. This involved a lot of throw bag practice, rope system figuring, and learning to swim in rapids. One evening, to practice our z-drags, we set up a 9-1 rope system to pull a Suburban across the field. This was good practice for our test of pulling a kayak loaded with rocks up a 30 foot cliff the next day. This was to simulate the amount of force needed to pull a canoe off a rock. Once in my life I’ve had the misfortune of being in a group where a canoe got wrapped. I didn’t know about z-drags then and I didn’t have the equipment with me anyway. After trying to move the canoe for half an hour, we ended up getting a tree to use as a lever and with three of us pulling on the tree we eventually pried it off the rock. Water flowing at a good speed is not something to be taken lightly.

Swimming was the most fun though (at least for the people whose drysuits were not leaking). The combination of defensive swimming, aggressive swimming, and rolling across eddy lines was a lot of work, a lot of fun, and really effective education. It did involve a fair number of bruised knees, ripped nails, and jammed fingers, but we all survived and had a blast.

Although it was rare, we occasionally got a chance to chill. These times were filled with music, walks along the river, and campfires.

It was hard for me to fit photography into this intense schedule. It was great practice for me to take pictures of people in action without being too distracted from the learning I had to do along with everyone else. But my normal practice of meditative photography was pretty much impossible. Since August I’ve had the opportunity to lead a canoe trip and do a bit of teaching. Although there was still a lot to do and a lot of interaction, I found a lot more time for photography while leading. Hopefully I’ll eventually get to that story here too.