On belay! PHOTO: KEVIN CALLAN
Seven days, two books, no traffic. PHOTO: FRANK WOLF
Dealing with the Devil At first, notoriously hard-luck tripper Kevin Callan was skeptical of locals’ claims that Diablo Portage on northern Ontario’s Steel River loop started at a sheer cliff. “We kept paddling past the landing,” he says. Eventually Callan resigned to the fact that the locals were right—but his Springer spaniel did not. “She kept looking at me with eyes that said, ‘Are you crazy?’” Later on, while Callan was struggling with a portion of the trail known as Crotch Cruncher for its treacherous thigh-deep crevices, a lynx stalked the disillusioned dog. “When we returned home she was scared of the neighbour’s cat,” says Callan.
400 kilometres on into the hidden Jungle
On assignment forNational Geographic’s book America’s Hidden Wilderness, author James Raffan found just that on Quebec’s Riviere a L’Eau Claire. “We knew the local Cree chose to avoid this river in favour of a series of lakes,” says Raffan. “Our experience explained why.” On a river of many portages, a two-kilometre, eight-hour bushwhack around a waterfall ranks among his all-time worst. “Near the end of the portage, we decided to slide the canoes downhill,” he says. “At one point a canoe loaded with gear took off and disappeared into a dark forest abyss.”
a boreal girl’s introduction to the rainforest
Shortly after moving to Vancouver Island from northern Saskatchewan, author and canoe-guide Laurel Archer got her first taste of the unique challenges of portaging in the rainforest. “All the trip descriptions made the Nitinat Triangle route sound great,” she says. “But it was horrendous. In a nutshell, portaging in the rainforest involves carrying a canoe over huge, slippery cedars that have fallen like pick-up-sticks. And then we had to double back because of wind and waves on the ocean leg of the trip. It worked out that we portaged more than 25 per cent of the total distance.”
the Yellowhead He may have dragged his canoe on wheels, but that doesn’t discount the magnitude of Frank Wolf’s seven-day portage from Edmonton to Jasper on the Yellowhead Highway as part of a cross-Canada trip in 1995. “Te most arduous part was the bleak flatness of the Prairies and forever seeing the Rockies in the distance,” says Wolf, who walked 50 to 60 kilometres per day spending his nights camped in the ditch. “I remember reading novels as I towed the canoe. I got through a couple of books on that portage.”
thompson’s disposable Canoes
Fur trade explorer and cartographer David Tompson made the first of his many trips over the Rocky Mountains at Howe’s Pass, near present-day Golden, B.C., in 1807. It was common for explorers of the day to abandon their canoes at one end of a portage and build new ones at the other. In the case of Howe’s Pass, a lack of birchbark forced Tompson’s party to hack together pieces of split cedar into the likeness of canoes. In 1811, Tompson’s exhaustive surveying led to the discovery that Howe’s Pass was at the head of the Columbia River, which flowed to the Pacific at Oregon.
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