Skipping the sermon at the Stanley Mission. PHOTO: LAUREL ARCHER
Bottom of Frog Portage, Churchill River. PHOTO: LAUREL ARCHER
A system of lakes broken up by bottlenecks of fast water. PHOTO: BARB AND RON KROLL
T
CHURCHILL RIVER • Saskatchewan
Te revival of wilderness canoeing in the 1970s can be credited in part to a man who had remote waterways all to himself in the previous decades. Sigurd Olson, an environ- mentalist and writer from Minnesota, pop- ularized recreational wilderness paddling with his accounts of canoeing in the Bound- ary Waters and Quetico area in his best-sell- ing compilations of short stories, Te Singing Wilderness and Te Listening Point. In these books, Olson eloquently described
the charms and hardships of travelling by paddle and portage and living outdoors. But only one of Olson’s canoe trips was worthy of being the focus of an entire book—north- ern Saskatchewan’s Churchill River, which he described in Te Lonely Land. In the summer of 1955, Olson and five
paddling partners—including Eric Morse, a University of Toronto historian and member of the band of canoeists dubbed the latter- day Voyageurs—paddled three cedar canvas canoes 800 kilometres down the Churchill and Sturgeon-Weir rivers from Ile-a-la-
38 n CANOE ROOTS fall 2006
Crosse, Saskatchewan, to Te Pas, Manitoba. It was unheard of at the time to take a seven- week canoe trip for pleasure. “We traveled as the voyageurs did, paddled
the same lakes, ran the same rapids, and packed over their ancient portages,” wrote Olson of their trip. “We knew the winds and storms, saw the same skylines, and felt the awe and wonderment that was theirs.” Te Churchill consists of a series of lakes
connected by short channels of fast water. Te main access points are Ile-a-la-Crosse, Missinipe and Sandy Bay, all of which are north of La Ronge, Saskatchewan. If you don’t have three weeks to paddle the 386- kilometre, 20-portage section between Ile-a-la-Crosse and Missinipe or two weeks to paddle the 222 kilometres between Mis- sinipe and Sandy Bay, your best bet is to fly in to a lake somewhere along the way. A great five- to seven-day trip involves chartering a floatplane from Missinipe to Sandfly Lake and paddling the Churchill’s network of lakes back to your vehicle.
MAPS: Topographic 73-O/5, 73-O/9, 73-O/10, 73-O/12, 73- O/13, 73-O/14, 73-O/15, 73-O/16, 73-P/10, 73-P/11, 73-P/12, 74-B/4.*
INFO:
www.canoesaskatch-
ewan.rkc.ca/skroute.htm
GUIDEBOOK: Northern Saskatchewan Canoe Trips: A Guide to 15 Wilderness Rivers, by Laurel Archer, Boston Mills Press.
OUTFITTERS: Horizons Unlimited, La Ronge,
www.churchillrivercanoe.com, 877-511-2726.
READING: No canoe trip on the Churchill River would be complete with- out a copy of Sigurd Olson’s The Lonely Land for campfire reading.
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