2005 Buyer’s Guide: Whitewater
Getting it While We Can
As the river drains away, it reveals stark reminders of why we come this way
story & photos by Brian Shields
WE JOURNEY DOWN TO JAMES BAY AGAIN, pulling our three canoes, one paddle stroke at a time, for the 300 kilometres to Moosonee. We travel the seldom-used North French River, catching the last of a wet summer’s high water and then watching the river ebb, day by day, as its life drains away under us. So few whitewater canoeists travel this river because the North French is what the local outfitters call “water critical”. Sandwiched tightly between the Little Abitibi and the Wakwayowkastic rivers, the narrowness of its watershed normally allows canoe travel only just after the snow melts. There are no signs of anyone having come this way for years, nothing recognizable as a camp- site, never a blaze or an axe-cut branch, all the portages are hid- den, unused, behind a wall of trees. In a region laced with so many canoeing classics, why explore such a questionable river? Our group of aging paddlers decided long ago never to paddle a river twice and the North French was the only blue line draining into James Bay from the south we hadn’t travelled.
Cold and incessant early summer rains have filled the riverbed com- pletely and we fall into it, early in July, on the very first sunny day in
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At the more dangerous rapids we end up picking precise and delicate lines to thread our way through the rocky puzzle.
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