As we paddled along, it looked for all the world like there were continuous, small hills on either side of the river.
Like so many things, what should have been obvious wasn't until it was pushed in my face.
We had left time in our schedule for weather delays and so we could take some days off to hike a bit. A few days out we decided to take part of a day and see what was back from the river.
When we climbed the 'hill', instead of the backside of the hill like I expected, it was flat tundra as far as the eye could see. The river just flowed through a cut it had made. Well of course it did; what was I thinking? The illusion persisted through most of the trip however.
Up on the tundra there was very little in the way of trees. Except for the very occasional straggler, what trees we'd been seeing were entirely in the slightly more protected valley made by the river.
All along the trip, all the way to the end at the arctic ocean, we found wildflowers. Robert and Marilyn were especially interested in them and most of these pictures are Marilyn's.
I can't say that I was much of a wildlife photographer on this trip; really wasn't much of a photographer at all but you can see that for yourselves. Here are some pictures of a lone caribou we floated by.
We only saw one bear on the trip, a grizzly on the side of the river as we floated along. As soon as it saw us, it headed away and that was just fine. We did see lots of bear sign though: tracks, scat, and places where bear had dug up the ground. All we had with us for protection was pepper spray; fortunately this isn't an area known for polar bear, just grizzlies.
One creature that I really hoped to see on the trip was a musk ox. For me they hold a fascination as holdovers from the ice ages and would be a perfect accompaniment for a trip to the arctic. We did manage to see a couple herds of them as well as a few singletons. With the second herd, Andy and Robert took off running to get a closer look. They succeeded but it was too far away for me to get pictures.
One day as we headed downstream, we heard a splashing noise from behind us and turned around to see a small herd of caribou crossing the river. I guess we didn't bother them too much.
Andy found this skull that I dubbed the saber-toothed gerbil.
Later we saw arctic ground squirrels and figure that's really where the skull came from.
I just liked this twisted tree. There was actually a whole swamp of them like this right next to were we camped one night.
Four of us brought fishing gear on the trip. Mostly we caught greyling but we'd read that there were arctic char in the river too so we stopped at a place where char had been caught before. Once Robert found the right spot, each of the four of us caught a nice char. This is the first fish Marilyn ever caught.
We'd stopped for fishing just after lunch so we kept the four fish in the water until we camped for the evening and then filleted and cooked them over an open fire. It was really good. Fresh char is undoubtedly my favorite fish, but four char is a little too much fish for six people, at least in one sitting. We had some more for breakfast the next morning.
The arctic has quite a selection of birds of prey as well, especially as we got into the cliffs nearing the canyons. Eagles, falcons, and hawks were common. It's a little hard to get a sense of scale from this picture but this nest is at least 15 feet tall.
As we got near the canyons, the rock formations on either side of the river got more and more spectacular. They also created the one exception to my earlier claim that the river was really easy canoing with just a nice current to carry us along. Here was the whitewater. Sadly, I was busy enough with the canoing that I took no pictures. Silly of me as the rock formations were fantastic and I now wish I had pictures of the rapids.
The first canyon had three rapids. These were easy enough to scout as we got to them and we ran all three. Marilyn and Robin thought about running one backwards but Andy and I managed to catch on to them before they went through. Robert and Andy *did* run one backwards.
The next day saw the second canyon and this was a more serious obstacle. When we got to the first set of rapids it was time to figure out what we were going to do: try to run them, pick our way through the bottom of the canyon, lining and carrying where we had to, or just carry the whole thing.
When we got there, another party was preparing to carry along the tops of the cliffs down the left side. We got on top of the right side and walked downriver to see for ourselves. The walking would really suck if we had to carry over this so we looked really hard at the river to see if we could make it. There was a bit of problem with scale again since we were so far over the river; the rapids looked smaller than we knew they were. There were certainly drops that we knew were too big to run safely but for each of those we found a way to line it or carry in the canyon bottom. In the end, we decided to stay down in the canyon and work our way through.
We had two carries. The first and longest was around this rock pillar. By longest, I only mean a couple hundred meters. Certainly beats the estimated 4km for carrying around the entire canyon. The river went to the right of the pillar and we to the left. Writeups we'd read of the river put this pillar in the middle of the river and imagining the water level that much higher was a little sobering. With those water conditions, working through canyon would not be something to even consider.
It took all day to pick our way down through the canyon. These pictures are where we took a break, having come as far as we could see when we'd scouted from the top. While resting, drinking, and eating, I wandered off through the rocks and got a look at the river a bit downstream. More rapids but I thought they were runnable and picked out a path through. When I got back to the others, I described what I found and they decided to just let me lead and they'd play follow the leader through the rocks. I felt honored for their trust and, fortunately, we made it through just fine.
Shortly after that, we decided we'd really had enough for the day and found a rocky place to camp. We decided that we weren't going to think about getting up early the next morning and, indeed, we didn't; we slept until almost noon. Then we decided to take a day of rest and just stayed put for another day.
Continue with Canoing, Part 3.