Journal
Shades of White, the Prelude
The dramatic final chapter of the Kesselheim family’s trip across Manitoba was preceded by three weeks of (mostly) smooth sailing, including wolf pups, moose antlers, seals, and a fisher.
By Alan Kesselheim

Of course, the only thing people know of our Manitoba canoe expedition is the final, epic 36-hour marathon full of polar bears, whales, and ocean swells (see “Shades of White”). Yes, it was memorable. But what it leaves out is a three-week trip through the boreal, subarctic wilds of the North, across more than 300 miles of very quiet and lovely landscape, on the Seal River.

It was a logistically sweet journey. We drove to Thompson, Manitoba, and got shuttled to our put-in along the Churchill River drainage, leaving our car at the train station. At the end of the trip we hopped aboard the Tundra Express train out of Churchill and trundled back to our car, avoiding the expense and hassle of a fly-in. It was also an echo of my first canoe trip with Marypat, back in 1982. On that expedition we paddled the North Seal River, also ending in Churchill. Our 2009 trip followed the Churchill River, then crossed to the south branch of the Seal, and rejoined our earlier route about halfway through, at Shethani Lake.

Ruby was the impetus behind the trip. Ever since a family expedition down the Kazan River, on the true Canadian tundra, when she was 10, she had been agitating for a return to the north. This wasn’t quite tundra, but it was close. It was wild, and it was affordable.

In contrast to the high anxiety of the trip’s conclusion, our first three weeks were everything you hope for on a northern canoe jaunt. The weather cooperated. The bugs were light. Headwinds were rare. Campsites were generally beautiful.

Not that everything came easily. We made a strenuous, three-day traverse from the Churchill River system to the South Seal. One very long day was spent working upstream on the Big Sand River, a tortuous, logjam-infested creek that required a 16-hour, dawn-to-dusk effort. In the middle of that slog, we came face-to-face with a family of curious wolf pups.

Wolves were a frequent sight on the river portion of the trip. We saw seven or eight during a span of several days, including a pack trotting along a beach in dawn mist. We also saw a fisher running across the crest of an esker ridge, several moose, and seals playing in the river currents more than 100 miles inland.

Beautiful campsites kept appearing just when we most needed them. We’d paddle along rocky, shrubby, inhospitable shoreline for 20 miles and, at the end of the day, turn a corner and find a crescent beach with slopes of glacially smoothed bedrock. We spent a windbound day in a beautiful camp on a sandy point, our fire sheltered in a grove of birch trees and surrounded by wild roses.

The Seal is punctuated with fun, frequent rapids, most of them runnable. Some of them go for miles, full of waves and current and river bottom whipping past under the hull. Stunted boreal forest alternates with islands of tundra and miles of sinuous esker ridges, the sand deposits left by retreating glaciers. We stopped to walk the crests of eskers for hours.

Sawyer and Ruby dunked in the river, swam some of the rapids, floated next to the canoes. In one camp we had a natural Jacuzzi frothing past. They picked cloudberries for pancakes, collected driftwood for our cook fires, pitched in on camp chores.

Three weeks in, more than 20 miles from the ocean, we came across our first polar bear track in the mud. We had stopped for lunch. There, embedded along the shoreline, was a track the size of a platter. We all stooped over it, then stood and scanned the horizon for white. A day later we bumped down the final rapids in the river and saw the drab shack hunkered on the Hudson Bay coast, where the fear-and-loathing portion of our journey, the part everyone remembers, began.

Back to Top