Daily Trip Log Reports

August 7: day 27
Today the plane will come to pick us up. Its been 23 days of travel in the wilderness, yet it seems like we only started a few days ago.

There's always a bitter sweet feeling at the end of a long canoe trip. On the one hand, there's a desire to get back to all the things we've been used to in our everyday lives. On the other hand, we've developed a bond with our new home for the last several weeks and leaving is hard to do.

On trips with people you don't know, you may develop a close friendship with a stranger that is hard to leave behind at the end of the trip or you may have been at odds with someone for an entire trip and this is your opportunity to leave them behind. Regardless of what happens, the end of a trip with strangers is always an emotional time. 

When you travel as a family, it's a different situation. We've always been a close family unit and we're all good friends with each other. On this trip, our two boys have become much closer with each other. At home they had the typical arguments that siblings have, but out here, they've rarely argued at all. It has been amazing to see how much they've enjoyed each other's company and how much each has tried to help the other. We've found that the main difference between travelling with strangers and traveling with your family is the complete lack of homesickness. When you travel with the family, home is where ever you are.

Near the appointed time, we hear the unmistakable drone of a Beaver headed in our direction. After circling our lake a few times to check for the best approach, the sturdy little bush plane drops down past the cliffs and lands near our campsite. It doesn't take long to load all our gear into the plane and before we know it, we're airborne and headed back to La Loche and our van.

The weather is quite overcast and our pilot flies low under the clouds. A few minutes in the air retraces several days of paddle for us and we get to see some of the terrain from a fresh perspective. Everybody is glued to a window on the two-hour flight back, looking down at the unending wilderness.

When we arrive back at the float plane base in La Loche, we spend some time chatting with the pilots in the Air Mikisew offices, catching up on the world events while we've been gone and phoning the various folks back home anxious to hear that we survived the trip. When the calls are made and we get the van packed and ourselves cleaned up, we head off into a cold drizzle for Sasakatoon, where we're scheduled to do a presentation on canoeing with children for the Saskatoon Canoe Club the next day.

Brendan gives his mom a hug immediately upon his coming out of the tent in the morning. Both boys still maintain this ritual, especially when out camping.  See More Photos!

Postscript - rolling in the driveway at home

August 12: day 32
It's a little after midnight when we roll into the driveway of our home in a small hamlet in the hills that surround the valley bounded by the ski resorts of Horseshoe and Mount St. Louis in Central Ontario. Less than 200 Km to the south of us, the lights and bustle of the large metropolitan area of Toronto are probably still alive with people still awake and going about their business, but here, all is quite and there are no street lights to break the illusion of wilderness. It's been a long drive. Our trusty van has accumulated another 10,000 Km as we drove from our home to the remote community of La Loche in northern Saskatchewan and back.

Everyone but me is tired and heads to their respective rooms and bed once we've had a chance to check that our house is still as we left it almost a month ago. I'm still wide awake from the drive and putter around, cleaning out some of the essential items from the van. Just south of Sudbury, we noticed that the sky occasionally lit up with a hint of northern lights. It seems ironic that we see these as we head south and home, but the nights have not been dark enough at the northern latitudes we traveled to see much in the heavens. Star gazing won't be possible for another few weeks where we camped.

On one of the trips out to the van, I stop dead in my tracks to stare at the sky. Its pulsing and dancing with the strange, eerie light as the aurora shimmers from horizon to horizon. The light show above me is in constant motion and the colours above span from east to west and north to south. Not a single corner of the night sky is unaffected.

I know from past experience that the brilliance of these northern lights is below the threshold of what I can capture in my camera, so I'm left to grope for words to describe the scene above me. Language fails me in this endeavor and I'm forced to settle back and simply admire the spectacle above.

In the distance, I hear the lone howl of a coyote, no doubt also dazzled by the strange luminescence above. Where we live is a testament to the power and scope of the last glaciers that shaped this region of the world, millennia in the past. When the irresistible force of tons of ice scraped the landscape clean down to the bedrock of Canadian Shield, it deposited what meager cover there was in the fertile regions to the south, in part forming the hills where we live. I've often imagined that on a clear day, I can look out from a vantage point in the hills and see a gateway to the vast land of rivers and lakes to the north. Hearing the coyote call, it's not hard to imagine a different timbre and pitch which transports me back to that little lake on the McFarlane River where the coyote's distant relatives the wolves were howling every night around our two tents in the wilderness. 

I debate whether or not I should wake the rest of the family to share in this treat, but decide that they need their sleep. I vow that someday, I'll return to the shores of a remote northern lake in the cold of winter to share with the rest of my crew, the indescribable beauty of the aurora borealis dancing across a shimmering, frosty night.