Why Athabasca?

The tale behind the trip, from daydreams to details

In the mid 1970s, I was idly scanning through magazines in a waiting room, my mind not really focused on the pages flipping before my eyes, when an incongruous photo suddenly snapped my attention to the page in front of me.

I've always been fascinated by canoes and the sleek red craft pictured on the page might have been enough to attract my attention anyway, but the landscape around the canoe was so outlandish, I became instantly fascinated. Here was a vessel ideally suited for travel in the forests and lakes of Canada, apparently being paddled through the Sahara Desert. I had to find out more.

It came as a surprise to me when I read the accompanying article to learn that there's a desert-like sandscape located in the heart of central Canada. In a remote corner of northern Saskatchewan, just below the NWT border, there's a vast area of shifting sand dunes that borders the south side of Lake Athabasca.

This area is home to a surprising variety of wildlife and hosts some plant life found nowhere else on earth. But what really caught my attention is the fact that two significant rivers flow through this remarkable landscape. The idea of canoeing through a desert has an irresistible appeal for a paddler with an eye for the unusual.

Someday, I wanted to walk among the dunes and paddle in the shadow of a huge sand dune on a clear, northern river. That magazine photo often came to mind over the years whenever I was planning the next season's canoe trip, but with so many rivers to choose from, the dunes were bypassed in favour of other destinations. This year, I'm excited to say, my family and I are finally going to finally have the opportunity to see the Athabascan Sand Dunes in person. 

Getting to the sand dunes will require a fair bit of travel. We're leaving our home in central Ontario several days before our trip on the river begins. We'll be driving a van loaded with food, camping gear and canoes to La Loche in northern Saskatchewan.

From there, we'll jam all our gear into a vintage DeHavilland Beaver bush plane for the flight to our starting point. We'll be taking two canoes for the four of us. In order to ease the logistics, we're taking a 17 foot canoe and a 16 foot canoe.

The larger canoe will have the seats, thwarts and deck plates removed so that it nests perfectly on top of the smaller boat. That way the both canoes take the space of only one.

We'll begin our trip on a small lake and paddle down the Carswell River in a northerly direction. The river doesn't have a lot of water running through it and in dry years it can mean a lot of wading and dragging. We've been told that most of June has been rainy and water levels should be no problem.

After a few days travel, the Carswell meets the larger William River that comes from the east and joins the Carswell to flow north to Lake Athatbasca. We'll continue along the William till we reach the lake. For most of its length, the William River flows through typical northern boreal forest of jack pine and spruce.

Campsites should be plentiful along the rock ledges or in the moss-covered gaps among the trees. All that suddenly changes at one bend in the river. Rounding the corner, the paddler is suddenly faced with a wall of sand that rises straight from the river and towers overhead.

The last section of the river will be a challenge to navigate. The river spreads out and becomes very shallow. What was a solid flow of water becomes a tangled puzzle of braided channels that often lead to dead ends. Travelling this section will require a good eye for current and colouration to detect the deeper water. 

Once we've exited from the river, we'll be paddling along the south shore of Lake Athabasca for several days. This area is often prone to high winds and we may be forced to sleep during the day and travel at night. The shoreline in this area is marked by the ghosts of forests that were buried alive in the sand dunes and re-emerged from the shifting sands decades later, stripped to a skeleton of their former selves.

Float planes are reluctant to land on Lake Athabasca, so our final destination will be a small lake on the McFarlane River on the east side of the Sand Dunes area. The McFarlane looks like an interesting river, and if time permits, we'd like to spend some time exploring upstream from the lake.

Once we reach the sand dunes, we'll be doing a lot of walking, exploring the different types of landscape, and climbing the tallest sand dunes.

It should be an interesting trip.