CIIcanoe...: Another group plans a canoe trip to the "Little North" (“Le Petit Nord”)

Back in August 2009 I wrote a Wilderness Canoe trip report, 21 Day Canoe Trip to the "Little North", that Dave Phillips and I took to the Caribou Forest, Wabakimi Provincial Park, Albany River Provincial Park and the Ogoki Forest. All of this area is within the “Little North”. The “Little North” is an area north of Lake Superior and south of the Hudson Bay. The eastern boundary is James Bay and the western boundary is Lake Winnipeg. In the early days the fur traders called it, “Le Petit Nord”.

Tonight, 04-02-13, I received an e-mail from a guy, Peter Albinger, who is planning to do pretty much the same trip as Dave and I did. Back in 2009 we had extremely dangerous high water levels that made for several very interesting moments especially when we swamped our canoe a couple times in the large standing waves above Iron Falls on the Misehkow River. It's really not a place to be swimming with a canoe. You can read about that in Day 5 of our trip. Then there was the incident where Dave damn near cut off his thumb off with his saw while cutting branches along the shore while we were walking upstream in the Petawa Creek. I wrote a pretty detailed report and there are many photos.

Below is a post Dave wrote on one of the canoe forums ...

...and with a mere whisper of the word "Wabakimi", my good friend and
fellow adventurer Chuck Ryan shows up at the door. the man has a finely
tuned ear, besides being a heck of a paddler.

there's only one thing to do, dredge up a photo, and here it is...

Chuck in his Canuckistan La-Z-Boy, camera case at the ready if an
opportunity should arise, multiple maps, GPS to transfer UTMs to
the the written record, journal, water bottles full of some energy drink
concoction, and a coffee cup full of a liquid so black and viscous ya
could seal your driveway with it.

Chuck was responsible for recording the information we would transfer
to our custom map set and send to Phil Cotton, shoot the photo record,
write the trip report, and most importantly, keep the boat pointed where
it was supposed to go.

For my part, the main jobs were preparing enough food to keep our
calorie intake at 7000 per day, portage the canoe along with a pack
containing 100# of custom blend coffee from the mountains of some
exotic location, not that we have an addiction, and paddle 55 strokes
per minute so the boat would move fast enough to pull a skier...ya know,
should the need arise.

Memorable Chuck quotes from that trip...

After losing the boat in big standing waves above Iron Falls on the
Misehkow, "Dave, you better learn how to paddle or we're going to die
in here."

After another day of slow advance and torturous portage clearing, "Dave,
when you said you wanted to go up to the Albany, I didn't know we would
have to walk the whole way."

Here is another post Dave wrote replying to someone on the forum:

we were both concerned about the portage at Iron Falls, and had read all
the old available print literature covering this river route, as well as
some old trip reports. everything we read said river right, river right, one
after the other...except for a lone report from a myccr paddler who had
gone through solo only two years earlier, he said river left.

as it happened. we found some pretty extreme conditions on the final
approach to the falls, with multiple sets of class rapids. we took some
water in the first set, eddied out and bailed. there wasn't a chance in the
world of making an approach for a river right portage landing before the
falls, and if we had gone river right, we couldn't get back across to a river
left landing. no portage available that we ever found. chuck determined
a river left line and we were doing ok until we got into some big standing
waves and filled the boat to the gunnels. we were still paddling when the
boat capsized and we were in the water, swept down river right along
with the boat. the falls is a huge fast chute, the amount of water moving
through there was unbelievable.

i couldn't see chuck, he couldn't see me, but we both knew enough
to reach up and grab the painter lines, let them stream, and swim
like heck. the boat was rigged with 25' poly lines, coiled from the
boat out and secured under a bungie on the deck plate so they
would stream. the ends were sealed and also marked for easy
identification. those lines were rigged for emergency use, like
right now.

we were able to get the boat into the last eddy above the falls, and
when i said "Man, that cold water is refreshing", the audience didn't
laugh. close call, no joke. all our gear was tethered and watertight, we
didn't lose anything. we found the portage only 50m ahead, river left,
right at the top of the falls.

the point here is that you better know where those portage landings
are when traveling fast water in the drop and pool boreal system, you
can find trouble pretty easy. of all the landings we found in fast
water, none would have permitted us to casually switch sides if it
wasn't where we thought it would be.

Here is Peter's e-mail to me:

"Chuck, a couple of years ago I first read through your series of posts on the canoe trip you did with Dave down the Misehkow and Albany and then up Petawa Creek etc all the way to Pikitigushi. Well, it kinda stayed in my mind even as we paddled other Wabakimi waters.

This summer coming we are finally going to recreate your trip. I thought I'd relay a thank you for all the info in your posts - in some cases, the only info I could find on parts of the route.

I've got a series of links, including one for your blog at http://albinger.me

Needless to say, we are hoping for less rain and lower water conditions than you guys were given. We'll see how it goes.

I hope you're still paddling and having a good time!"

Here is the actual link to his post: Seedtime 2013-Planning a Three-Week Canoe Trip in NW Ontario

If you don't have time to read his blog post here are a couple paragraphs out of it:

"Our route is not original! It is pretty much a copy of the one that CIIcanoe describes in his epic series of posts from 2009 entitled 21 Day Canoe Trip To the “Little North”. (N.B. All blue text is clickable, as are all images.) He and his partner Dave started their trip in Pashkokogan Lake, just west of the headwaters of the Misehkow River in Greenbush Lake. They spent the first two days covering the 53 kilometers to Rockcliff Lake. This is where we pick up their route and follow it to the end. Relevant bits of info on the route and the portages from CIIcanoe’s report will be pasted on the digital copies of our maps before I run off a couple of paper sets that will come along for the ride. CIIcanoe (aka Chuck) and your paddling partner Dave (aka djrocks) - thanks for the post and the inspiration!.............

.............First it was the fur trade. Then it was lumber and minerals. The economy of the Canadian Shield has been built on a sequence of resource extraction activities. We’ll see some signs of this as we paddle down the Misehkow, the site in recent years of mineral exploration. I came across this interesting (but admittedly incomprehensible at times because of the geology-specific language!) - Technical Report: Geology and Mineralization of the Misehkow River Property (2008). It explains the activity that CIIcanoe noted as they paddled north from Iron Falls on the Misehkow in August of 2009, given that the Jiminex mining claims are staked in an eight-kilometer area along the river in this area. It’s worth a look."

I wrote Peter back asking him to let me know how his trip goes this summer and good luck!

Some of my other canoe trip reports with Photos....

21 Day Canoe Trip to the "Little North"

Woodland Caribou Solo

Dark Colored Pictographs

Chuck Ryan Photography

CIIcanoe Canoes Wabakimi