The Way of the Wolf: Fat, Fast and Feral—A Recipe for a Successful Epic Canoe Expedition
The Canadian Arctic is a vast area of lakes and rivers interconnected for thousands of kilometres that the adventurous soul can travel in any direction. In this region, the majority of canoe trippers will typically fly via bush plane to the headwaters of a river and amble downstream to the mouth, then get picked up and returned to the town they began from.
Trips like these deliver a pleasant vacation—undoubtedly a fabulous way to spend a couple of weeks through a few hundred kilometres of a beautiful summertime wilderness landscape. These journeys are worthwhile for sure…but at some point in every tripper’s lifetime, they should set out to do an Epic Arctic journey.
Epic is, of course, open to interpretation—but in my estimation, an Epic journeymeans travelling in the old ways over vast distances of a 1,000 kilometres or more—upstream, over a divide, downstream, then up again, perhaps another divide, overland, along ocean coastlines…linking multiple iconic waterways into one grand excursion. In earlier centuries, this was the norm—there were no planes to skip over broad tracts of wilderness for a convenient drop, and the travellers at the time were expert canoeists who were highly in tune with the land. Every stretch of water was used for practical reasons by Indigenous peoples and, later, voyageurs to move through the landscape. Nowadays, the tough bits between popular rivers have been returned to the wild creatures, with local people rarely venturing too far from their communities in the summertime, and where canoeists cherry-pick stretches of river to avoid the perceived difficulty of the bits in between.
There is something seminal that arises from an Epic journey that can’t be drawn from a recreational trip, where every day is a challenge and the world you departed from becomes a distant memory as you disappear for weeks or months into the rhythm of the land. To experience an Epic, you really do need a significant amount of time out there, you need to cover a lot of distance and you need a variety of waterscapes. These trips are never easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is. So… where to start?
From the experience of over 50,000 kilometres of epic wilderness journeys in my lifetime so far, to travel efficiently and successfully over a long distance in the short Arctic summer, in very simple terms, you have to be fat, fast, and feral. Let’s break it down to show you what I mean:
1. Go in Fat
I’ve often been asked, “How do you get fit for your epic trips? You must have to work out a lot and go into these journeys in tip-top shape.” Quite the opposite actually. A robust diet of beer, carbs and anything else that adds a fine marbling to my waistline is more important than any fitness routine. Why carry a heavy amount of food in your pack, when you can carry it on your body? I bring a minimal amount of sustenance…oats for breakfast, Tortillas with PB&J for lunch, a freeze-dried pouch for dinner and a few pepperoni sticks and bit of chocolate to round it out. My beer gut takes care of the rest. I’m not saying aimless sloth is the key…keep on moving, in advance of your Epic, but scale the calories up.
On a particularly challenging 1,350 kilometre trip from Yellowknife to Kugluktuk a couple of years ago via the Yellowknife River and the Hood River, I went into the trip at a jiggly 187 pounds and came out at a lean, hunted 162 pounds, existing largely on my own body fat. So, drink up and pig out on the approach to your big journey—gluttony is the best training!
2. Go Fast!
There’s plenty of time in the short Arctic summer if you just want to casually do a classic river like the Thelon, Back or Hood… But if you want to do an Epic line that links up several of these waterways, you have to work within the parameters of what the Arctic gives you. For example, on Great Slave Lake, the ice doesn’t often leave the lake until around July 1. Smaller lakes melt out earlier with the quick-warming land around them, as do the rivers. In the Arctic, however, the big lakes take a lot longer to melt out as the mass amount of thick ice in these vast bodies of water refrigerate themselves and hold…so timing has to take this into account.
On a 1,750-kilometre trip from Yellowknife to Chantrey Inlet via the Back River in 2018, we started on June 29, moving quickly across Great Slave Lake, and after only a week of paddling, caught up to a couple on Pike’s Portage who’d started a whole 3 weeks earlier. Their mistake was not taking the ice into account, and they ended up stuck halfway across the lake for nine days, waiting for it to clear. Their early start and slow pace eventually forced them to abandon their dream of going down the Back River from Yellowknife.
At the other end of the season, you also can’t dawdle along, as by mid-August in the Arctic, you’ll run into consistent storms driven by a heavy North Wind. We met another man on the same journey on Ptarmigan Lake as he was spending his morning cleaning fish instead of utilizing a beautiful tailwind to push him across that vast lake. He also wanted to do the Back River but eventually ran into the mid-August winds and abandoned his trip halfway along—he was just simply too slow to finish the mission.
If you want to complete your Epic, you should start later than you think—but go fast. Don’t take days off, and be consistent by putting in 10 hour days, every day. In this way, you miss the big lake ice, but also finish before the arctic August winds kick in. We ended up covering the 1,750 kilometre journey that summer in 35 days…kicking back and sipping Whiskey on Chantrey Inlet by the first week of August.
3. Be Feral
Finally, you have to be feral. In general, this means being wild and untamed. Your mentality should be like that of the wolves, musk ox, caribou and bears you see out on the land. Like them, you have to be lean, lank and tenacious… ever-moving across the vast landscape of the Arctic.
Feral also means keeping things extremely simple. I always travel with one canoe and a partner. By adding two or three canoes (and four to six people) to a journey, you create more logistics when it comes to movement. You will inevitably be waiting for, or trying to catch up to, another canoe in the group—a ‘push and pull’ mode of travel that fragments the flow of the trip. And remember, even a trip of 100 days is just a weekend trip with more food…you use the same canoe, tent, cooking kit and sleeping gear as you would for a short excursion. You just have to figure out the food equation. With a canoe, this is easy—I’ve carried up to 50 days of food at a time, which fit easily beneath the gunwales of the canoe.
Anybody can do an epic canoe trip; you just have to have the right approach. Like a wolf ranging far and wide in pursuit of its prey, an Arctic canoe tripper is best served by doing more with less. In following the mantra of being ‘fat, fast, and feral,’ your dreams of completing an Epic canoe journey through the Arctic will become reality.
