In the north, the second half of July is travel time. I long resisted this reality, trotting out lame reasons why August was better, or even early September, but I get it now. I don’t embrace it, for my own personal travels, but I get it.
Folding all the factors in — daylight, insects, winds, temperatures, ice-free waters, and on and on — there emerges a two-week window of the year when Arctic and sub-Arctic back-country travel by any means is most straightforward and likely to succeed. And on wonderful days, to be truly wonderful, and on tough days, of which there are some, at least not likely to be deadly. And the winner is — late July. Yes, it can be blistering hot (but this year, up here, it’s not.) Yes, the mosquitoes are still out in force (but they have abated a little by late July.) And so on. It’s the time to make miles.
In the spirit of that I have been busy, and I am up at a research camp on a flying job. Flew over the upper Back River the other day, and that got me thinking again about George.
Here he is, arriving on July 29, 1834 at the mouth of the river he called (using the native name, mind you, and hey let’s give him some credit where credit is due, folks) the Thlew-ee-choh. The river now bears his name. To confuse things a bit more, in the passage from his narrative below he refers to another river as “Back’s River.” Near as I can figure out, that river, flowing into the south tip of Bathurst Inlet is the stream now called the Western River.
Departure date from Fort Reliance? June 7. Return date to Fort Reliance, via an upstream journey of the entire Thlew-ee-choh, and then the lower Lockhart River watershed? September 27. Those few of you who are familiar with that stretch of northern Canada might let those dates and that routing sink in for a minute. For you others, well, suffice it to say that it is an itinerary almost beyond modern comprehension.
By 4 A.M., July 29th, we were afloat; but the weather was cloudy and cold, with a northerly breeze, and the thermometer at 41 .5 degrees {F.} At sunrise a fog began to spread and soon became so dense that we found ourselves in the midst of several rapids before we were in the least aware of their presence; and subsequently the breeze freshened, and the fog increased so much, that, unable to see distinctly, we were obliged to lie by until it should clear. In the meantime the sun occasionally broke through the clouds, and enabled me to obtain observations, the results of which were, latitude 67 degrees, 7 min. 31 sec., longitude 94 degrees, 39 min. 45 sec. W.
The afternoon permitted us to proceed; and it was while threading our way between some sand-banks, with a strong current, that we first caught sight of a majestic headland in the extreme distance to the north, which had a coast-like appearance. This important promontory was subsequently honoured by receiving the name of Her Royal Highness the Princess Victoria. The sand-banks also now became broken into cliffs, which, dwindling away on the eastern side to a vanishing point, subsided on the western into low flats, the level of which was just broken by half a dozen sandy knolls sparingly tipped with a few blades of dry grass. The banks on this side were cut by several channels leading to the left, but shallow, and not navigable. The country on both sides was swampy, and gradually sloped upward to the distant mountains.
This then may be considered as the mouth of the Thlew-ee-choh, which, after a violent and tortuous course of five hundred and thirty geographical miles, running through an iron-ribbed country without a single tree on the whole line of its banks, expanding into fine large lakes with clear horizons, most embarrassing to the navigator, and broken into falls, cascades, and rapids, to the number of no less than eighty-three in the whole, pours its waters into the Polar Sea in latitude 67 deg. 11 min. N. and longitude 94 deg. 30 min. W.; that is to say, about thirty-seven miles more south than the mouth of the Copper Mine River, and nineteen miles more south than that of Back’s River at the lower extremity of Bathurst’s Inlet.
There is a lot to chew on there. One hundred and ninety two years on, here we are. Travel time, Late July, and a little time travel.
"bushedpilotblog" Dave Olesen 