An incredible journey

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This article was published 13/03/2021 (1839 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grand adventures often have simple beginnings, such as two teenage girls being assigned to the same canoe on a summer trip, becoming fast friends and later celebrating college graduation with a 3,200-kilometre, 85-day canoe trip from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay.

Author Natalie Warren and Ann Raiho, the first two women to make this expedition, had a remarkable trip of paddling against strong headwaters for days, navigating rapids and the vast expanse of Lake Winnipeg, encountering wild animals and hordes of mosquitoes and black flies, and the tensions and joy that accompany an endeavour as difficult as the one they chose.

Along the way they met skeptics who suggested two women could not finish the trip, and “river angels” who supported them with good wishes, a hot meal and sometimes a roof over their heads for a night.

Warren was a 16-year-old living in Miami when she first got the canoeing bug during a two-week summer camp in Minnesota. She had never canoed before, nor seen wilderness, but liked the idea of the freedom of it. On her third outing, a 50-day trip through Nunavut, she was paired with Raiho, an old hand at canoeing from St. Paul. The two of them became friends, and went to the same college in Minnesota, where this adventure started in a dorm room.

Raiho entered Warren’s room one evening, threw down a copy of Canoeing with the Cree, an account of the 1930 trip by a teen-aged Eric Sevareid (later a well-known TV correspondent) and a partner to Hudson Bay, and said: “Read this. We should do it.”

And so they did, setting out on the Minnesota River on June 2, 2011, padding against a flood-swollen current on the polluted waterway, travelling only 23 kilometres in 11 hours on their first day.

That may not have been an auspicious start, but it tested the mettle of the canoeists and helped prepare them for the arduous journey that took them through Fargo and Grand Forks to Winnipeg, Gull Harbour, along Lake Winnipeg to Norway House and Oxford House and eventually to York Factory, the historic Hudson’s Bay Company trading post that was their endpoint.

Warren doesn’t herald their role as the first women to make the trip, but does celebrate it, as well she should; it is a remarkable feat, whomever does the paddling.

Her account of the hardships of rough water, rough weather, rough rapids, the seemingly endless expanse of Lake Winnipeg and the arctic rivers leading to the bay make it clear just how challenging and downright dangerous their trek was — especially, for instance, when they lost their compass overboard — without ever resorting to braggadocio.

Warren’s narrative includes commentary on the sorry state of many of the waterways they travelled, caused by farming practices that pollute the rivers, and the Lake Winnipeg algae bloom that can be seen from a satellite.

She also describes the economic losses that have decimated many Indigenous communities along the route, and the changing climate that has harmed hunting and living habitat for wildlife.

Warren captures the economic desolation of those communities, but also the generosity of their inhabitants, who opened their arms and their homes to the paddling pair when they needed a hot meal and some TLC.

It was one such stop in Norway House where they gained Myhan, a stray dog, as a third member of the crew. Their host explained a dog was needed in case they encountered a polar bear; the dog would bark, the bear would eat it, and the women could run to safety. Warren and Raiho took the dog, swearing not to use it as a sacrifice.

An arduous trip puts strain on the best of friendships, and at one point the two only communicated with each other by way of notes.

However, they ended the exciting journey still friends, and still are a decade later. One thing they agree on is that the pace of climate change means a similar journey today would be as different from theirs as theirs was from Sevareid’s.

Chris Smith is a Winnipeg writer.