Five days on the Brokenhead

West End

St. James-Assiniboia

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This article was published 07/07/2023 (1205 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Life is a lot like a river.

That’s a lesson that Danny Shelest, a 10-year-old St. James resident, learned recently, after travelling 150 kilometres down the Brokenhead River. Over five days, Shelest canoed the river with family friend Lorne Chastko, a veteran paddler and West End resident.

“It was cool. It was so quiet,” Shelest, a student at Linwood School, said, adding that his younger sister is “not so quiet.”

Last summer, Chastko travelled 1,180 kilometres down the Assiniboine River. The trip took 23 days, and challenged Chastko in many ways. Hearing tales of Chastko’s adventure, Shelest — who spends time in the summer at the same campground as Chastko and his wife, Donna, near Beausejour, Man. — was intrigued.

“I thought it would be good for him to experience,” Chastko said. “His dad is an outdoorsman, but more of a fisherman.”

“I’ve gone on smaller (trips), a couple of hours,” Shelest said. “It was fun. At some points, it felt really, really long because we were paddling from five to nine hours a day.”

The pair launched its canoe on June 16 just north of Ross, Man.

“The river there is about 20 or 30 feet wide,” Chastko explained. “But we ended going through about a kilometre of reeds, because it narrowed right down. So I ended up getting out of the canoe and standing on reeds to pull the canoe about four feet, then another four feet, then another for about four hours. Of course wouldn’t you know it, it also started raining there. It wasn’t bad, but Danny was sponging the canoe out while I dragged it along.”

The journey wrapped up near Patricia Beach on Lake Winnipeg on June 20.

“The river really opens up (near the lake) some parts wider than the Assiniboine,” Shelest said. “It gets really wavy near the lake.”

Wildlife was plentiful throughout the journey.

“It was excellent,” Chastko said. “We saw swans and geese and ducks, we saved a little Bambi who fell over the side of the river. We saw it get up and walk away after about half an hour. ”

“I saw a moose in the woods,” Shelest added. “We saw foxes. Something that was really cool is that we saw baby goslings swim underwater twice.”

The pair camped on private property of some friendly folks they met along the way, including a Hutterite colony, and spent Sunday night at their respective campers at Great Woods Park & Campground for a little taste of home before finishing up their journey Tuesday morning. Along the way, Chastko said they had to portage a number of times where bridges were either too close to the water, or still jammed with trees from the spring runoff.

For Chastko, the experience was both a means of passing on knowledge to the next generation, and seeing the world from a new perspective.

“In life, you’re going to find plenty of little problems that you have to deal with and figure out what you’re going to do. This river trip is much like life, when you’ll be dealing with things in life, with happy and joyous times and times that you wonder what you’re going to do,” Chastko said.

“For me, it was great to see it through the eyes of a 10-year-old,” he added. “That was really neat, as well.”

It seems as though, after his experience, Shelest has caught the paddling bug himself.

“I think that more people should do stuff like this,” he said. “All kids today, all they want is to be on their screens. Kids should spend more time outside.”