Fitting Into the Land

A 100-day expedition from southern Alberta to the Arctic Ocean, canoeing northern rivers and lakes, yields fertile research into how people interact with place and landscape. For outdoor educators, it has the potential to change the way they think about the wild.

Just as we were about to embark upon the portage I saw it—a lone caribou on the ridge above us. During the previous 30 days of paddling upstream on the Yellowknife and Winter Rivers, our group, growing ragged and weary, had yet to see one.
Picking up my binoculars to look more closely, I realized there were actually many more of them on the ridge. Then, as we all watched, the whole hillside appeared to be moving.
The caribou swarmed toward us even as we continued onward over the portage. Then, about halfway along the two kilometre hike, one of the team members had to stop. Her knee, suffering from a chronic injury tweaked two months ago just as we were setting out, had flared up. Despite 23 hours of daylight, completing the portage wasn’t an option. So we camped right there, enjoying the twilight and the tens of thousands of caribou—part of the Bathurst herd—streaming past. After some tense days, the experience brought the group back together as we shared something we had all hoped to see. If it wasn’t for the injury, we may never have witnessed it.
The event illustrated why we had undertaken this expedition in the first place: to explore the relationship of people with place and landscape. Our skills and experience had brought us here, but it was also the group’s working dynamic and the particular ecological circumstances of the ridge, plus a dose of chance, that had allowed us to encounter such a caribou extravaganza. All these elements came together to influence how we perceived this place.

For 100 days in the spring and summer of 2005, as part of the Paddling the Big Sky expedition, we travelled over 2,800 km of river by canoe. As with many expeditions, ours began in the stories and daydreams of a group of friends. What we had in common was an interest in the past, present and future role of outdoor recreation and education as a mode of personal, social and environmental learning. This theme guided our approach to planning and executing the journey, as our purpose was to explore and challenge how skills learned through outdoor activities engage people in meaningful relationships with their environment, and promote ecological and social responsibility.

The expedition began in May outside Hinton, Alberta, with three instructors and 12 undergraduate students from the University of Alberta getting their feet wet in the chilly Athabasca River. We paddled for nearly a month to Fort McMurray, at which point the undergrads were replaced by three new members of the expedition. Together, this team of six would canoe the remainder of the Athabasca River, across Lake Athabasca, and down the Slave River to Great Slave Lake. With storms brewing in both the weather and group, we hitched a ride from Fort Resolution to Yellowknife for the last leg: 50 days of travel against the current on the Yellowknife River, over the Canadian Shield, and into the barren lands of the Arctic tundra. Eventually, after weeks of lake-hopping and portaging heavy loads, the Coppermine River ferried us to the Arctic Ocean. We had started in the foothills of the Rockies, crossed the prairie, the width of the boreal forest, and over the barren lands.

Photos by Anthony Berners, Patrick Mahers and Haley Elzen

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 15th, 2010 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Field Notes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.