Joint Services Hood River Expedition 2001: Part 1


In early July this year six of us flew out to Canada’s Edmonton on the start of an expedition that we had been preparing for over many months.

The plan was to fly on to Yellowknife and then by float plane to a lake above the head waters of the River Hood, a river with the reputation of offering the finest white water north of the Arctic Circle. We would portage to the head waters themselves, travel down through a series of ribbon lakes then the river itself to the Arctic coast and along that coast to the Inuit community of Bathurst Inlet where another float plane would pick us up. Going down the middle section of the river there would be a lot of very serious, big white water. We would then visit the awesome Wilberforce Falls, where the Hood enters a 6km canyon. And then finally the sea conditions for the coastal trip being entirely unpredictable, and with Arctic Sound in particular exposed to prevailing north westerlies, we knew that this last stretch too would be a challenge. But then we wouldn’t have been contemplating this trip otherwise.

The Team

This was a British Joint Services Expedition, the bulk of the group being made up of Services personnel - from the Army, Air Force and Navy, and myself as the sole exception - something of a privilege as civilians are rarely allowed access, but I provided specific scientific expertise. For the Services personnel this was on-the-job training - for me (at least according to my employer) it was to be a holiday!

A considerable body of professional wilderness travel experience was brought to bear through the group, not least as some had been on several similar canoe trips in the far north. Each of us were assigned specific roles both in preparation & for the trip itself. The team comprised:

Steve White : Expedition leader; paramedic;
Training, insurance & travel, equipment procurement
in Canada;
Mark Gittoes : 2nd in command; paramedic; communications;
Rations & comms procurement, equipment
procurement in the UK;
Rob Oliver : Navigator;
Chart & GPS procurement;
Sal Bateman : Paramedic;
Rations & medical procurement;
Colin Taylor : Scientific project leader;
Jane Lambley : Science project support.

The three tandem teams were thus (bow & stern respectively) myself & Steve, Mark & Rob, Sal & Jane. This meant that each boat had one person with medical expertise. This logic was to extend to the point where each boat could be totally self supporting if it found itself on its own - with tent, cooking kit, food, sleeping bags, bear bangers, bear mace and so on.

A party of six is a good size for this sort of wilderness travel - small enough to enjoy the environment around us and each others company without being a crowd, large enough to be self reliant if well enough trained.

Training & preparation

Because of F&M our river training had been restricted to the few sections of white water that we could get at, such as at Eddylines on the Welsh Dee & latterly on the slalom course on the Tryweryn. Over a period of 6 months we met up as a team every 2-3 weeks, spending the weekends being coached on a wide variety of white water skills. The training was intensive & deliberately pushy, as we knew that soon enough we would need to be able to deal confidently with an Arctic white water river, with fully laden boats, only one way out of the wilderness and that at journey’s end, and only ourselves to count upon.
This was both really hard work & at times good fun, which was just as well as there was the crucial need for the team, & the paddling partners in particular, to gel together. I had to learn to paddle bow on white water for the very first time - and my first experience of this was straight into the deep end as lead boat on a very bouncy day at grade 3. Subsequently we all went through a White Water Safety & Rescue course, some of us coming away somewhat bruised. Mark might be a water baby but I still don’t happen to like ‘safe swims’ over rocks at grade 3 - and my bum still reminds me of this as I sit!



Towards the end of the river training we oozed confidence - able to do a run threading a continuous line from one eddy to another to another, scouting the river ahead as we went and paddles moving in perfect synchrony. It felt good and, we had to confess, looked good. For me the high point was successfully completing the slalom course on the Tryweryn, largely sight unseen. I’ll long remember the conversation I had with Rob, sternsman on that occasion, half way down: “You don’t want to do this, do you?” “No” “You’re going to do it anyway, aren’t you?” “Yes” - so we did.

Apart from the river training plenty else was going on, with team members polishing up medical skills, sorting out charts, procuring equipment & so on. With F&M -related export restrictions rations became a particular problem as we couldn’t take a bean from the UK but would have to acquire the whole lot across in Canada. With only a day & a half to do this, & reduce down our purchases into day-lots suitable for packing in the canoes, we knew it was going to be hard. We were also going to have to select and outfit our boats with spray decks, adjust seat heights and then get everything into the plane on time. Jet-lagged and travel weary! We would have to get it perfectly right first time as after a further 4 hour flight we would be entirely on our own

My particular responsibility was running the science projects. Over a period of 3 months we put together a number of projects that would run concurrently - ranging from routine census of bird & mammal populations we encountered, through sampling of plant material for subsequent DNA analysis, to partially speculative experiments examining plant distribution. This was done in conjunction with the Botany Department at St Andrews University & the Canadian Wildlife Service.

Lastly we spent a whole day littering Steve’s back garden with vast piles of kit, sorting it into boat-lots and trying to fit it into the two large Ortlieb drawbacks we would each be personally responsible for whilst leaving enough room for all this food we had yet to buy!

At this stage time seemed to be moving faster and faster. Suddenly we were all standing in a slightly dazed but excited group at Heathrow, ready to go.

Outward bound

The flight out was one of these remorseless affairs, the plane full, and ourselves too excited about the trip to do anything as sensible as sleep. Steve and his winning ways managed to tease an incredible amount of alcohol from the stewardesses. The rest of us enjoyed stunning views of mountains, glaciers and ice fields over Greenland. Later we were to spend hours flying over the central barrenlands of northern Canada, knowing that it was just this sort of terrain we would be travelling through shortly thereafter.

We landed in Edmonton late afternoon and rushed towards the fabled Mountain Equipment Co-op which had kindly agreed to stay open late just for us. We had already put an order through for some kit but we then spent a slightly crazed 90 minutes buying all sorts of things on our personal & group shopping lists. With vast bags of trophies we made it to the hotel and, I think, slept. The following morning early we and our increasingly large volume of baggage were ferried to the airport for the next leg to the north.

We spent the long expected jet-lagged day & a half in Yellowknife purchasing & repacking all our food for the 3-week trip, selecting our boats, changing seat heights & fitting spray decks. Sorting out our food was a vast business. We had a load of Canadian Army boil-in-the bag rations as our mainstay but besides that we had to be sure of 4 weeks food for 6 people all bagged in such a way that it would come out in day-lots & be shared equally amongst the three boats. The hotel kindly lent us a meeting room to do this in. We produced a vast quantity of waste packaging as we reduced the the volume down. We also acquired a local reputation that was still rumbling more than three weeks later after we bought every Snickers & Mars Bar in stock at the local supermarket!

At the outfitters we selected 3 fairly well worn Old Town Trippers - the standard workhorse in this part of the world. The open season for paddling a river as far north as the Hood is only around five weeks, so inevitably the first choice of the canoes and spray decks was already away in use on rivers further to the south. So the spray decks that we found were all mismatched and worn with no single set fitting our boats - so we had to spend a fair amount of time matching one part with another and, finally, arranging for some heavy-duty adjustments to be machine-stitched overnight.

Each of us again had our particular leading roles in all of this, but as our time in Yellowknife came to a close we were all focussed on packing the food and getting our boat kit ready for the flight out.

On arriving at Yellowknife we checked in with the float plane operators, Air Tindi, to confirm our flight. All was ok but we discovered that we weren’t to use a float plane at all but a twin Otter with big bouncy wheels on it! This was the first indication that we’d had that Spring was running late ‘up north’ - it seemed there wasn’t likely to be liquid water to land on.

The morning of our flight out dawned grey, wet and a bit miserable. Boats, restitched spray decks, our now very heavy Ortliebs and ourselves all turned up at the airfield. In the pouring rain our boats and all our kit were packed into the plane. The space was so tight that our seats had to be removed to allow the packing to be done. They were then fitted back into the narrow shoulder-width space remaining, we clambered into them, and we were off!

The journey lasted for several hours, the pilot flying under low cloud and& frequently passing through rain. The landscape below was dreary and as we went north firstly the number of trees dwindled to nothing then more and more tundra appeared, showing the classic polygonal pattern created by permafrost. This was a very bare landscape indeed. Occasional vast lakes, a line of cliffs, or an esker snaking over the horizon were the only features. There was certainly no sign whatsoever of man’s presence. We then came to a series of wide lakes, with the pilot calling back to us that this was the top of the Hood. They were frozen solid. We faced the prospect of slogging our way over this ice-locked landscape, moving down the river to land below the ice, or going back.

Soon we were doing low level aerobatics looking for a landing site on top of a gravel esker. The pilot looked at several, flying extremely low to inspect the ground for hazards and turning on a wingtip to go back and look again. Eventually the pilot selected, as suitable, a tiny flat surface that had the apparently fine quality surface typical of a rough building site, with 50m scarps all around. We landed neatly - I had expected something more like a crash. The Services folk allowed afterwards that it had been an exciting experience!


The River

We unloaded the plane, worked out where we actually were, said our farewells to the pilot and waved him off. A quiet descended with only the whisper of the wind and the muted roar of an enormous grade 5 rapid some 4km away.



Grey, windy, cold and overcast, and with ourselves high above the river, it did feel remote. We were excited but we were also tired. The way out was now some 300km & 3 weeks away. Having been dropped further down the river than we had planned we were, in theory, several days ahead of schedule. Having said this we had no idea of the state of the river far less the conditions we would later encounter on the coast. We also knew that we would still have to pace ourselves carefully as, in this environment, people and kit wear out quickly. We planned to travel no more than about 30km a day, which might seem paltry by some standards but with the occasional rest day we knew that we would need to keep on travelling for three weeks.

So we set up camp & started sorting out our kit, moving the boats down towards the river. The following morning found us all togged up in polar kit with a stiff breeze blowing & air temperatures around -4C. We took the boats upstream to inspect the big grade 5 rapid; we saw a good amount of ice, fragmented as floes had been broken up coming down through it. We spent most of the morning exploring before returning to a hot meal. Getting over the jet lag and the weariness of all these last minute preparations was important. As we warmed up the evening meal a group of 5 caribou trotted towards us out of thin air and kept on trotting around and away from us, heads held high - going somewhere very determinedly. Odd looking beasts but keenly aware, whilst we were still just a little dopy. The Bathurst Herd of some 300,000 animals was somewhere to the north of us and the local Inuit still depend upon it to some extent for overwintering food and pelts. A couple of us on a short walk later that day found fresh bear tracks and a lot of our dopiness fell away abruptly. The following morning, again under a dreary overcast, we set off downstream.

The river was initially broad and slow moving but we quickly encountered our first ‘swifts’ - barely a ripple and a hint of white from a distance but certainly enough to chuck the boat about vigorously as we went through. A little further down we came across a big grade 3 with a fairly obvious line down through it, twisting from one shore to another, back, and then back again around a wide rock garden. There were a number of must-make moves and the water was enormous, with much of the run being done amongst big serried haystacks of water marching between fangs of black rock, and the final leg being a long way from the near shore and any chance of rescue.

Over the next few days we experienced the occasional rapid up to grade 3, but much more often just large ‘swifts’ or enormous deep-water Vs with bouncy waves but no hazards to speak of. We began to realise that the river was very high indeed, and rather than having arrived after the spring melt-driven spate we were running down river at its peak. The only description of the river available to us had obviously been written at lower levels, so many of the probably more technical rapids reported there were flushed out.

We settled into a routine for travelling, moving down the river about 30km or so, setting up camp at a suitable spot and resting before moving on. The camp discipline was strict as we knew that the area had a good grizzly population - so food was positioned over an area downwind of the cooking area, itself downwind of the tarp (a mosquito-proofed tent with massive storm valances and enough room for all six of us to snuggle in), itself downwind of our three sleeping tents.

After gales and freezing weather in the first week the weather became steadily milder. On one day that meant a steady drizzle as we pounded our way through what seemed like an endless series of these big deep water Vs. The weather was a bit inconsequential, at least for the bow paddlers, as we tended to go straight through the middle of the biggest waves whilst our stern paddlers could be heard whooping with glee as the back end lifted high and clear. On at least one occasion, completely blinded by a dump of frigid water, I had to ask my exultant stern paddler where we were, please, and where should we be going now?! In hindsight, if I were to be critical of my performance, I would say that I was perhaps a little too polite! It was just as well that the stern paddler could still see where we were supposed to be going. At the end of such a day we would be profoundly weary, I suspect the bow paddlers most of all.
Another gale blew up and we rested over, taking a day out to eat and eat, pancakes with maple syrup being the delicacy of choice. It was also a time to catch up on journals, do some of the scientific work, mooch around and, of course, have yet another kit faff.

The landscape around us was astonishing - technically dry tundra of the Low Arctic with lots of exposed rock, low worn hills, enormous sand and gravel eskers



left over from the last ice age, and no trees. Or rather there were trees, but only in the form of an astounding variety of dwarf willow species often in abundant carpets but never growing to more than knee-hieght. This astonishing array of willow species was unexpected and was to render one of the four science projects impracticable. This was no great loss as the other three projects were to prove entirely successful.

We saw far more traces of life on the ground than of the animals themselves, but when we did it was a precious and wonderful sight. One morning a large white wolf wandered in to inspect us and just as casually loped away - just curious. Later we saw another couple lope down to the river and casually swim across - a 250m swim in water close to freezing after which they just gave themselves a good shake, merrily frisked to the top of an esker and settled down to watch us. Again, just curious.

There was one species we were entirely happy not meeting, and that was bear. We often saw tracks, often fresh, and that was quite enough. A bear encounter wasn’t the sort of experience we were looking for. A graphic illustration of the strength of these beasts was often found around our campsites, where a bear had ripped apart a large area of ground in pursuit of that tastiest of morsels, a sik-sik. These sik-siks are ground squirrels and were the commonest animal we saw on the trip. Our camping discipline was meant to minimise the risk to us from bears should one ever happen on us, but we also had bear-bangers and canisters of mace that we never travelled without. Although we were once troubled by a fox one night thankfully the only bears we saw were either running away from us or spotted from a distance offshore.

We saw single lemmings, voles, shrews, but these were generally very much
more secretive than sik-siks. Small birds were very rare but raptors such as
peregrine and eagle relatively common. We realised that they weren’t hunting other birds but the relatively abundant small mammals.



As we moved further down the river the volume increased as did its speed. Sometimes there seemed to be little need to paddle downstream as this wide river was moving like an express train! Astonishing cascades and big impassible rapids occasionally interrupted our journey but generally we were able to scout rapids from the river itself and keep on running. The most frequent bits of white water were the increasingly enormous deep-water Vs, often associated with a turn of the river or some subsurface constriction that was probably a very much more technical rapid at lower levels. These came one after another after another - some were great fun but others were plain intimidating. Having been warned that I would be “visually intimidated on a daily basis” beforehand, this was about right. Only when I rediscovered the joys of backferrying through these beasts did I really start having fun. My sternsman might have been whooping less but at least I wasn’t inhaling quite so much river!

The sheer scale of the river (large in comparison to the UK but still relatively small in North American terms) meant that we could use features on the outside of bends to scout downstream. Whereas on a fast flowing European river we would be taught to backferry round the inside of the bend and avoid the outside, here we ran much further out & at high speed, stringing together marginal outer bend eddies as we went around and frequently dropping very briefly through eddies behind big midstream holes just so that we could spin & hesitate long enough to scout the next section down, all ‘on the run’. This style of river running, though we had been coached to expect it, didn’t really make sense until we were there and doing it. Such a volume of water was simply far beyond anything in the UK.

During a period of steady drizzle and rain that would have rivalled the West Highlands, and between sets of these big deep water Vs, we came across a solitary musk ox. And there has never been a more miserable sight than a drookit musk ox! The beast had a prehistoric look to it that fitted with the landscape. A little later the drizzle cleared and we came across a herd of 30 or so of the beasts, standing defensively in rings around two youngsters. We disturbed a wolf on the far bank, with a suggestion that it had been stalking the herd.

With what turned out to be the last of these big deep water Vs behind us the river changed again into a fast furious racing bounce steadily downhill. It was a constant big grade 2 which was noisy enormous fun. The speed of it was astounding. Somewhere in the back of our minds was the understanding that a set of 150 foot falls was somewhere not all that far ahead.

The weather began to pick up just as we entered the Wilberforce Hills, with a far-blue sky developing and a quality of light that made it next to impossible to judge the scale of the astonishing landscape of low bare rock hills and moraine scarps around us. Until then, on the river, we had always very clearly been going downhill, with the skyline falling away in front of us very dramatically. Now for the first time we found ourselves hemmed in within a skyline of ancient hills, wending our way through a maze of wide braided channels. On the skyline ahead of us some rose-coloured cliffs appeared. As we closed on them we discovered that they enclosed a wild stretch of rapids immediately upstream of the Wilberforce Falls. We were about to see one of the wonders of the world. We were also about to have a pig of a portage in temperatures hovering in the mid 30s C.

To be continued....

Colin Taylor