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My name's Adam Shoalts. I'm a writer and an explorer.
And my dream is to try to cross nearly 4000 kilometers
of Canada's Arctic wilderness alone.
As far as anyone knows this has never been attempted before,
probably because no one was stupid enough to try it.
It's a very Canadian approach I have, you know,
just coming out here skating around by myself as a way to train.
My first playground was the forests that surrounded my family home.
I mean that's where I grew up, I grew up in the woods.
All around us where we lived, we were in a really small town, was forest.
So with my dog and my brother, we would always be out in those woods
building shelters and making fire without matches and catching frogs.
And my father, he would encourage us and he taught us all the different trees
and how to build birch bark canoes and cedar strip canoes.
And that's where I really fell in love with the natural world
and just came to really appreciate it.
I mean I think it's so important that we preserve it.
And that's always been a big part of who I am and...
And why I do these expeditions and these journeys
because I feel like that's the most important thing there is,
is this natural world and we try to preserve it.
When I zoom in on the satellite imagery,
I measure all the exact distances so I will know exactly like, well,
okay, I've got, you know, 27 kilometers to go this stage where I want to get to
or, you know, 13-kilometer portage here.
But to get an actual topographic map,
I'm using a Garmin BaseCamp over here on this laptop
and I'm copying my route manually from the satellite imagery
on to the topographic maps here and then I can download...
Download the topographic maps onto this little device here, the GPS,
and carry with... This with me in the field.
The winner is Adam Shoalts!
Nice.
- Can you recall the price? - Yeah, it was 1,800.
This is good.
And I want something super tough,
durable that can withstand all the punishment that the Arctic can dish out to itself.
The polar bears mostly stay on the seacoast and they only come in land a little bit. So...
What about grizzly bear?
There's lots of grizzlies, but I figure I can take a grizzly.
You could take one? With what?
My bayonet.
You think I should take a gun?
Something more than a bayonet.
- I got a bear spray... - Or... or... yeah, bear spray.
Yeah, you're gonna make yourself flavourful while he comes at you.
It's just that I have to travel as light as possible
and the gun is cumbersome and it has to be kept protected,
it has to be inside a waterproof case.
I showed you a small gun.
I'd be bringing a gun with me, personally.
I know it's a lot of work and everything but,
I don't know, he's a... he's crazy not to.
I mean like polar bears, everything, like, it can happen,
especially if they're hungry this time of year.
So, he's definitely got like a lot to undertake.
I have full confidence in his ability to be able to carry their sel.
But there are things out there that see humans as a meal.
Especially in the part of Canada he's going,
there's things that could stalk him for... for multiple days and him not even know it.
The expedition that he's gonna do now is gonna be very tough.
There's a lot of unknowns and it's a long distance and he has got a lot of gear to carry,
it's very tough.
I would say there's only a small percentage of people that probably could do it,
especially doing it alone, that makes it even harder.
When you talk about an expedition that's gonna span several months,
several thousand kilometers, how could you not look at it by asking the question,
"Is it possible? Will he be able to do it?"
So, I know he has his determination working for him.
I think he has that advantage over top of anyone else.
I'm nowhere near as nervous as my mom, I can tell you that.
I'll sleep fine at night.
I have quite a confidence about it.
I won't be as near nervous as my dad who will be slightly less nervous than my mom,
but I'll be nervous thinking about it and hope for the best because, realistically,
it's like tackling the near impossible.
But, yeah, like his dream is my mom's worst nightmare.
Super-lightweight, but I'm doing a bent-shaft 12-degree one,
so it's a little more efficient for flat water and this will be for white-water rapids.
I don't know if this is gonna be enough Gorilla Tape. I'm gonna go to buy a second.
Which canoe are you taking?
Fifteen-foot solo, built for me by Nova Craft, weighs 53 pounds.
Middle is tough stuff, super hard.
You can hit it with a sledgehammer and it won't break...
If you don't make it back, can I have it?
Yep.
I don't think he's gonna have the anxiety that most people would probably have out there.
I think he's done enough of these and he's gotten out of his comfort zone.
It's just gonna be a very long trip.
So that'll be new for him.
But I think he's going to be able to break it up
into mentally shorter trips...
A month here, a month there.
So I don't think he's looking at it as one big long trip.
I think he's breaking it down into his mind
as a series of smaller trips and smaller accomplishments.
I think that's how you get past the... the five-month issue
being out there by yourself.
When you see the design that no one talks about.
The... it's like kind of more on the back of your head, more on the side.
So I like them better than last year. It's just all sanded.
It's like unbelievable. You can have a beach picnic there, right?
They called it Sandy Creek for obvious reasons.
But it turns out that that's not why they call this Sandy Creek.
I was... my... my eye was burning, so I just... the only water...
- Here is Dawson City. - Okay.
Coming down the Klondike Highway and then if we were going east on the Klondike
and we were going up the Dempster through Tombstone Territorial Park through here.
What I've kind of done is I've taken all these historical accounts
and stitched them together into one big epic journey.
And no one knows if it's really possible to do it all in a single season.
You could do it maybe if you spread it out over several years.
But it's gonna be a race against time to see if I can squeeze it all into one year.
I mean my first wilderness trip by myself,
I was only 13 years old and I was terrified all night long.
But, you know, 18 years later of wilderness adventure,
you... you get into the rhythm of things and you start to feel much more comfortable.
So now when I look at on that wilderness,
I don't see an alien foreign environment,
I see something that looks like home.
So, you know, I'm in my element.
There's nowhere I'd rather be in the world than right here.
SOS.
Thank you.
This is the send-off, I suppose.
Long time coming.
Yeah. It's... this expedition has been three years in the making, at least three years.
So it's been a long time coming to get up to the Arctic Circle
and now I'm finally here and all these years of planning and preparing
and dreaming and visualizing has culminated in this moment.
So, we'll see how it goes from here.
Godspeed.
Thank you for all your support, Chuck.
Yeah.
It's been a blast having you here as part of the expedition support. So, that was awesome.
So honoured to help.
Oh, well, I'm honoured to have you and everyone else here.
So, very good.
What a contrast from the days when it was just me.
I mean I guess I'm gonna get to that pretty soon. Okay.
So I mean look at the size of that. I mean it's massive.
Going off in that direction.
So, bear crap and bears on the road here.
And the road can give you a false sense of security.
I mean you think it's a little outpost to civilization, but it's not really.
I mean, the grizzly is... they just walk right on them.
They do their business on the road.
And probably coming down from those mountains there.
And it kind of makes me want to keep, you know,
one eye over my shoulder as I do this hike.
I feel like I could almost be in one of those post-apocalyptic movies
and everything is just desolate and barren
and I'm like one of the last people left alive on Earth looking out on this landscape.
Here is my canoe fully loaded
and ready to set off on my journey across the Arctic.
This canoe and I are about to become very good friends and very close companion.
If I'm to cross the Arctic,
I have no choice but to travel up river on many of these waterways
because they're flowing north out to the Arctic Ocean
and I have to go east if I'm to cross the Arctic.
It's a matter of necessity.
The vast Mackenzie River.
Over two kilometers wide, sometimes three kilometers wide.
Way down there is my canoe. Who wants to be my pole?
My main strategy for getting upriver was kind of hauling along the bottom a bit
like they do on those boats in Venice, gondola I think they call them.
So that's my... that's my style, it's very romantic,
I like to think, as I pull my way up the Mackenzie River.
I may be doing this journey alone but in reality I could never do it
without the support of people like Chuck, Mark, my family, the crew.
I mean they've all been terrific and it's just... I mean it's...
It's really an overwhelming feeling having done expeditions for years
on a shoestring budget all by myself not having anyone to support me.
I mean saying thanks doesn't seem adequate.
But it's just a really nice feeling knowing that there are people out there
who are rooting for me, who are cheering for me, supporting me.
And without that... without their support I really couldn't do it. That's the truth.
Yeah, I got my stuff up here, satellite phone, first-aid kit,
bear spray, air horn.
These are my little accoutrements of weapons, air bangers over there.
My pillow, I just take my clothes and I...
You know, socks, dirty socks and things
and I stick them inside my sleeping bag case
and that's my pillow and I... you know, I love that pillow.
So friggin' comfy.
Look at the remains of that massive blister down there
from hiking along the Dempster Highway.
I think my dreams of becoming a foot model have pretty much been decisively ended now.
It's pretty cold but there's... there's no really no other option right now.
I've got to wade across this mud flat.
So I just took my boots and my socks off.
I've rolled up my pants. It's kind of like quicksand.
It's pretty cold but didn't seem to be any other option. So here we go.
There's the grizzly track. There's another one up here.
Imagine if I am just pulling along and the bank gives way
and... and just smacks into my canoe and sends me into the river,
probably from the melting of the permafrost and the ice breakup.
It's really quite strange though coming along this section
I got a bit of a chill like you get in the grocery store when you go on the frozen food aisle.
That's kind of what it feels like with all these mounds of ice here.
You know a bit of a chill coming off it as they go along all this dirty ice that's melting.
There's nothing quite like the smell of wet socks drying in your tent.
It's 2:30 AM and I was asleep and something woke me up outside the tent.
There was a noise and it sounded like a big animal crashing through the woods.
So I started yelling.
That's what you normally do if there's a bear outside the tent,
like "Hey, hey, hey."
So I scared it off.
And I could hear something crashing.
So I unzipped the tent and looked out,
grabbed my little air horn and I went to squeeze it.
It just made the hissing noise. So the thing doesn't work.
So I thought it was a bear but then I looked again and it wasn't a bear,
it was a giant male muskoxen.
A muskoxen just outside my tent in the bushes over there.
This is my '80s rock star hair look right now.
My toe looks kind of messed up and it bled a little today.
And I'm about to leave behind the familiar that is the Mackenzie River over there,
and head into the unknown.
This new waterway leads east into the forest.
One thing I don't pack on expeditions are towels.
So I'm just gonna have to air dry and shake like a dog.
It's moving a little bit.
Dude, check out what it is.
I have to head that way anyways, but I'm gonna stay a bit far bank for safety.
It's best not to disturb them.
I'd only been asleep for about an hour and twenty minutes and I heard a noise outside.
I woke up.
And, thankfully, I'm a light sleeper
'cause I heard something in the bushes and I heard the noise,
and, instinctively, when I hear a noise outside my tent I start yelling.
So if it is a bear, hopefully, I scared it away.
And I quickly unzipped the screen door, poked my head out
and I saw something move in the bushes and sure enough it was a black bear.
I don't know if you can see it there.
I propped my canoe up alongside of the tent
to create like one side of a barrier and, thankfully,
I did 'cause the black bear was just on the other side in the bushes there.
I started yelling at it in my most menacing and intimidating manner
and smacking the paddle on the canoe making as much noise as possible,
and, eventually, he walked off, he didn't run.
He walked along the edge of the bushes there down the shoreline.
And I've continued to make noise. But I don't know how far he went.
The more I've gone up this river and the more I've explored it,
the more I feel the... I started to wonder about that old 1972 government report on the river.
It described the landscape that the river flows through as, quote,
"Subdued and gently rolling."
And I don't know about you but I wouldn't describe that as subdued or gently rolling hills.
I mean that's a pretty spectacular peak right there.
There's this vertical cliff that rises beside the river.
That's pretty awesome.
Mosquitoes are getting bad.
It's never a nice feeling when you wake up and you see just, you know,
hundreds of mosquitoes just waiting for you the second you'll unzip the screen door
to come attack you.
Looking pretty nasty.
The nail is gonna fall off.
But that's okay.
And my... my fingers have become incredibly sore, I think,
from gripping the pole so hard.
It really... it's really sore when I go like this with them.
Yes, my toenail has fallen off
and I used an alcohol wipe on that and cleaned it up a bit.
This morning is officially the first day of summer
but it actually feels colder today than it's been the last several weeks.
And I had a pretty good night sleep on this beach here except, you know,
you never really sleep that soundly because there's always noises in the wilderness.
Like right now off to my left somewhere I can hear a baby beaver crying
and there's geese that honk and birds that chirp
throughout the night.
And sometimes, like a few nights ago, there's a bear that will wake you up...
A bear woke me up at least... when it's walking through the brush or, you know,
you hear a muskoxen rumble or all kinds of things like that will wake you up.
But I guess, eventually, you just kind of get used to it.
That wolf yesterday, that white one on the bank,
actually that was the most curious wolf I've ever seen.
He actually looked at me for quite a long time and, you know, he walked along the bank.
It was almost like seeing a domesticated dog.
The... the look in his eyes, the way that he stared at me and our eyes met;
we looked at each other and I filmed him and I was just...
It was almost like having a friend in the wilderness seeing that wolf.
It was just such a nice moment.
This area has been burnt out before from a forest fire
but there is really high cliffs over there.
And the river, the Hare Indian River here
is getting quite small and hemmed in by willow bushes
on either side as I near the headwaters.
There is just not a lot of vitamin C in granola bars and dehydrated foods
but there is something I can do pretty easily to remedy that
and make sure I don't get scurvy from lack of vitamin C,
which is to take... let me show you here... take some of the spruce...
Take some of the spruce needles which is loaded with vitamin C and throw that in my pot,
boil some water and make spruce tea.
They say that, you know, spruce tea has more vitamin C in it than orange juice.
So that's pretty good. And I don't have to worry about getting scurvy.
It's a real disheartening sight behind me here.
The river that I'm following pretty much just disappears into that morass.
And there's no question I'm not gonna be able to drag the canoe through there.
I'm gonna have to portage everything,
which is not gonna be easy considering it's just like a foul morass of swamp and muskeg.
But I think I'm almost at the next lake,
so I just got to tell myself that and try to find the mental stamina to push on.
Well, I followed the river for as long as I possibly could, the Hare Indian River.
My gear is behind me here, but there's pretty much nothing left of it, just this ditch.
The current is clearly flowing that way and that puts a smile on my face
for very important reason because that means, you know,
all the water I have encountered so far has been flowing the other direction
it's been flowing west, but this is flowing east.
And because it's flowing east,
that means I have crossed the divide between the Mackenzie River watershed
and Great Bear Lake over here.
I'm the only person on the whole lake all to my lonesome.
And some caves way up there on the mountain slopes.
And when I see a cave on a mountain,
my imagination always goes to strange places and I imagine
what manner of creature might live up there.
It is 4:24 PM on June 25th and I have just reached
Great Bear Lake.
This is a big achievement for me.
It's a new chapter in the expedition.
It's like I've reached a new level, a new phase of the journey.
I've got the accumulating scrapes and bruises.
Nice bruise.
My lovely fiancée has made these super helpful labels for me because,
believe it or not, despite the fact that I am filming this entire documentary,
I'm not very good with technology.
So she labeled everything like "unplug as soon as charging is done."
"Plug this end into the solar panel." "Charge battery pack." It's very helpful.
She labeled everything.
I just came around the corner here and this is what made my heart sank.
There's just nothing but ice as far as the eye can see.
And it's a lot of ice and it's gonna slow my progress right down to a crawl.
There's just so much ice out there.
Melting ice floes out there that's blocked up my passage
along the coast of Great Bear Lake.
So, there's nothing I can do about it.
I started at 3:30 AM and I'm operating on only three hours of sleep.
I paddled 41 kilometers today on three hours of sleep.
So I've made my camp on this beach.
Try to get as comfortable as I can.
I'm gonna have a fire in a second.
And just hope that when I wake up,
this ice will be out of here and I can continue.
3:12 AM,
and I am about to set off through the ice here on Great Bear Lake.
It's entirely possible I'm the only person on this entire vast body of water
paddling right now, especially since it's still icy.
Out there I can't make it any further along Great Bear Lake,
it's just my route is blocked by ice.
All right team, listen up.
Mr. Canoe, Mr. Blue Barrel, Paddles, everyone, I need your attention.
Backpack.
Now we are going to be patient and we are gonna wait
until the ice melts out there and then we can continue.
So today is a lesson in patience.
I know like me you're eager and you want to push on,
but it's just too much of a risk.
If we get stranded in that ice again and then the wind picks up,
it could take us way out into the heart of the lake and that would be extremely bad.
So, team, I'm proud of the work we've done together,
but right now we've got to try to be patient and just wait for that ice to melt.
It seems like I'm not the first person to become stranded
on this island here in the center of the island.
Looks like long time ago
someone once had a campfire here
because these four rocks look like they've been placed here
and in the center of the rocks there's some very old bones,
some animal bones or somebody cooked something.
So somebody else maybe was stranded on this island, too.
You know if I follow it maybe I'll find a pot of gold.
Actually I would be more happy just to find open water and no ice.
I'll take that over the pot of gold.
The longer I sit waiting for ice to melt,
the less likely it becomes that I'll get all the way across the Arctic
and then I have to, you know, re-evaluate my goals, what I'm gonna do on this journey.
Still some pretty big ice floes out here, but most of the ice has melted.
Iceberg dead ahead.
Hard to starboard.
Now I'm just trapped on a fog-bound coast here
and this one looks less inviting than the other one.
I can see some swampy alder bushes back in there.
There's a summer out here in the woods.
I know that there's ruins of Fort Confidence.
Fort Confidence was built almost 200 years ago
as a fur trade fort on Great Bear Lake
and there's not much left of it today.
There's probably just some stone foundations.
But I'm gonna go off into those thick spruce trees over there
and see if I can find anything.
And I see something up there.
Looks like an old stone chimney just poking out of the... the undergrowth of the forest.
And the fort itself would have been built out of spruce logs
cut right here, no doubt.
They just kind of hacked through here.
It's a little bit eerie.
Kind of just seeing ruins in the middle of nowhere
reminds you of the ghosts of the past as it were.
That, you know, hundreds of years ago there were explorers here before me.
Oh, wow, that's really neat. Look at that.
You can see the masonry work in there.
So this is a chimney. We got some rocks down below.
Wow, that's actually quite neat.
A bit of wood sticking out of it, too.
Everything else must have rotted away and been swallowed up by the forest
over the last 200 years.
These are granite rocks pulled out of the lake shore there.
Oh, yeah, I can see straight up the chimney.
I mean it's a little bit eerie the ghosts of the past,
but it's also very fascinating from a historical perspective
to think that hundreds of years ago this forest here would have been cleared out
and they would have had a fort with cannons and muskets and high wooden walls.
The river I'm trying to find is named after the guy who was in charge of this fort, Dease.
So I'm looking for the Dease River.
Well, let's get back down to the canoe.
I don't like to leave my canoe for too long.
I get... we get kind of separation anxiety when we're apart.
So I tied it up down there on the water and I better get back to it.
He was really curious but then I accidentally made a noise with my paddle.
He ran off, he got scared.
Poor sock just trying to get dry in the sun and the bugs are just swarming up.
Somewhere out here in the forest
should be the remains of Douglas' cabin from over a century ago.
And I think I see it up here.
Yeah, I can see it now.
So just the parts of the walls are left but the roof has collapsed.
In over a hundred years the elements have done that to it.
There's the inside of the cabin.
And you can see over there in the corner this was this...
This would have been its fireplace over here.
I mean the preservation is pretty good in this cold environment, right.
It's a pretty dry environment despite the snow, so things don't rot that well.
But in a hundred years the roof has collapsed.
But there it is down in there.
So that would have been his hearth,
very important for the long cold Canadian winter.
And that's all that remains of it.
You can see the construction along the side.
And just very slowly the forest is gonna swallow it up
and it'll vanish into the wilderness and there won't be anything left of it.
But now I got to get back to the canoe and continue my own journey upriver.
Last night when I was setting up my tent,
I discovered there was a hole in it, a little small hole in the screen here.
And I was inside my tent at the time
and I had nothing to patch it with other than a bandage.
But now I've got my duct tape.
So I'm gonna make a little more proper repair to the mesh there
so the bugs cannot find a way in and bite me in the middle of the night.
There's just unbelievable number of those horse flies
on this beach and all over the river.
You can see some... there's just a bunch of them accumulating inside my tent
around... under the tent fly... there's one right there... and they're big suckers.
And when they bite you, it feels almost more like a bee sting.
And if you want to see what it looks like,
it's like a welt where one got me right there on the shin today.
Another one bit me down there.
Millions of mosquitoes and black flies just swarms of them
all over the place down there on my gear and just...
They're so bad that I'm just not even gonna brush my teeth this morning
because I can't take this bug net off to brush my teeth with like millions of mosquitoes
buzzing all over the place.
So I'm just gonna go.
The skies are dark and I can see that a storm is coming,
so I want to batter down the hatches and secure all the gear.
I had a quick fire, made some herbal tea and some dinner really fast
and I just threw my backpack under there on my paddle and I'm gonna jump in the tent.
You don't want to be caught out in the open in the storm.
This tent's been pretty strong so far but this is the first real big test of it.
It's intensifying, definitely intensifying.
You know there's something about a storm alone in the wilderness.
It can get on your nerves a little.
I've been through a heck of a lot of storms in the wilderness,
like probably over 50 of them.
And you just have to wait it out and try to... excuse me...
My tent is really flying around all over the place.
Water coming off down there.
Oh.
I got this map to follow and I think this is the creek here that I'm on.
Then you go across the tundra here and through them the marshes
and then I'll see the lonely mountain and I'm gonna head for that lonely mountain
and I have to cross some fields of ice, but, eventually,
they'll take me over into the Dismal Lakes.
I'm gonna hope to try to do this in just three loads.
So if it's a 10-kilometer portage one way,
I would take my big heavy pack first, that's 20 kilometers...
10 kilometers there, 10 kilometers back.
Then I would go to this barrel which I've loaded fully right up to the brim.
It's gotta weigh close to 50 pounds.
That would be another 10 kilometers there, 10 kilometers back.
So that would be 20... 40 kilometers.
I'm gonna try to follow this sand ridge to begin with.
I saw some wolf tracks over here.
So it looks like the wolves use it as a highway and I'm gonna do that as well.
Here's... here's some faint wolf tracks.
There's one down there and they went that way.
So I'm gonna go that way as well.
About 10 kilometers from me and that's it, the lonely mountain.
And that's where I want to get to.
And you can see the trail, the drag marks where I dragged the canoe
all the way over there and across through those trees several kilometers away.
And sand and gravel seems a little bit hard on the canoe,
but I don't really have a choice at this point.
I feel really privileged to be here right now amidst such beauty.
Maybe not so privileged when there's hordes of black flies
and mosquitoes eating me alive.
But this view is just magnificent and I'm really soaking it in right now
and looking forward to another freeze-dried meal.
This canoe has been through the ice, it's been over the rocks,
upriver, downriver, hauling,
paddling, it's taken a lot of abuse but, you know,
fuss far there's no leaks and it's still... still standing up to the rigors of this journey.
So I just hope that so far so good and that it stays that way.
And there they are. At long last my first glimpse of the Dismal Lakes
and they don't look that dismal to me from up here.
They look actually quite refreshing after this nightmarish portage
with horrible bugs and marshes and high hills.
So the Dismal Lakes look pretty good from up here.
That's what I thought of that book.
No sense in carrying any extra weight than I need to.
Packing another book doesn't make any sense.
So there you go.
But for sentimental reasons I did actually... I saved the cover.
I saved the cover, I'm gonna keep that.
My neck was massacred by black flies the other day on that portage.
I'll show you some of the bites if you can see them down in there.
And the black flies just love to go for the neck.
And, yeah, they've just bit me all over the place in there portaging.
It's pretty cold night. I don't mind that.
I actually kind of like getting cozy inside my sleeping bag here
and huddling down with all my extra sweaters and blankets and things.
You can see the tent buckling under the pressure.
You can hear the wind howling.
I created this rock wall on this side to cut down on the wind rushing underneath the tent fly.
If nothing else, it was creating a lot of noise and keeping me up at night.
It's not really anything else I could do.
Everything is pretty exposed out here by the Dismal Lakes.
So that's where I'm headed... out there.
The longer the expedition goes on,
the more my gear starts to suffer the effects of wear and tear
and had a couple of holes in it up here and the fabric was coming out.
They look like they have been burned,
singed by the fire but I don't know how because it's in my hood.
There's the other hole in my tent down there that I patched with actual duct tape.
Wristband broke off of it, so now I'm just using it as an old-fashioned pocket watch
that I keep in my pocket.
This busted off of it, so I'm gonna try to repair that.
Otherwise I don't have a bear banger, which wouldn't be good.
You know after a month and a half or more, two months almost, being out here,
my tent begins to feel like home, like this is my home
and I'm really... when I'm warm and dry in here and it's cold and wet outside
it just feels like the greatest luxury in the world.
Feels like a five-star hotel to me.
My path up the Coppermine is blocked by a massive canyon.
It represents a huge obstacle.
I'm gonna have to do a really long portage up over these tall cliffs to get around it.
So I've got all my gear here.
I've just prepped it.
And I tied my hiking boots onto the outside
because for the first one I've got to wear these wading shoes which are bigger and heavy.
So I'm just gonna wear them, leave them over there and then switch into the hiking boots.
I've got three loads to do... The barrel, the backpack.
This barrel I've emptied, so it's now empty.
And then, finally, the canoe and it's gonna be hard because this is one heck of a canyon.
I come across a rather unexpected sight which is this monument.
In the last place on Earth you'd probably expect to see a monument.
It says David and Carol Jones who loved the north
and its people were drowned in these rapids on August 14th 1972.
They respected honesty and truth.
You know seeing that it's a very solemn reminder of the hazards
involved in a wilderness journey like this
and it's very touching.
I feel for them and their family and want to take a moment
to pay my respects to fellow wilderness travelers.
Makes me want to be extra cautious because it's a reminder of, you know,
what can go wrong with the slightest mistake out here.
But that's what I'm portaging around this big canyon.
It was a pretty demoralizing day, I have to say.
It was just really brutally hard labour all day long.
The bugs were awful.
And I knew coming into the expedition that this phase
would be one of the most physically rigorous of the whole journey...
The Coppermine River,
which is just a big powerful river with strong white-water rapids, waterfalls,
and canyons on it, and that's why no one travels upriver on it.
But that's exactly what I'm trying to do here.
And, you know, I put in a very long 11 hours of travel
but I only made it about 12 or 13 kilometers upriver.
So that kind of took the wind out of my sails.
And I mean you can see the river right there.
Didn't have the great... best camping place either
but you can see how strong the current is in the river.
And... and I mean that's not even like a strong part, that's just like the ordinary part.
Hearne depicts this area and this is, you know, 247 years ago,
as very windswept barren rocky tundra with not a lot of tree cover,
maybe just some scattered spruce here and there.
I mean there is some trees but not many.
And that's also the impression I got from the 1820 accounts
written by John Franklin and John Richardson, two later British explorers.
And, yet, here we have, you know, pretty large extensive spruce forests.
And that makes you wonder about things.
Is this the result of global warming? Could be.
We know that the climate has been warming since about the mid-19th century.
Don't quote me on that, but I think that's about right.
Right, the Little Ice Age came to an end and then the climate has been warming.
So, it's possible that over the past almost a quarter of a millennium,
it's a long time since Samuel Hearne was here in human terms.
The forest has really grown up and there's trees where there was never trees before
because the climate is warming.
So it's been 55 days since I left the Arctic Circle,
longer since I started camping though.
It's cold but refreshing.
Every night I have a little ritual that I do inside my tent.
It's called kill all the black flies that come inside the tent with me.
And if you can hear that gentle pitter-patter,
it's not the sound of rain against my tent fly.
It's sound of hundreds of black flies against it
as they get trapped under the fly and they try to escape.
But some of them get inside here with me.
No matter how quick, no matter how nimble I am, when I dive through the tent door,
some of them come inside.
My toe is still pretty swollen and busted up.
Fact is it just... your feet take a beating when you're on them 13, 14 hours a day
wading through rapids and rivers and boulders and whatnot.
So they're my favourite bird.
Although what I don't like about them is when I'm paddling by the shore
and they have a nest nearby, it turns into the Alfred Hitchcock movie The Birds
and they swarm at me.
And if you look carefully, you'll see that they have very sharp beaks.
It's July 22nd, I'm waiting for the sound of the Bush plane.
So I'm looking forward
to some new food rations and fresh batteries.
And I'm just waiting here so.
It's him.
He's gonna touchdown.
Nice.
Food is on the way.
It's raining for the fourth straight day
and it's about 11 o'clock at night,
I'm inside my tent.
And I'm still nice and dry and warm and snug in here.
And it's gonna take more than rain and bugs
to deter me.
That's what I'm dealing with here, the white-water of the Coppermine River.
There's no way to drag up through that or pull, so I had to portage around it.
And here is my wader and it's just those two little punctures there
that are causing me all my grief.
So I'm gonna take some of this from the tree with my Swiss Army knife.
And then when that has melted I'll lather it on to the wader.
And you can see I've applied some of the spruce resin to the hole in the wader
with the stick here and, hopefully, this does the job.
It's July 31st and the bugs are just atrocious this morning.
They were bad last night but I mean there's just massive clouds of them here.
The fantastic news is that my patch on my waders
using the resin from the spruce tree has held up like a dream.
So, in the end, it was nature's solution that did the job
that modern materials couldn't.
Duct tape, Gorilla Tape didn't work on its own,
but when I heated that resin up and put it on, it worked like a charm.
And now I've got dry feet.
Oh my goodness, there's a jackpot over here.
In Newfoundland they call these bake apples.
Mm...
This is so good.
I still can't entirely dispel a bit of anxiety that I feel.
It's still an open question whether or not I'll even make it to Baker Lake.
It's just such a long way and winter is coming.
I mean winter could come in August, I don't know.
It's impossible to say.
So I am just super conscious at all times that time is running out.
Not too far away to the southwest is a tree line
and that marks the start of vast forest that cloak northern Canada.
And somewhere down there to the southwest
there must be some pretty bad forest fires raging right now.
Still little hazy from those forest fires.
I only really have at this point five weeks of decent weather left
and it's gonna probably take more than that for me to get to Baker Lake.
Right now the task for the moment is to kill
all these friggin' black flies inside the tent with me because there is a lot of them.
I repeat, that is not a rock.
Those cries are coming from some waterfowl out there on the lake.
They make the strangest cries like a child in distress just as I am about to call it a night.
Listen to the birds crying.
And look at that it's something like The Land Before Time,
dinosaurs roamed the Earth over there.
I have to get my canoe across all of that
and all of my gear for about a kilometer.
Well, I just completed the fourth portage of the day.
I got the canoe across all in one shot,
carried it over my head
because I didn't want to risk any more abuse to it
than necessary dragging it over these rocks.
Well, in a land of desolate rock as far as the eye could see,
old as time, this is the oldest rock on the planet,
goes back billions of years,
it's rather ironic and good for me
that I have this beautiful little bed here for the night.
I'm gonna call this home for tonight and sleep
in this nice little patch of lichens and Labrador tea and crowberries.
For the first time in like almost three months
I can see the moon, and it's a full moon
and there's always something to me anyways special about a full moon.
But it's starting to get dark.
And the night is dark and full of terror, as they say.
You paddle for over 11 hours and almost all of it against the wind
and you really just want to make dinner and crawl inside your tent,
but you can't because there's water down your stove.
First animal that pops into mind almost immediately is polar bear.
I don't know what it's all from, it's just the wear and tear
and the abuse that your body goes through on an expedition like this.
Thunder clouds rolling in across the tundra. And that's always a little ominous.
Look at this nice beach all to myself. How lovely?
This is where a grizzly bear has dug up the burrows
of some Arctic ground squirrels because the grizzlies love to eat the ground squirrels.
So that's what this is here.
Red sky at night, sailor's delight.
Red sky in morning, sailors take warning.
I'm gonna go now and paddle as hard as I can
for as long as I can for as long as the lake stays calm.
But it's another rainy morning and I have to get up
and hike all the way back to the start of the canyon,
grab my canoe which I left there,
portage it across the canyon or at least up to this point,
which is kind of like the halfway point,
and continue the portage in four loads,
taking all of my stuff all the way across the canyon.
I have to do it.
Well, good thing I got waders on 'cause that's pretty deep.
Hasn't been break for a while,
it's just this dismal Grey skies hanging over the land.
So it's made it hard to really dry stuff out.
I got some wet clothes that I can't dry for lack of sun
and I'm running kind of low on my battery life too
because I haven't been able to recharge anything with my solar panel
because there hasn't been enough sun.
But I'm gonna get cozy as I can inside the tent
because the nights are getting cold now that it's later in the season.
And...
The nights are also getting darker.
It's getting dark early and it's staying dark longer
now that we're getting late in the season.
And I'm not really sure at this point how much longer it's gonna take me
to get to Baker Lake.
But that's when I am pushing myself 12 hours a day
to get to Baker Lake, the little Inuit community.
Right now my biggest concern is the wind.
Wind has been fierce all day,
just really powerful wind gusts that make canoeing downriver
seem like I'm still going upriver.
At times the current has been... Or the wind has been so strong
that it actually has pushed me back upriver despite the strong current.
Basically, I've tried to shift everything out of the back end of the canoe,
the stern up to the front.
So I've loaded up the front as much as I can, the bow of the canoe,
with anything I've got, you know, GoPros, water bottles, my backpack,
and I've shifted the barrels up to the front as well
to concentrate the weight up
at the bow of the canoe that's going downriver into that headwind,
that really strong wind.
Doing it this way is allowing me to make progress even against that strong wind.
Otherwise, the canoe lightly loaded in the bow,
wind is just spinning my canoe and I'm, literally,
just spinning 360 degrees and not get anywhere.
So shifting the weight up to the front is making the canoe go
downriver even into the wind.
I pulled ashore here because I could see that there was some serious trouble
waiting for me up ahead.
We've got a rapid there.
That's not the real problem.
It's what's beyond the rapid.
That's a vertical drop and I can see the mist rising,
there's a big waterfall there and another canyon.
That goes in the right canyon there.
I know that I'm not, obviously, not the first person to canoe this river
because I'm following some historic reports.
But, obviously, someone at some point came before me
and wasn't fully prepared for just how gruelling and long
the portages around these huge canyons actually are because look at this,
someone has abandoned all this stuff right here.
There's a barrel, a bag of garbage,
three backpacks, some other bags,
some empty Coleman camp fuel.
And these bags have been here for quite a while.
You can see the water is accumulated on top and they're drenched and they're pretty old,
ripped up and sand's accumulated around them.
You know I believe, fundamentally,
that coming to this wilderness is a privilege.
And no matter how difficult and back-breaking it may be,
you have a responsibility to pack in anything you...
Or pack out anything you bring in with you, right.
You can't just throw stuff away. The litter out here is real travesty.
It's a very famous grove on the Thelon River
and it's in that spruce forest
that in 1927 John Hornby and his two companions
starved to death in their cabin.
They were depending on the caribou migration, they never found it.
The geese have started to fly south.
Winter is coming.
That's a wolf, you hear him?
Her. She's calling her baby cub.
Check on the little ones because they saw this suspicious creature going downriver.
Wow, that's amazing.
Did you hear that?
So it's a whole family of wolves there.
The mom with four little pups and the two adults there.
It's just incredible.
So I'm coming up to four months since I actually last saw my fiancée
and since I was last home.
And I don't know how long, you know, take me
to complete the end of this journey and get to Baker Lake
because the weather is beyond my control and wind is such a critical factor.
Today with the wind in my favour, I traveled probably a hundred kilometers.
But if it goes against me, I'm lucky if I can get 10 done in a day.
The moose is really enjoying the beach.
Came up here on his summer vacation from the forest down south.
Heard that they had some nice beaches up here on the river.
And my matches just fell in the water.
Looks like bad news.
If I'm very lucky, the wind might blow them right past me.
But my canoe is still down there and I gotta go get it and bring it up here.
I've made camp here.
And this canoe has just been an absolute warrior.
I'm amazed that how tough it is.
You can see it's suffered quite a lot of damage
from the ice and the rocks and everything else,
but there's no leaks in it whatsoever and it's holding on its own.
So, very sturdy canoe and I am very lucky
and fortunate to have it with me.
Kind of puts one in a meditative and reflective mood, I suppose,
when you're out here alone in the wilderness and you're just wandering across the land
and you come across a human skull just lying there in the open.
Out of respect, I'm not gonna film it and show the bones on camera,
so I didn't film it.
And I guess if I were superstitious and afraid of ghosts,
I might be a little apprehensive but, fortunately, I'm not,
and I find it more interesting than anything.
So it's early morning and I've just got my canoe loaded behind me.
The wind is still pretty strong but I'm gonna paddle hard
and I'm in the final phase of the journey at this point.
The end is almost in sight, so I gotta get going here.
Since day one of the expedition,
stashed away in my barrel I've been saving this tea...
Tea teabags, cinnamon apple.
And I had it before I left on the expedition when I was back home
and I thought it was really delicious and I had a second one of these.
So I decided to take it with me on the expedition and I only had this one.
All my other herbal tea was mauled apple.
But this cinnamon apple one is like of a much better quality.
And I've saved it this whole expedition.
Let's get that off of there.
So down behind me there that's my last campsite of the expedition,
fingers crossed.
If everything goes according to plan, the weather holds out,
I should be good to paddle the rest of the way to Baker Lake,
the little community, and that will end my journey alone across the Arctic.
So, yeah,
it's been over a hundred days now solo.
It's September 5th and first thing tomorrow,
September 6th, I'm gonna paddle into town.
It's not quite over yet, anything could still happen.
The dawn could bring some crazy weather,
a bear could come and maul me in the night,
muskoxen can plow inside my tent, go get struck by lightning.
So, you know, I don't want to celebrate just yet.
But tomorrow when I reach Baker Lake,
then the journey will be over.
This is the morning of September 6,
and I'm just packing up my canoe for the final time.
I'm about to set off on the final leg of my journey to reach Baker Lake.
So this is day 102 since I left the Arctic Circle
and nearly four months since I left home.
You only live once,
you're only young once
and I've always been very conscious of that fact
when it comes to planning my expeditions.
I really want to push myself hard now
because I feel like I'm in my prime and I have to do these expeditions
and I want to continue doing them for as long as I am able to.
One day if I am able to look back when I am old
on all the adventures and journeys that I've done,
hopefully, I'll have some satisfaction that I saw the wilderness
while it still exists.
There's a tinge of regret and sadness that it's coming to an end
because I really loved the expedition and I really loved the journey,
and there's a part of me that wishes I could keep going.
Yeah, that's as good as I was expecting.
Well, you're supposed to drop off a canoe.
Apparently, they emailed you about it.
And her name is Sheryl.
Does that sound about right?
- Yeah. - Yeah.
So it's time to say goodbye to my friend, my companion
in the last three and a half months.
We're supposed to be reunited in Winnipeg.
And it feels kind of sad to leave it here,
but it's amazing canoe and it withstood this journey the whole way.
So, it's pretty awesome.
How many barrels did you bring?
Well, there is, what, five.
There's actually five here 'cause the yellow one is inside this one. I think it's...
Welcome home.
Yeah, I'm not... I'm not wearing the big one.
I'll wear this one. I think that one should come off though, it might fall.
I'll hang on to this.
I can handle this.
Well, Adam Shoalts is a writer, explorer, and public speaker
who has hiked to all corners of this country.
His new book is entitled History of Canada in Ten Maps.
It tells the story of Canada from the Vikings to the early 19th century,
and Adam joins me now.
And I guess first off Adam, welcome back.
You just recently returned.
Oh, yeah, I was in the Arctic for the last four months
doing a journey across as my own Canada 150 project.
But it's great to be back and here in the studio.
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