“Okay you guys, let’s go,” a voice called out wearily from somewhere in the tent. “Time to get up.”
I realized, as I struggled to break out of my dream-filled slumber, that it was our steersman Paul Westdal. He didn’t sound one bit enthusiastic about having to face another day on that stretch of the Hayes River in northern Manitoba once known as Hill River. The ordeal of the last week was beginning to take its toll.
None of us had slept well that night, or any of the five previous nights since our expedition left Oxford House, a lonely outpost halfway between Lake Winnipeg and Hudson Bay. And of course, none of us wanted to get up.
We had all allowed ourselves the luxury of ignoring Mr. Bennett’s earlier wake-up call. Now in the half-light of dawn on that freezing cold morning in September of 1964, we were once again being forced to confront the inevitable.
“Get going, Byfield,” he urged with a soft kick through his sleeping bag. Mr. Byfield’s oldest son Mike and I had the misfortune of sleeping by the door.
I had my head out of my bag by this time, but Byfield still hadn’t moved. They always wanted Byfield and me to get up first so there would be more room for the others. I was always a bit resentful that I never got to sleep among all those warm bodies because I was smaller and could fit by the door.
Most of the time I was more than willing to comply with their “you first” decree if only to escape the nauseating stench of body odor, urine, smoke, insecticide, and steaming wet clothes as people emerged from their sleeping bags.
Early in the trip, I discovered that if I got up before the others the fumes were nowhere near as pungent because they were still trapped inside sleeping bags.
Since Oxford House, when the autumn rains began in earnest and the rock-strewn river refused to let us pass without at least one stint of wading, everything we owned was either damp or wet. The smell inside the tent was so putrid the only escape was out into the frigid morning air.
I was one of the few who removed some clothes to sleep. I always took off my running shoes and sometimes my socks if I had a dry pair to put on. Occasionally I would remove my jeans if they were uncomfortably wet.
But everything else stayed on – up to four layers on the upper part of my body. The big drawback came in the morning when I had to put back on the now semi-frozen articles. Once out of the sack, only through an explosion of rapid movements, was it possible to avoid a return of shivers.
For those fully dressed that moment came the instant they stepped out into the frosty world outside. The only concession the trip’s planners had made to it being cold was to advise us to bring long underwear, heavy socks, and a heavy sweater. Few of us had gloves, toques, even windbreakers or other articles that might have decreased the discomfort.
While breaking camp there seemed to be no way of escaping the shivers. The sun rarely shone, the fire was only big enough for cooking, and everything was covered with frost – the paddles, your spoon and mess tin, the cooking pots, the outside of the tent.
“What’s it like out?” someone asked as I tore at the frozen strings in an attempt to loosen the flap.
“About the same as yesterday,” I mumbled pushing my head out enough to look around. “Frost on the ground and it’s starting to rain.”
“Oh, God,” someone groaned.
“Forget about the weather and get going,” interrupted Mr. Westdal, sounding much more like a master than an old boy who had returned to steer one of the three, seven-man canoes on the expedition.
Only Mike Byfield had known Mr. Westdal when he was a part-time school student, so it was easier for him to take charge. But suddenly Mr. Nice Guy had become Mr. Mean, or at least Mr. Unsympathetic.
I remember applauding the decision to hold the canoe trip at the end of the summer rather than at the beginning, mainly because it meant summer holidays came first. In theory it would mean the water wouldn’t be as cold and the weather might be better. The official reason for the change was to make it easier to get summer jobs.
On my first canoe trip, neither water temperature nor weather had been much of a problem. But then we’d been traveling through civilization most of the time and perhaps psychologically everything felt warmer as a result. The trip had followed the Saskatchewan River from Rocky Mountain House, Alberta to Grand Rapids on Lake Winnipeg.
Every few days, it seemed, our brigade of two, 26-foot north canoes, the David Thompson and the William Cochran, had passed through a major city or town. First, it had been Edmonton, then North Battleford, then Prince Albert, then Nipawin, and finally The Pas. In between, there were numerous smaller centers, many of which we stopped at for a store break. It was the longest trip I ever went on, both in miles, nearly 1,000, and days, 25, but it was also the most uneventful.
As Eric Morse wrote in his book Fur Trade Routes of Canada: Then and Now:
'There is little to attract the modern voyageur to paddle the murky Saskatchewan. Though the scenery had changed not at all from the days of the fur trade, high banks along much of the river restrict view; and the scenery tends to become monotonous. Herds of buffalo no longer enliven the scene.'
The long hours of uninterrupted paddling ensured we all became well-acquainted with that uncomfortable condition known as “voyageur’s ass.”
Apart from a near mutiny at Grand Rapids when Mr. Bennett, the expedition leader, announced at first that we would have to paddle an additional 110 miles to Warren’s Landing on Lake Winnipeg to catch a boat ride back to the school, the only other memorable event involved the theft of our canoes during a two-hour stop in Prince Albert. (They were found not far downstream, caught in the willows, with a woman asleep in one of the canoes.)
Breaking camp that frigid morning of September 9, 1964, seemed to take longer than usual. People were starting to complain openly about the rationing of food, a measure that had been instituted partly because some had been lost when one of the canoes dumped while shooting a small falls, but mostly because the 20-mile stretch known as Hill River was taking us far longer than it should.
After three days we still weren’t through it, and there was another 120 miles before we would reach our destination of York Factory on Hudson Bay. The maps showed the worst was over at Berwick Falls, another 15 miles downstream. But could they be believed? Whoever marked the rapids and falls had never been on the Hayes in low water. The ones they missed seemed to outnumber the ones they marked.
What made this stretch a paddler’s nightmare was the brutal topography. The river drops 200 feet in less than 40 miles. It was literally falling off the edge of the Canadian Shield.
Across northern Canada lies an enormous granite landmass known as the Pre-Cambrian or Canadian Shield. Stretching from the St. Lawrence in the south to the Beaufort Sea in the northwest, this magnificent plateau of rock, lakes, and pine forest once formed part of the earth’s original crust. Billions of years of erosion have worn its once majestic peaks into rounded bumps, few of which are bigger than the 400-foot Brassey Hill beside which we were passing.
For much of its length, the Canadian Shield still behaves like a range of mountains. The 3,000-mile-long height of land is broken at only one point – by the Nelson River which flows from Lake Winnipeg to Hudson Bay. All the water in the southern half of Western Canada funnels through the Nelson on its way to the ocean. Rivers like the Hayes, Churchill, Albany, and Ottawa span the breadth of the shield but they don’t cut through it the way the Nelson does.
The Hayes became the preferred fur trade route from Hudson Bay to Lake Winnipeg because it did not plunge the traveler through a series of terrifying gorges as encountered on the Nelson.
When we embarked on our 500-mile expedition at Grand Rapids on August 24 our biggest concern had been Lake Winnipeg. Some argue it’s the worst lake in Canada for small craft because it sits broadside to the prevailing winds and its shoreline offers few bays in which to take shelter.
Even worse, it is particularly shallow, averaging about 30 feet along its 280 miles of length. As a result, the wind quickly whips the water into an unnavigable fury of white caps and steep-fronted waves. There was a very real possibility our objective might be dealt a fatal blow before we even started.
In our favor was the fact the majority of us had been on at least one other canoe trip. Not in our favor was the fact only one of the three steersmen, Mr. Bennett, had experience at the helm of a 22-foot canoe. As the expedition’s leader, he led the way in the Dollard des Ormeaux. Steering the Isaac Jogues in which I was bowsman was Paul Westdal. The Father Turney, named for the school’s first full-time chaplain, was being steered by Frank Doolan, a master recruited that summer.
As it turned out Lake Winnipeg was kind to us. Only one day was lost due to the wind, allowing us to cover the distance to Warren’s Landing by the fourth day. News of our triumph was reported in Canoe Bulletin #2 sent out by the school to parents on August 27. Mr. Doolan, an electronics technician, was able to keep in almost daily contact with the outside world with a portable radiotelephone.
Our arrival at Warren’s Landing at the entrance to the Nelson River coincided with a change in the weather. Overnight summer had turned to fall. In a diary I kept on the trip I made my first of many references to the cold and the wet the next morning.
`Got up at 7 a.m., cold wind from north (headwind), set out at 8:30, slow drizzle, very cold all morning.'
As we paddled towards Norway House the countryside took on a new look with Jack pines, tamaracks, and ash replacing the dusty green spruce of Lake Winnipeg. Slabs of smooth rock took the place of crumbling, sandy cliffs. We stopped only long enough at Norway House, a small community of mainly Indigenous families, to pick up our food cache and to visit the HBC store.
Our camp that night on Playgreen Lake put us just above Sea River Falls, a five-foot drop where the Nelson River makes its first plunge through the Canadian Shield. The next morning we said farewell to Nelson and began a pleasant ascent up the Echimamish River. Echimamish means “flows both ways” in Cree, and it was this tiny, willow-lined tributary less than 40 miles long that linked us with the Hayes River.
Beaver dams along the Echimamish kept the water high enough for HBC York boats to move up and down with minimum difficulty. We had little trouble negotiating the dams. Most of the time we were able to drag the canoes up and over while standing precariously on the dam.
But we did have trouble finding our way out of the Hairy Lake, a brief widening of the Echimamish that is clogged with reeds, rushes, and water lilies. After an hour of fruitless search – the lake isn’t much bigger than a lily pond – Dan Raymes was sent up a tree to reconnoiter.
The height of land at Painted Stone Portage marked the end of the Echimamish and gave us access to the beginning of the Hayes. We now began our descent to Oxford House, the next and final food stop, 85 miles ahead. The drizzly weather might have been more tolerable had we been paddling. As it was, we spent most of the time struggling over slippery portages with boats too wide for the old fur trade trails we were following.
When not portaging we seemed to be slogging through knee-deep water over greasy, algae-covered bedrock so as to allow the canoe to float freely. Channels we hoped would provide passage through the notorious Hill Gates, a narrow canyon with 80-foot rock walls, repeatedly turned into blind alleys, forcing us to drag the canoes back upstream in search of another route. Towards the end of the second day and still no sign of Oxford Lake an accident occurred that probably would not have happened had morale been higher.
One of the Father Turney‘s four canoe carriers, David Mindell, tripped while portaging, causing it to crash down on his neck. The severity of the blow was worse than it needed to be had the other three been more attentive. A place was made in the bottom of the canoe for him to lie, his neck supported by packs. And it was there that he lay until we reached Oxford House a day later.
A food stop on the Saskatchewan River trip had usually been accompanied by an outpouring of hospitality, often a dinner and a place to stay. But on this occasion, all any of us wanted was to be warm and dry. I remember that evening in the community’s cozy hall being the happiest moment of the trip.
Amid the cheery warmth of the room, Dick Van Middlesworth and I traded off playing a well-used guitar lent by one of the Indigenous kids. As a crowd huddled at the door we worked through all the songs we knew by the Beatles, belting out hits like Misery, Please Mr. Postman, I Should Have Known Better, and Can’t Buy Me Love.
It provided a fleeting escape from the horror the Hayes River had become. I remember that session as the beginning of three exciting years of musical collaboration between Dick and me. We fell asleep that night lost in another world.
The jolt back to reality was immediate, however. The distance to Knee Lake was less than 15 miles, but it took us all day as we fought our way down a boulder-strewn Hayes River. We shared the trail on the portage around Trout Falls with the only other party we ever saw on the river, two Indigenous heading to Oxford House in a kicker-powered canoe. As we plodded, they raced along the trail, undeterred by the dreary weather and impossible conditions underfoot. Our camp that night was made even more miserable by clouds of swamp bugs.
It was during the day-long push across a topographical zigzag known as Knee Lake that the bottom finally fell out of the dark grey ceiling that hung overhead. A skin-drenching squall came at us from the northwest. We fought our way to the narrows and then into the larger part of the lake before stopping for the night.
The next morning we awoke to our first frost. Anything that had been wet was covered in ice. The intermittent sun that morning helped spur us across the final stretch of the lake and re-enter the Hayes. We had begun that section of the Hayes rarely traveled by locals.
This meant the portage trails would have been totally lost in the undergrowth had it not been for the fact that another expedition had traveled the route earlier in the summer.
The expedition was led by Sig Olson, a canoeing guide from Ely, Minnesota, and included A. H. Lovink, ambassador for the Netherlands, Elliot Rogers, a retired major general and chairman of the Manitoba Liquor Commission, Denis Coolican, president of Canadian Bank Note Company Ltd., Blair Fraser, Ottawa editor of Maclean’s magazine, and Dr. O. M. Solandt, a vice-president of De Havilland Aircraft Company Ltd.
They were all members of the Voyageurs Club. Perhaps their most distinguished member was Pierre Trudeau who was on the trip down the Coppermine River to the Arctic two years before he became prime minister.
As my diary noted, our way was marked by a sign left by the Voyageurs Club. Willow branches had been broken at the beginning of each portage trail by the Voyageurs paddlers. The now lifeless limbs were relatively easy to spot against the green undergrowth.
`Had lunch at 5:30, pushed over 2nd rapids, then on to 3rd rapids, cloud moved in, camped at end of portage, dark, started to rain, quite a long portage (Long Portage, 450 yards) on left marked by broken trees.' (September 5)
The next morning we completed the crossing of Swampy Lake and cast our eyes for the first time on the famous Hill River. Before us lay a navigator’s nightmare. The river became a labyrinth of mostly impassable channels. We ran aground so often that for long stretches we didn’t even try to get back into the canoe. When it got too swift to wade we would grab the lines front and back and walk in the shallows while one person fended the boat off rocks.
Late in the first day, Mr. Bennett decided to shoot a small falls. His boat didn’t make it. The crew grimly clung to the overturned boat, buoyed by their life jackets, slowly manoeuvring it ashore with help from a second boat. For one boy it proved to be one trial too many. In the midst of the emergency, he bitterly denounced the school for putting him through such hell.
Mr. Bennett chose to ignore him. Following the rescue, we built the largest fire possible in the small clearing. A pot pack and a food pack had been lost. Most of the hardtack biscuit got wet so a drying operation using mess tins was set in motion. It didn’t work of course but it provided some comic relief to those was who particularly hated hardtack.
Just before camping that night, we rounded a bend and there, off in the distance, stood Brassey Hill, its summit lost in the low-lying clouds. The day’s efforts had advanced us a mere five miles, and by dark our camp was again enveloped in frigid Arctic air.
It was more of the same on the second day on Hill River – a monotonous cycle of short periods of paddling followed by long stretches of wading only interrupted by portages.
They were portages that once bore names hinting at the wretched conditions users would encounter – Mossy, Smooth Rock, Rocky Launcher, and Swampy. Under the weight of a load, it was not uncommon to sink thigh-deep in muskeg. Another day of effort had produced only four miles of progress.
In 1819, while struggling upstream on the same section of river, Sir John Franklin captured the horror of the Hayes in his diary on Sept. 20.
`It is not easy for any but an eyewitness to form an adequate idea of the exertions of the Orkney boatmen in the navigation of this river. The necessity they are under of frequent jumping into the water to lift the boats over the rocks, compels them to remain the whole day in wet clothes, at a season when the temperature is far below the freezing point.
Two days earlier the Franklin expedition had awakened to find the countryside covered in snow. One day he recorded progress of only 1 3/4 miles.
It was an ill-humored party that set off in light rain on our third morning on Hill River. We’d taken twice as long as usual to break camp and there was more than a trace of anger in Mr. Bennett’s words of encouragement during the prayer and briefing session before departure. There was little doubt many were in the mood to give up. It was as if there was a collective wish for it all to stop.
I was crouched at the river’s edge, bowline in hand, when I first heard someone yell. We’d just finished lining our third set of rapids and together with the Father Turney were waiting for the Dollard to catch up.
“Come back,” were the only words I could make out over the roar of the water but I could see several people frantically waving their arms. Others were huddled around someone lying on a rock ledge.
“Looks like someone is hurt, Sir,” I said quickly. “They want us to come back.”
“Okay, de Candole, tie us up and we’ll wade back,” said Mr. Westdal.
The Father Turney crew followed our lead and by the time we had all arrived they had made a bed of life jackets and were wrapping 16-year-old Keith Veale in a sleeping bag.
“We’re going to have to radio for a helicopter,” I heard Mr. Bennett say to Mr. Westdal and Mr. Doolan. “He may have broken his back. He went down pretty hard.”
Faster than any of us dreamed possible that ‘something’ had happened. Veale had apparently tripped on the lines just where the ground took a big step down.
It may have been the end of the road for Veale but after hearing Mr. Bennett request more food on the radio I don’t think anyone believed it would hasten our departure from the Hayes. His misfortune, however, did provide us with a welcome break.
The Dollard‘s tent was set up on a mossy landing nearby while others prepared a make-shift stretcher of poles, rope, and rain gear. Throughout the move, Veale lay very still. No pain registered in his glazed eyes or chalk-white face but you could tell he had been badly shaken by the fall.
Mr. Bennett informed us a bit later that due to bad weather the earliest the helicopter could get in would be the following day. The other canoes were brought back and we made camp. Warmed by an enormous drying fire we scarcely noticed there were flecks of white mixed in with the afternoon drizzle. That night the first snowfall of the season arrived.
Around midday we heard the unmistakable chatter of a helicopter overhead. The family-run Lamb Airways of The Pas had agreed to take over the rescue when the RCAF Air Search Rescue Unit informed the school that it didn’t have the proper aircraft. Dennis Lamb was now on our doorstep. He had brought with him a nurse’s aid from the Northern Health Service station at Wabowden.
He had also been accompanied by his brother Greg Lamb, piloting a Beaver floatplane that was waiting nearby on a lake. The nurse’s aid determined that Veale’s back was badly sprained and she prepared him for evacuation.
Once Veale was gone our attentions immediately turned to the crate of eggs and box of bread, bacon, and sausage Dennis had delivered – delicacies we hadn’t tasted since leaving home. Mr. Bennett gave the okay and we prepared a veritable feast of eggs, bacon, toast, Klik luncheon meat, and juice.
We knew the end was near when Mr. Bennett announced during the meal that he had arranged with Dennis to send an Otter floatplane to meet us in two days’ time on the open river below Berwick Falls. To push on to York Factory would have required another four or five days, more days than we had supplies for, he said. But even with the good news, the dissension continued. The drubbing we received the next morning made it clear Mr. Bennett had heard enough complaining. He said a quitter attitude had grown too prevalent and it had to stop.
My diary that day simply said:
'woke up at 7 a.m., broke camp, loaded boats, lecture, pushed off.'
The river once again tortured us but by late afternoon the rock that had been under foot for so long changed to gravel. The next morning we kissed goodbye to the loathsome Canadian Shield after crossing the last portage around Berwick Falls.
A day later we were basking in the chilly autumn sunshine at a point where the Hayes meets the Fox River before making its 90-mile dash to Hudson Bay. There we waited for the arrival of Don Lamb and his Otter.
In 1935 American Eric Sevareid and his partner Walter Port had paddled the last 60 miles of the Hayes in one, eleven-hour session. The two high school graduates had been on the water for nearly three months since setting off from Minneapolis. In 1956, a party led by veteran outfitter Ben Ferrier traveled 40 of the last 60 miles without lifting a paddle. They drifted downstream through the night with only the steersman awake.
But there would be no thoughts of trying to match their accomplishments for the sake of finishing the trip. Three hours later the entire expedition minus the canoes had been airlifted to Ilford, a town on the rail line from The Pas to Churchill. And that night we ate our first “real” meal in three weeks as guests of the Ilford Hotel.
From there it was a 10-hour ride on a freight train to The Pas where we picked up a now-recovered Veale and took the bus ride back to Selkirk. As my first letter home described I was still feeling the effects of the ordeal two weeks later.
'During the first week or so after the trip, my feet were killing me because after being wet continuously for three weeks they were suddenly dry and not cold. To cure it I soaked each night in warm water and Epsom salts, then put powder on.'
Richard de Candole has been working in British Columbia and Alberta as a reporter and editor for over 40 years. Toughest School in North America is about his five years as a student at St. John’s Cathedral Boys’ School in Selkirk, Manitoba from 1962 to 1968. Richard lives with his wife Wendy in Qualicum Beach, British Columbia.
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