You Can Always Live on Rice and Potatoes
Choose Your Own Adventure
My favourite fortune cookie ever. Actually, this one was Janine's. Mine said, "Save money now while you have the chance."
zoom“The World was Made for Hikers”
River-wise, there’s a big difference between 10 days and 6 weeks.
The last time I planned a canoe trip, I had 6 weeks and it felt like the world (or at least a good chunk of Canada) was my oyster. Thelon, Back, Yukon, Churchill, Coppermine – I had time to do any one of the great rivers.
This year, I can give my river trip 10 days. In some ways this has made planning it trickier, at least when it comes to choosing a destination. I need a waterway that offers the ideal blend of rapids, scenery, wildlife and remoteness all within a tidy temporal frame.
Oh, and since my wife and I are hauling our 13 year old nephew out of school early to come with us under the pretence of it being an educational trip, I’d like it to be a historic or culturally significant river too please.
Oh, oh. Sorry. One more thing. I don’t like long drives much. Could you make this some place within a day’s drive of Toronto?
I took all of these variables and loaded them into our outdoor super-computer (a large Rubbermaid container in our basement that contains our topo maps and guidebooks). The super-computer spit out a name:
The Missinaibi.
It looks like a great fit. The upper portion of the river, running 236 km from Missinaibi Lake to the little town of Mattice, is full of class I-III rapids, moose, bear, beaver and monstrous fish. It’s one of the last great undammed rivers south of 60 and it was a key route during the days of the fur trade. There’s even the remains of a fur trade post that I can tell Sean’s teacher we visited.
If you’re willing to label the 13 hour drive to Mattice at our take out point and the 8 hour car shuttle back to Missinaibi lake as a “day’s drive” from Toronto, I think you’ve got yourself a perfect match.
Done. Settled. We’re going next Thursday.
Over the next week I’ll be blogging about our preparations for the trip, here and on my blog at getgone.wordpress.com. When we hit the water, I’ll post live from my sat phone so you can keep track of just how rusty my j-stroke is.
jm
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