August 11/2025. Day 8
We head into the lowlands with no helmets or rapids to contend with. We have miles and miles of eskers: stratified sand hills formed within ice-walled tunnels by streams that flowed within and under glaciers.
By the end of the day, we’ll have paddled 50K. Our longest paddle. After paddling for hours, those eskers have turned to the sandy beaches with tall grasses. The paddlers on one canoe saw a wolverine. Something I hanker to see. Wolf and moose tracks are fresh but not a peek of either animal. There are so many piles of moose poop, we sleep on it and sit on it.
We see ducks pulling the broken wing fake to distract predators from their ducklings. Bald eagles sit high overhead. This day we saw a quick break in the clouds, but the smoke returned and a black cloud followed us to our camp. After trampling down the tall grasses to capture a small plot for our tents, our amazing guides had yet another delicious meal waiting so we could eat before the bottom heavy cloud opened, just as we were finishing washing the last dish.
What a day. We go to bed with full bellies and tired muscles.
The German’s Boat
8/11/2015 Day 8
This is a story I planned to tell earlier when we found the canoe and learned about its story.
In 2017, two German friends decided to buy a canoe online and paddle the Hayes River. They picked up the canoe at the Winnipeg Airport. They were flying in from Germany uncertain of what they had purchased and clueless about what they needed for such a adventure. The seller ended up driving them and the canoe to Norway House, the start of the trip. After paddling more than 200 miles. They crashed their canoe on a rock and destroyed it.
They would have to self rescue, so were forced to trek about 100 miles to the nearest highway outside of the town of Gillam, Manitoba.
Wolf Wagner, 25, and John Hoentsch, 26, spent 11 days slogging through boggy terrain with no means of communication to ask for help.
There were no trails just bogs and muskeg.
They became uncertain they would survive.
They were barraged by insects, muck, hunger and doubt. Yet eleven days later, they reached Gillam.
Mountain Peace 