August 13, 2025 Day 10
Wake at 4:00 with little sleep. It’s just too Cold for something as friendly as sleep. The sound of a powerful, angry river would startle me awake.
Once up, our spirits lifted by the appearance of the sun and then waned when a bottom heavy dark cloud passed overhead. We all remained cold encased in wet clothes with no chance of experiencing dry ones. Actually, I had no real reason to complain. We had no wind and no rain. The currents and ripples pushed our broad shouldered river forward. It was the best of all possible worlds.
The average number of people on this river on any given day is three. This quiet unpeopled place at that moment was my best of all possible worlds. No WiFi. No communication from that outside world. No incident light. No mechanical sounds. Everything eight people need in four open canoes.
We start to get the feel of joining the ocean. Maybe salt water is in the air. Maybe it was the expansiveness of the Hayes River. This will be the last night we share on the Hayes. Tomorrow we’ll be in the Hudson Bay at York Factory.
York Factory is a Canadian National Historic Site that was a settlement and Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) factory (trading post) on the southwestern shore of Hudson Bay in northeastern Manitoba, Canada, at the mouth of the Hayes River, approximately 200 kilometres (120 miles) south-southeast of Churchill.
When Anne and I had talked before the trip, she said she was sure we’d see polar bears. I’ve been on many backpacking trips when I thought a lot about bears black and grisly. And mountain lions that we caught on our game cam and that killed our neighbor’s dog right in front of them. I could be pretty jumpy about bears and mountain lions.
On this trip maybe I had been too tired at night. Or maybe it was because we spent more time on the shore than the woods. But now that I’ve worried for months about polar bears and we are officially in their territory, it’s the last thing on my mind.
I still have the wind and rain to fret over. People in the wilderness don’t die of animal attacks. They die of their own stupidity. Drowning and falling.
Before we set up camp, Garrett fired a Bear Banger and shot his shotgun across the rivers. We were instructed that morning not to use anything scented. And to put all scented items in a barrel. We had to erect our tents in a row with a few feet between them.
I slept fine. I got up in the night to pee and never looked for the white bear.
Mountain Peace 