Adventures
The Ice Boat Story: Mark II survives Arctic Ice Pack
The three words that best describe the kayaks Mark Eckhart makes are: Durable, Versatile, and Incredible.
An Australian friend and I had this idea to paddle 2,600 miles from British Columbia through Alberta, across the Northwest Territories to the coast of the Arctic Ocean. The main hitch in what we thought was a fairly elegant plan, was that neither of us had ever paddled anything, anywhere, before.
Early summer of 2002, three large boxes and a videocassette arrived at my house in Washington State. I put the tape in and Mark Eckhart appeared on the screen and began to rapidly assemble a kayak from the contents of the boxes that were now sitting next to me. I went out into the backyard and in half an hour I had made a jet-black tandem kayak. Our fate had been sealed; it would seem, in Fed-Ex boxes.
Three major obstacles blocked our path to the Arctic Ocean: one of the largest berm and weir (pile of rocks) dams on the planet, the remote Vermillion Chutes and Falls, and an unavoidable series of rapids disconcertingly called, The Rapids of the Drowned.
Versatile
At the W.A.C. Bennet Dam we disassembled the boat, put it in the backpacks it came with and along with all the rest of our gear, began to ferry loads back forth down the dam. The kayak was easy to take apart and carry when split between two people. Unfortunately over a mountain of food in the cafeteria at the visitor’s centre I had made an empty boast about being able to carry the kayak by myself down the face of the dam. The Australian had double dared me and foolishly I had agreed, in part I think due to the semi-narcotic effect visitor’s center cafeteria food was having on my blood chemistry. Now that I was so thoroughly used to rice and dehydrated vegetables, the chicken, three colours of jell-o, and seven bags of Cheetos I’d eaten had given me delusions of invulnerability. To make matters worse we loitered around the cafeteria, thrilled with the novelty of being indoors, abusing the free soda privileges that had come with the 32 oz. size waxed paper cup. With most of the daylight gone I began the excruciatingly slow climb to the bottom of the dam: a 92 lb. kayak is not easy to carry by yourself and even less so when it begins to rain. With each laborious step I cursed funnel web spiders, and an assortment of marsupials all of which I considered generally aggravating and asinine. My favourite part of that long night was meeting the Australian running one direction while I was running the other. We paused, looked at each other quizzically, and jinxed ourselves by asking at the same time, “What are you running from?” “Bear. Black Bear.” he said. “Moose. Cow and Calf.” I replied.
After a brief and serious conference we decided to run downhill towards the bear. More importantly, I had won the dare and carried the boat successfully down the dam avoiding the stay in traction the Australian had predicted.
Originally we had intended to portage around the Vermillion Chutes and the Falls beneath them, but paddling in the dark, we missed the beginning of the overgrown portage trail and paddled into the chutes. Like a bad cliché, the sound of crashing white-water alerted us that we should stop, hole up, and wait for morning. When first light arrived we could see a wide labyrinth of rock channels and rushing water. Even though the Vermillion chutes, in the only source we could find from 1974, were described as class IV they did not look that forbidding. We decided, rather than unpacking, packing, and hauling the boat through the mosquito infested forest, we’d run what portions of the chutes we felt we were capable of running, and back-line the rest. We discovered that rapids often appear smaller from shore than they are in actual practice. Twice I lost the line we had scouted beforehand, twice the Australian in front of me disappeared completely into a white wall of water, and although he complained bitterly and vomited up a little river water, the kayak never felt like it was going to capsize. We also discovered that climbing out onto giant log jams clutching a length of rope attached to a heavily laden kayak is an ill-advised activity at best, like a game of: Winner Take All Jenga. The white water was exhilarating and had boosted our confidence but when confronted by the awesome power of the Vermillion falls I quietly packed the boat up and carried it down a series of limestone steps at the edge of the falls. The Australian still flush from his unsuccessful drowning in the chutes and the vast amount of white-water experience he had garnered throwing up river water, tried to persuade me that we should run the falls. That it was somehow our duty. I read my book and ate noodles.
Now absolutely convinced of the perils of paddling near hazards at night, we were careful to arrive above The Rapids of the Drowned in daylight. The local joke is a sign there cautioning that the river is no longer navigable beneath this sign, unfortunately the sign is too small to be read until you are in the pull of the rapids. We figured that ferrying loads the twelve miles from Fort Fitzgerald to Fort Smith would be time consuming and monotonous, so we assembled a dolly we had been carrying with us since the previous town. We cut and tied harnesses for ourselves from spare webbing, and built a skid plate from duct tape and a log and installed it on the stern. After balancing the weight of the gear in the boat as best we could, we began the long pull to Fort Smith around the rapids. For fourteen hours through the long day and into the short night, we made Scott of the Antarctic jokes in bad taste, misquoting Ammundsen who we remembered had said that, “Only dogs and Englishmen were fit to man-haul.”
Durable
Early in our trip we had been warned about a series of rock outcroppings on the upper Peace River known locally as: The Fingers. It was late evening, the sun was setting and out of nowhere an otter appeared, then another, and another, until three river otters were following alongside our kayak. At times they would get out of the water and run along the shore. It was only then that it became apparent that this was a family, a mother and her pups. At one point the otters must have strayed with us into a beaver’s territory. A noisy brawl broke out between the otters and a particularly surly beaver. Beavers had a nasty tendency of creeping up right next to our kayak and slapping their tail on the water’s surface, turning a nice quiet meditative moment into a heart attack. We both were craning our necks trying to watch the fight behind us and didn’t notice the water speeding up. The kayak snaked quickly around a rocky corner and then it was all over, I only had time to use the most predictable four letter expletive for unexpectedly going over a four foot waterfall. The kayak disappeared over the little falls, bow first it dove. The whole boat seemed to be underwater for a fraction of a second and then we were drifting slowly back down the river, soaked, speechless, and stunned. One of the little otters peered over the edge of the rock outcropping, and I can’t be sure but I think we were being mocked. When we could form whole words again we marveled that the heavily loaded ash wood kayak hadn’t splintered, crashing like it had under it’s own and our weight.
Prior to leaving Washington we had printed off a trip report from the Internet, the document was reliably useless, but it did help allay our fears that around each bend in the river we were about to paddle off the edge of the world. One of the biggest worries of our trip was the Great Slave Lake. The report we had, recommended the best way of crossing the Great Slave Lake as: “… don’t. Build a bird house, take up caving, or match stick battleship building, whatever, but don’t go out on that lake.” Unfortunately the point at which the valiant individual who’d written the report had gotten off the lake we had long since past. The Australian explained to me at length the dynamics of a wooden kayak, how it flexed in high seas, how it was more durable than other types of kayaks. He reminded me that Hannes Lindemann had crossed the Atlantic in a wooden foldable kayak, and if he could cross an ocean, we could cross a stupid lake. I felt like clapping after this motivational speech, but figured I would get hit with a paddle.
We had good weather on the lake our first few days and as a consequence got a little too big for our britches. We decided to try to shortcut across the southern shore of the lake by hopping from island to island. It had worked for two beautiful sunny days. We used our paddles for masts and our tent fly as a spinnaker, making daylong voyages island to island far from shore. On the third day a wind began to blow inshore, across hundreds of miles of lake, quickly bringing with it the phenomenal swell we’d heard so much about. Soon we were fighting eight to nine foot waves with white foaming crests ripping away in the wind. Every once in a while these rogue pyramid shaped waves would come crashing awkwardly over us. We were terrified, but we persevered, paddling into the wind for six hours, cresting each wave in an explosion of spray then running down into the trough behind. Eventually we arrived scared and wet, but relieved to be safely on the appropriately named Dead Man’s Island. After two days stormbound on the island we paddled back to the shore of the lake. Once there the Australian apologized out loud with sincerity and real regret to the lake for having called it stupid.
Incredible
The main purpose of our trip was to meet the people who lived in the modern Canadian north. We weren’t in a race and no one cared whether or not we made it to the Arctic Ocean, so when more often than not when we received the incredible hospitality of rural Canadians, we stopped. Without exception we had a great time. We lost days here and there. When we had unseasonably warm weather at the beginning of the trip we’d take the spray cover off the kayak, essentially converting it into an open canoe. We discovered that with a few adjustments the front seat could be put into the kayak backwards. We made a table and spent two or three 100+ degree days playing gin rummy drifting leisurely down the river. On the gentler parts of the river, when the mosquitoes became unimaginably bad, we’d remove the seats entirely and sleep scrunched up in the boat, slowly logging miles while we slept. In the grand scheme of things, we figured that we had struck a peculiar kind of balance between wasting time on the one hand and manic 16 hour paddling sessions on the other. We must have done something right because our enthusiasm, even after four months, never waned. The Arctic Ocean was where this entire river system relentlessly went and so too did we.
Those freakish 100 degree Albertan days were only a fond memory once we found ourselves well above the Arctic Circle, still paddling early in October. For weeks we had been in sub-zero temperatures and as we neared the Arctic Ocean we found that even on sunny days the temperature rarely rose much above zero. Each time your paddle blade dipped into the water a little bit thicker glaze of ice would appear on it. We would take breaks to smash the ice from our paddles. Likewise anywhere that waves broke over the kayak ice would build up until the kayak would begin to list under the weight. In the mornings after forty five minutes of slow layering and the pulling on of immersion suits in a two person tent, you could look forward to digging the snow out of your cockpit with half a paddle. Then on October tenth we paddled out of the Mackenzie River delta and into the Arctic Ocean, there was little chance for celebration, I patted the Australian on the back with a double gloved hand, and we continued to paddle. The notoriously unpredictable Arctic Ocean weather was in rapid decay.
The next day, having paddled 2,597 miles in 113 days, just 3 miles short of our goal, the Inuvialuit settlement of Tuktoyaktuk, it became clear that our trip was over. The wind had shifted, the temperature had dropped and literally the ocean had frozen around us. For three hours we tried to find an open lead to shore through the shifting sheets of ice. We used the bow of the kayak like a miniature icebreaker, holding our breath every time we crunched through the ice, wondering if the Hypalon shell of the kayak would hold. At 1:30 p.m. we set off our emergency positioning beacon, a device that was only in the boat due to my mother’s insistence. The wind began to blow in towards the shore and the sheets of ice began to collide. Soon we were surrounded by small foot high pressure ridges. We struggled to break away the ice from around our kayak to prevent it from being crushed. Hours passed and what had been the sea, only hours before, was now a snowy icy white expanse. As the pale yellow light of an early winter sun dipped towards the horizon we heard a beautiful noise- the rhythmical thump-thump-thump of a helicopter. We cheered and waved our arms.
The pilot and co-pilot of the helicopter were true professionals; they put the skid of the helicopter parallel to the kayak virtually touching it. The door of the helicopter slid back and one by one we clambered in. As soon as our headsets were on, we began to profusely thank the crew, all three of which to whom we undoubtedly owe our lives. The only real tinge of regret, and it was a small one, was watching our kayak slowly disappear. We figured it had been doomed forever to the murky bottom of a cold ocean. As it sat there eerily empty and alone, rocking back and forth in the rotor chop of the helicopter I did not envy it its’ fate, which so very nearly had been our own.
All the eulogizing and bleary-eyed nostalgia over our drowned kayak had been in vain though. It had done what we could not. It had survived winter in a frozen ocean. An Inuvialuit elder named Abraham Klengenberg out gathering firewood on his skidoo in the near constant twilight of the far northern winter had spotted something light blue in the snow. To his surprise as he began to dig, the shape of a kayak began to emerge. He removed what loose dry bags he could and headed home. In one of those dry bags was my journal and passport. As Abraham and I talked on the phone I don’t know who was more surprised he or I.
Abraham invited me to his home and for a week I received the fine hospitality of the Klengenberg family. In a single day Abraham, his son Spenser and I, managed to shovel and chisel the kayak free of the ice and pull it behind a skidoo on a pulk back to Tuktoyaktuk. The rest of my time was spent thawing the kayak and equipment out in a heated Royal Canadian Mounted Police garage, as the March temperature there was still 20 below. The kayak was perfectly intact. I packed it up and shipped it home.
Perhaps it seems more credible now when I say that Mark Eckhart makes kayaks that are durable, versatile, and incredible.
-Erik Spellman
-Clifford Mee (the Australian)