Kuujjua River, Victoria Island, NWT (1999)
For several years, the Kuujjua has gleamed in my imagination like a jewel at the end of a long string of Arctic rivers. Located in remote western Victoria Island and 225 miles long, it represented a tough logistical and physical challenge. But, early in April, eight members of the Arctic Division of the Geriatric Adventure Society blocked out three weeks in late July and decided to try it.
Moving canoes north is always the biggest problem to be solved.
In the past, chartering out of Yellowknife, we have rented pretty good ones there. But after getting a trio of pretty battered boats in Baker Lake in 1997 and hearing even worse horror stories about the derelict fleet in Cambridge Bay (almost all canoes abandoned by previous parties), we decided to buy a quartet of PakBoats and bypass the whole uncertain process. And the whole shebang, with a little whittling here and there to save weight, fit into a single wheeled Twin Otter.
Adlair Aviation dropped us off at the headwaters of the North Branch of the river on a cold July evening. We camped below a riverbank, partially sheltered from the north wind, dined, and assembled the canoes. Some of us, accustomed to the rugged, stable, trucklike Old Town Discovery 174, were just a little leery of these slender lightweights. But we attached our bow and stern lines and next morning loaded up and started down the infant river.
The first day featured a lot of walking through shallow water, hauling the canoes after us. But at least the wind was behind us. By the next day, the Kuujjua (“big river” in Inuktitut) was a bona fide river. Then it turned west, and the wind was right in our faces. We fought it as long as we could, until even with the current, we were moving only a few inches with each stroke. We found a slightly sheltered spot, ate supper at 3:30, and dropped off to sleep to the roar of flapping tents.
The next day was probably the key to the trip. It started just past midnight, and established in our minds the idea that, wind or not, we were going to get to the mouth of the Kuujjua. Two of us were still smarting from our failure to complete the Hayes River, in similar conditions, in 1997. But after an all-night descent of several good rapids and another snooze from 6:00 a.m. until mid-afternoon, we paddled several more hours. And this time we really went to bed!
Water level, in spite of numerous contributions from good-sized side streams, was a little low. This made it possible to run down the middle of most rapids, but it also meant a lot of bumping down rocky stretches and, even worse, a lot of lining. Lining isn’t usually a particularly arduous exercise. But the Kuujjua flows between cliffs of ancient basalt flows, and the boulders it produces, and then coats with a slick brown “boot slime”, are deadly walking. Everybody was bruised and battered, some were bloody, and two men even broke ribs falling on the rocks. The weather was uniformly cold, wet, and windy. It is a good ting we were having so much fun.
There are musk oxen everywhere along the Kuujjua – hundreds of them. They were with us from start to finish, munching across the tundra, sometimes quite close. Fishing wasn’t quite as productive as it’s been on some other rivers, but we always had more than enough fish to eat, and the dramatic, brooding beauty of the basalt cliffs and canyons more than made up for it.
The boats stood up beautifully to the pounding we gave them; the patch kits worked as well as advertised. A day ahead of schedule (and in sunshine!), we ran and lined down the last ten miles of almost continuous rapids and arrived at the sea. Seals cruised offshore for migrating charr, and further out, a whale spouted. The mouth of the Kuujjua is the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. But we couldn’t linger. We packed the boats away, called for our pickup, and sat on the gravel beach in sunshine, wishing trips like this could last forever.
Willem Lange