Banks Island, NWT – Wildlife by Canoe
Joel and I just returned from the Thomsen River on Banks Island safe, sound, and quite rested. We had a magnificent trip! Tundra gray overcast, cold, windy and rainy but otherwise quite wonderful. We did a lot of great hiking, even yours truly – for whom hiking is usually a chore and not a pleasure. The tundra was generally like walking on grass, although at times there were batches of small hillocks that were about the size of a salad bowl, and you had to be careful not to roll off them and twist your ankle as you were stepping from one to the next.
However, the highlight of the trip was the unbelievable wildlife. Daily we saw several family groups of muskoxen.
We never frightened them enough to make them form the traditional circle with the adults facing outward and the calves inside because we felt we should not stress them but just observe and coexist peacefully. One morning we were awakened by clip-clopping and snorting. The muskoxen were right outside our tent d
rinking from a stream and munching about 3 feet away.
We once had foxes in our camp about 2 feet away for about 15 minutes. They were marking the territory and howling and yipping at us because we were apparently in their hunting path. I have never had animals in the wild come so close before. It was really exciting! Two of the people whom we were flown up with had a very close encounter with two wolves, who were quite curious. they came into camp when they were frying fish and stayed for about 10 minutes, long enough for Dr. Mike to pick up his camera and take a roll of film. I can’t wait to see the pictures. In a park the size of the state of Maine, there have only been 42 people in the last two years. So, it is quite possible they had never seen people before.
Oh, I forgot to tell you that we used a folding “Pac Boat”, designed and made by a friend of ours and sold by Mad River Canoe. It worked exceptionally well! It weighed only 50 pounds and folded up into a large size duffel so we could carry it on the regular airline as baggage, and inside the Twin Otter it saved space for the other canoes. After the first few days we began treating it like our Tripper, dragging it over sand bars and up on shore loaded, and amazingly there were no abrasions on the bottom that needed to be repaired. There were scratches, but nothing major. This river had no whitewater so we can’t report on that, but it handled very well in the wind – better than our Tripper, and it loved to surf. We have named it “Surfer Girl!”
I hope you have been having a relaxing and enjoyable summer…..
Bev and Joel Hollis
