Vignettes borne from the Barrenlands

Thoughts gathered on the Hood River, July 2025

Words and photos by Sean Pederson

The Barrenlands. Drab. Lifeless. Or so early European explorers like Franklin claimed. 

But Farley Mowat, in People of the Deer, saw through the illusion. To the untrained eye, this treeless expanse seems empty—but it’s not barren. It’s overwhelming. The land is a flood of beauty too vast to absorb, where “we only see the barrenness that follows when beauty flows too thinly into the sponge of an illimitable space.” 

I felt that paradox firsthand on our 33-day, 450km canoe expedition—from the vast lakes west of the Hood River, down its icy rapids, all the way to the Arctic Ocean. The Hood demands advanced whitewater skills, resilience in a frigid climate, and the mental grit to endure hoards of insects and deep isolation. It’s not for novices—and it pushed all of us to our limits.  

Each day was a battle, a revelation, and a chance to grow. But trying to capture the full scope of such a journey in a traditional trip report feels futile—like a European settler trying to appreciate the Barrenlands in a single glance. So, I’ve taken Mowat’s advice: zoom in. Focus on the moments that matter. What follows is drawn from my daily journal—snapshots of struggle, awe, and discovery.

Entry 1: An Arctic Roanoke
June 29. Ontario is wilting.  Lawns are curling, and campers sweat in the evening around propane firepits. In the boreal, tongues of flame lick the bottom of a smoky sky. But this is the Arctic, not Ontario and our bush plane leaves in two days.  A week later, snow would be falling on us in soft fat flakes.  

But for now, myself, Robert James, Cathie Lappan, Lutz Morgenstern, Jean Claude Lessnick (JC), and Paul Hoy hover over a satellite image of Lake Napaktulik, a massive lake 150kms west of the Hood. Ice still clings to its surface. If it doesn’t clear our plane can’t land.  But by morning, the ice is pulling back. A quick call to Air Tindi confirms: “It’s All Good in the Hood!” I exclaim —an old grunge-era mantra returns with ironic cheer. I’d repeat it often on the Hood River, especially when things got hairy, or after dumping my canoe.  It was said more than once.

As the plane makes its final approach, Lutz’s surprise that he had kept from us for six months reveals itself: a small cabin perched on a hill, clad in white, ridged aluminum. 

The land is littered with caribou bones—skulls, femurs, tufts of fur. This is a hunt camp. A rickety one. The door never quite closes. The outhouse door is torn off by a grizzly.  But it has four walls and a roof, and we stay here longer than we should have, reluctant to let go of the last comforts of civilization.  But we can’t just sit around and drink whiskey all day.

The Barrenlands stretch out, dominated by eskers—serpentine ridges, the remnant deposits of ancient riverbeds running beneath the ice sheets that once smothered North America 15,000 years ago. 

We decide to hike the tallest. After a short paddle, we reach a river mouth, snowmelt still trickling from its crown. Disembarking, the vista unfurls endlessly. The eye struggles to grasp the scale.  

Pause. Look.  Zoom in.  My periphery fades like a vignetted photo. The vastness comes close.  

I stand in a meadow stitched with caribou trails that weave history through the hummocks.  Caribou bones hide behind rocks; time has pressed them into the spongey ground. So many trails. So many bones.  To the left: the lake. Ahead: a towering esker. Right: a smaller ridge, its spine conspicuously dotted with boulders. Behind: the river where we landed. 

Then it clicks. If that is the hunt camp, this is the killing ground.  

The valley is boxed in—river, eskers, lake. A trap. The Inuit drove caribou into this bowl, where escape was impossible. 

The conspicuous boulders on the esker ridge were once topped with moss, mimicking human hair in the wind, spooking the herd back into the valley. From behind these boulders come the hunters—silent, swift. Blood warms the icy hummock.

How many generations hunted here? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands?  Stone markers protrude from the land, guiding both Inuit and caribou. This place remembers.  I once wanted to be an archaeologist.  I’m absolutely exhilarated to feel more closely the land and its people, thrilled, and grateful for the experience.  

Later, on the final portage of the big lakes, we find more traces of Inuit culture: a firepit with a thick stone base to keep the precious birch twigs dry from the sopping bog of the hummock. A stream runs beside it. Fresh water. Black flies swarm in biblical numbers. 

Breathing makes me cough, clearing their carcasses from my throat and nose.  My hoodie is speckled with the blood of their work. Tomorrow, my face will swell grotesquely from their stealthy assault beneath my beard.  To my right, a modest esker catches just enough breeze to drive the bugs away. That’s where they slept, I bet.

Of course they were here. This portage was essential for them—just as it is for us. The Hood River was their lifeline, where caribou crossed predictably each year. The Inuit followed, hunted, cached food for future journeys across the frozen hummock. We locate one large well-documented food-cache upriver, and discover several smaller, hidden ones tucked out of sight.  We are careful not to take note of their exact locations, to leave them undisturbed as long as possible.  These likely have been used for millennia.

After contact, the hunt changed, and so did the people.  Europe craved pelts.  Caribou gave way to arctic fox. The Inuit become dependent on European goods.  Disease followed. The People of the Deer—once resilient, thriving in this brutal land—are undone.  Surviving for more than 10,000 years on this land, they disappear in a handful of decades.

Farley Mowat observed their collapse in 1947. Not ancient history. Recent.  In my father’s time.  Zoom in a little more.  And the exhilaration I once felt every time I discovered a cultural site now gave way to sorrow. 

The silence here isn’t peace—it’s absence.  Artifacts hastily abandoned in place.  Like an Arctic Roanoke.  The people had vanished, suddenly and without reason.  Not that kind of reason.  We do know why.  Just…without justification.

ENTRY 2: From Snow to Saxifrage
Time is funny up there.  It is not constant, but fluid, ever changing.  It can seem long, it can seem short, and often you can’t tell time at all.  

Everyone talks about the midnight sun in the north.  And it’s true.  I can read my book at 3am.  But nobody tells you what that means.  The sun creeps along the horizon all night, dipping in and out of the eskers that form the horizon…it sets 6 hours straight, bathing the land in colour.  Time stretches.  

But the seasons are short in the Arctic, and the wildflowers beautiful. Astonishingly short, and astonishingly beautiful. 

In 33 days, I saw a nearly full cycle of the seasons.  Remembering Farley’s wisdom, I pried my gaze from the limitless expanse of the horizon and instead looked at the small things of beauty I had been carelessly trampling beneath my feet, unnoticed at first.  

Life here is explosive, but precious: dwarfed, and fleeting.  

The restless Caribou know this.  To stay in any place too long, and they would strip the land of its resources and starve.  In a land where seasons change by the week, there isn’t much time before the snow will once again cover the willow.  

When we landed on July 1, winter was just releasing its grip. A 4-foot-deep mantle of snow still covered not only part of the beach, but also the rusted fuel drums that revealed themselves over the next few days as the sun did its work.  

But the hummock was already blooming with brilliant spring flowers, all small, all delicate, incredibly diverse, spotting every meadow with brilliant hues. The purple lupine’s head, the tallest of the bunch, heavy with bloom, bent the stem that supported it.  A numberless host of creamy white dryads, beside the lake where there are no trees, fluttered and danced in the Arctic breeze.  The subtle beauty of the saxifrage reveals itself only if you press your face close to its blooms: tiny orange dots grace each creamy petal, contrasted by the vivid hues of the tightly bunched vegetation that roots it to the ground.  

But the seasons move quickly in the Arctic. 

Within a week or two, most of the initial flowers I saw were dying and another set began to appear. Different flowers, still delicate and small, but less numerous and less diverse than the first batch. 3 weeks in and these began to die too, and some of the miniature plants, the crowberry and the base of the three-toothed saxifrage, began to turn a brilliant red, signaling the coming of fall.  And, on August 1, only one month after the snow and ice had melted from the beach, as we rounded a corner in our last push where the Hood River meets the Arctic Ocean, we felt a slow but constant huff of piercing frigid air pushing against the fronts of our canoes and our faces, and I knew, in another month, the land would be frozen once again. 

It was a reminder on the fragility of life and time, fleeting and delicate, but also, like the ancient but dwarfed cedars that cling to the rocky cliffs of the Niagara escarpment, their roots probing the cracks to find the smallest bits of soil to feed them, that the obstinate and eternal pulse of life finds a way, despite the land’s efforts to snuff it out, given enough time.  

ENTRY 3:  The Champagne Grizzly

Before the trip, I fantasized about the wildlife I might encounter. I knew I’d see caribou, but the great herds that covered the land were sadly gone—down two-thirds over the past fifteen years. I desperately hoped for a muskox, a shaggy relic of the Ice Age. But one image kept flashing through my mind, stubborn and electric: a charging grizzly.

I knew it was unlikely. But part of me wanted it—under the right conditions. I even promised myself: if it happened, I’d get a tattoo to mark the moment.

One rare sunny morning, early in the trip, we paddled lazily across glassy water. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught movement. Small. Yellow?

What animal out here is yellow?

I signaled my canoe partner and switched to a silent stroke. The yellow blur rolled over boulders, sniffing for bugs and rodents. A blonde grizzly. Gorgeous. Powerful.  The wind was in our favor—he hadn’t noticed us.

We watched for ten minutes. I kept the canoe steady while my bowman snapped photos like a machine gun. I nudged us upstream, just enough for the wind to carry our scent.

The bear froze. Nose in the air. Eyes locked on us—and they never left.

Given how remote we were, I doubted he’d ever seen a human, let alone one floating in a canoe. He descended the hill slowly, deliberately, hump bristling. At the shore, he reared up and crashed into the river, water exploding around his elbows, eyes still locked on mine.

Grizzlies rarely attack from the water. Off balance, their power is diminished—and they know it. I let him perform his bluff. Then I dipped my paddle and eased us away.

With that, he settled back on his haunches, watching us go. Calm and proud that he had chased the intruders away.  

To lock eyes with a wild animal like that—to read each other’s body language, to feel that electric moment of mutual recognition—is unforgettable. A quiet standoff. A curiosity. A deep acknowledgment of the existence of the other.

It was beautiful. Humbling. And absolutely thrilling.  Even if I don’t get the tattoo, that experienced is etched on me forever.

ENTRY 4:  We planned for rest. The river had other plans.
Fifty percent rest days—that was the plan. Time to soak in the land, breathe it in. But once we left the hunt camp, the river took control. It chewed us up, spat us out, and gave us one rest day. One. We planned for sixteen.

By day 18, we finally cleared the big lakes west of the Hood River. We were way behind. Those lakes and their brutal portages wrecked us. Day 10 brought a two-day monster of a portage—our baptism into a fen-sucking hell. Every step sank into the icy bog, calves numbed, knees forced high to step on the hummock that only sank our feet once more into its icy depths.

Then came the gut punch. One of our team, battling health issues, told us he had to leave. A bushplane had just dropped off a group of guides, and with the weather turning, he knew the plane would return.

“Sean, can you do the rest of the trip solo?”

I was stunned. He was my canoemate—strong, thoughtful, philosophical. We understood each other immediately, switching sides and syncing strokes without a word. We had the rare rhythm of great canoe partners: banter in calm waters, silence in chaos. Most importantly, he laughed at my jokes, especially when I’d shout “Time to warm the cockles!” and pull out my secret weapon against wind … whiskey. And the wind blew often.

His absence hit hard. But the portages kept coming, each one stealing another rest day. The lakes were massive, and so was the weather. I didn’t relish paddling solo through that, but I did it. It took another week to cross them—longer than expected—even with my canoe tethered to Rob and JC’s in the worst of it.

I’d only recently learned to tame my 16-foot tandem in whitewater, and now I was itching to test myself solo. I quickly earned a reputation: big balls and no brain.  The guy who shoots every rapid, often without scouting. “Well, that’s what we’re here to do, isn’t it?” I’d say, grinning, every time someone gave me that look that said I was doing something stupid.

Most of the early rapids were boulder gardens—dry, technical puzzles linking the big lakes. It took days before we hit anything with real water. One rapid ran right past our campsite, split by a rocky island. River left held a narrow tongue, just wide enough for a canoe. If you hit it clean, it would spit you out safely. River right, A frothing mess of rocks ending in a four-foot ledge. No exit. No forgiveness.

I paddled up, debating whether to line it. The current decided for me—grabbed my bow and pulled me in. I shot through, laughing and waving at the team on shore, humbled by how quickly the river made choices for me.

Rob and JC gave it a go next, JC in the stern, Rob in the bow. From shore, it must’ve looked easy. It wasn’t. The current was stronger than they realized.  They missed the tongue and went river right.  This isn’t good.  They slammed the canoe sideways onto a boulder—hull pressed tight against the rock, the open end catching the full force of the rapid’s 1,500 pounds of pressure. Miraculously, it didn’t wrap.

Rob and Cathie had just taken the Boreal River rescue course. After two hours of changing rope angles, knots, and Z-drag improvisation, we freed the canoe under Rob’s guidance. On its side was written its name: “Desi.” From then on, we called it “Dent-y.”

A few days later, in another boulder garden, Dent-y got pinned again. JC was tossed and had to be rescued from shore. Rob freed the canoe and grabbed the painter, but the river tore it from his hands. Dent-y shot through a dog-leg rapid and vanished. Rob was stranded mid-river, wearing only dry bottoms. The water was Arctic cold, and he was too far from shore to throw a line. Thankfully, the sun was out.

He had two options: swim through gnarly whitewater to us on river left with a safety line, or swim to river right — closer, but unassisted. He chose the latter. Midway, his foot got trapped. I jumped into action, risking my own canoe to reach him. He freed himself just before I hit the rapid and nearly pinned mine too.

Now Rob and JC were canoe-less. The rest of the day was spent paddling and hiking, trying to recover Dent-y and their gear.

Between portages and mishaps, the rest days vanished. Eventually, the group—perhaps unwisely—agreed that the solo paddler without a spray skirt and a taste for “stupid things” should take point through all the rapids.

Soon, the rock gardens stopped and the rapids became full-day gauntlets—six hours of nonstop whitewater. Scouting wasn’t just impractical. It was impossible. We were behind schedule, and the river didn’t pause.

I learned to read the river it in real time—tongue to tongue, trusting the current to guide me. No hesitation. No second chances. Just movement.

Weeks of solo paddling had split the skin beneath my calluses. Cracks opened at the nail beds, then everywhere else. My right index finger ballooned, red and infected. I worried I’d lose the nail—or worse, get pulled from the trip. Somehow, I didn’t.

As the rapids grew, so did my confidence—though not without carnage. I held the record: two pins, two full-on swims, one without a dry suit. I’d adapted to the biting insects, crushed the portages, but the true test came at Kattimannap Qurlua, or Wilberforce Falls—the tallest waterfall north of the Arctic Circle.

Those falls had gouged a four-kilometer-long canyon out of the land. The cliffs—crumbling, deep orange red—rose 250 feet above turquoise chaos, mist billowing from the plunge. Few have seen it. Fewer have run it. 

From the top, it’s impossible to scout. Willow and birch hang over the edge, tricking you into thinking there’s ground beneath your feet. There isn’t. So, you can’t see into the canyon to scout the rapids.  Even when you can see down—everything looks runnable from 250 feet up. 

I knew I’d never be here again. So, I committed.

A leap of faith—or more accurately, a slide of faith. I lowered my 90-pound canoe down the only section of cliff that wasn’t sheer vertical, clinging to the rope… most of the time. The final 60 feet turned into a freefall. The canoe dragged me down the steepest pitch, rocks tumbling down the slope, and I had to let go. It rocketed ahead, launched into the air, and landed upside down in the river.

“No, no, no!”  My lifejacket. My paddle. Gone?

Miraculously, the canoe was caught in an eddy, its contents bobbing safely in the air pocket beneath the hull. I do dumb things. But this was the dumbest. And there was no hauling it back up. From the bottom, those cliffs looked twice as high.

For the first time on the trip, I was truly nervous. Alone in the canyon, invisible to the team. If I got hurt, pinned, or wrapped—no rescue. Just me and the river.

Rapid one: I misread the tongue, dropped into a frothy hole. It thrashed me, then let me go. Not pretty, but I was alive.

Rapid two: clean.

Rapid three: chaos.

It started smooth, feeding into an eddy where I planned to regroup before threading past a long ledge and down a vicious tongue aimed straight at a boulder the size of a house. Water exploded at its base, spraying skyward. If I missed the eddy, I’d slam into it.

I aimed. My bow slipped past the line. Relief—until the stern was yanked by an invisible hand. The current was stronger than any rapid I’d ever felt. I paddled like hell, trying to claw into the eddy, but the river had me. I was drifting backwards into the rapid.

Grunting, straining, I paddled upstream to slow the descent. On my left, the ledge loomed. I fought to keep the canoe from sideslipping over it—and somehow, that was the right move. Facing upstream, I slid into the tongue and paddled like mad, slowing my descent.  I slipped past the boulder, slow and steady, my panicked animal sounds betraying the grace of the maneuver.

I did it.  “It’s all good in the Hood!”

I bailed out the water—no spray skirt—and rode the rest clean. But I was rattled. Humbled. The canyon spilled out right at our camp. As I emerged, heart pounding, eyes wide, thankful, there was JC, calmly fishing.

“Catch anything?” I asked, trying to sound casual.

“Nuddin’ yet,” he replied in his French accent, flicking the line back into the water—unaware of the madness I’d just survived.

This run was mine alone. So was the triumph.  Bah.  To hell with the rest days.

Epilogue

Whenever people ask me about the trip down the Hood River I don’t know where to start.  I couldn’t possibly sit someone down and tell them the whole story. 33 days of constant adversity and adventure:  there’s just too much to distill into a single sitting.  The best I can do is tell them one or two little stories at a time.  And even then, which ones do I tell?  There are so many.  I’m not sure if I’ve told the right ones here either, to give a true sense of what it was like.  I feel like I haven’t.  The meaning of the experience eludes me.  Over time, over beers, over many sittings, the whole story will eventually come out.  But for now, it is still too big for me to distill into a single sitting.  In part, that’s because a lot of the things I want to talk about occurred not outside in the barrens or on the river, but inside, and I still haven’t been able to understand what those changes mean.  It’s just too much to take in.  The entire experience is like the land itself…too vast to be knowable.  For now, I’ll have to tell my story in little bits and pieces, to zoom in, like Farley, on the details, so that maybe one day I can make sense of the whole.