Lake Superior Journal: To the Extreme, Adventuring Brothers Put In on the Dog

by

“Get left! Get left! Boulder!”

My brother yells to me from the bow of our canoe.

I pry hard and am relieved when we dodge – barely – the unexpected protruding rock, but now we might miss the crucial-to-catch shore eddy on the right. Everything’s happening in split seconds.

“Cross-draw! Cross-draw!” I scream over the rush of the river.

My brother reacts with a solid sidewise-pulling stroke to maneuver the bow into the strong back current of the eddy. With the power and speed of the river, the canoe spins 180° as we broadside a 4-foot standing wave. I keep us from dumping by jockeying my paddle in a massive low brace to stabilize the canoe.

From the safety of the eddy, we look back in relief at the boulder.

It’s Day 1 of our three-day May paddle negotiating the Dog River, a tributary of Lake Superior’s wild Ontario shore west of Michipicoten. We’re still at the top of the first rapid, and we’ve already performed the most hair-raising canoe maneuver of our careers. Our crew is my brother, Ted, our dog, Merlin, and me.

Rugged and isolated, it’s a 16-mile paddle from the Paint Lake Road, where we put in, to the river mouth and Lake Superior. But to get there, you first have to contend with 60 rapids and seven waterfalls.

Time should never dictate your travel on Lake Superior, safety and the weather should.

In this stretch, the river drops 650 feet in elevation, which is considered the limit of what’s runnable in a canoe. Portaging is no cakewalk, either; there are no trails, and numerous carries are required. Additionally, water levels on the Dog are only high enough to allow for canoe travel in the spring, which adds the danger of bone-chilling water temperatures to the mix.

Because of these things, the Dog is a river best reserved for advanced paddlers with good wilderness canoe skills. Ted and I have 12 years of paddling on remote, whitewater rivers. If you’re looking for a relaxing and rejuvenating canoe trip, stay clear of this Dog. It’s the most challenging river on the Lake’s northern shore.

The river apparently was named “Nimoosh,” or “Dog” in Ojibwe. Some Canadian topographic maps label it University River, but it flows through Nimoosh Provincial Park, a non-operating, waterway-class park established in 2002 with no facilities and no fees required, so Dog is right.

Naturally Superior Adventures, an outfitter on the shore in Michipicoten, offers vehicle shuttles and rentals for those wishing to paddle the river. They can also facilitate a tugboat pick-up from the river mouth if you want to skip the coast paddle. We planned to paddle both the river and the shore.

It’s the morning of Day 2, and Ted holds his frozen wetsuit out horizontally like a board. Mine’s frozen solid, too, and we smack them against the rocks to loosen them up before putting them on. Not the most pleasurable way to start. Soon, we’re in the thick of it again. And the river is throwing stuff at me that I haven’t seen before.

Usually rivers are either high volume (think huge waves, and frothing holes), or technical (think dodging multiple boulders), but the Dog is both high volume and technical. We’re skirting truck-sized boulders while bombing over massive standing waves.

It’s actually a lot of fun, but can be terrifying. If we should dump, and lose our canoe in a rapid, there’s a good chance it would crush against a mid-river boulder or plummet over a falls. The walk out would be a long hungry march. So, in preparation, we keep basic survival tools waterproofed in fanny packs clipped around our waists.

At the end of each day, we’re exhausted and sore. We brought some whisky, thinking we’d savor a wee dram each night, but we’re too broken at day’s end to even crack the bottle.

We planned a three-day trip because that’s all the time we have. But it’s quickly apparent that five or six days would have made things more enjoyable.

Merlin isn’t as hard up as Ted and I are. Of course, he doesn’t have to paddle, and the portages are just fun walks for him. When it comes to rapids, we let Merlin out of the boat at the beginning, and he runs along shore to meet us at the end. Often, he’s there before we are, somehow knowing the next landing.

Camped on a flat rock at the river’s edge, we relax as a generous helping of juicy, delicious fiddleheads sauté in our pan over the fire. The delicacy is undoubtedly the tastiest spring wild edible, and this is my first time finding them in the wild. Lying back by the fire, Ted and I reminisce about the day. We’d covered a lot of river, but we had one upset on a small rock ledge that we didn’t scout. The dump was a little scary, though we laugh at ourselves in hindsight.

Our recollections turn sad when I bring up the large bull moose we’d seen washed up on the riverbank. Likely it’d broken through the ice in early spring.

A cold rain picks up, and we shuffle into the tent. Another look at the map reaffirms the tough day to come. We wonder aloud whether we’ll complete the trip on time. As we begin to fall asleep, the weather provides no reassurance. Rain turns to ice and drives hard against our tent.

The morning of Day 3 is not nice. We battle freezing rain, wind and cold, just to break camp. In the canoe, swift current pushes us towards Denison Falls, a spectacular 120-foot waterfall that would render us to mush should we go over it. We pulled out on the left as we approached the porthole of the falls marked by two large, rectangular rocks that jut out of the river on each bank and create an imposing a gate.

This is a dangerous spot if you aren’t keeping a close eye on your map. The water visible down stream from the gate appears deceivingly calm, but if you were to venture into it, there’s no turning back.

The portage around the falls is treacherous, but at least there’s somewhat of a trail here. The freezing rain picks up again, and the rocks are slippery. We portage with our life jackets on in case we slip off and tumble into the falls. The portage is a long one. We stop for quick breaks at many breathtaking vantage points along the trail. The trickiest part is at the very end. The put-in is a sheer cliff, and we have to lower our canoe, gear and Merlin down on ropes.

Finally, after three hours of portaging, we’re back in the canoe and an easy paddle brings us to Lake Superior. Our faces sting when we leave the river’s mouth, and turn east to take the icy wind and freezing rain head on. We put our heads down and paddle hard.

There’s no time for breaks, other than a quick refuel with crackers and peanut butter.

We’re a couple hours into the coastal paddle on Lake Superior from the river mouth to Michipicoten. Safety is our first concern. We’re cold, and paddling hard isn’t warming us. We have a ways to go, and the evening is rapidly disappearing. We weigh no-showing for work in favor of stopping to make camp. Time should never dictate your travel on Lake Superior, safety and the weather should.

Foolishly though, we push on.

It’s almost dark when we reach Perkawakwia Point, and the swells are large. We have to make a final 4- mile push to reach our truck at Naturally Superior Adventures, but looking across a large bay at dusk, we don’t know which is the most direct route. Sticking to the shore will add miles.

I break out the map and compass as Ted braces. I manage to set a bearing before the rain soaks the map, and we go for it straight across the water.

The waves grow in size. We turn to head for the safety of shore. It’s dark when we pull up on the beach, ending up just about 1,000 yards west of Naturally Superior. We’d paddled 18 miles in 3.5 hours after completing the last big portage. We’re freezing cold and exhausted.

The last 1,000 yards of paddling seems daunting. Invisible pins and needles prick inside my arms. Ted is shivering; he needs to get warm.

Luckily, we’re back in civilization. A fellow named Stan and his wife, who see us from their house on the beach where we landed, come down and invite us to come in. They’re impressed with what we’ve accomplished.

“The Dog is no picnic,” Stan says, and then tells us about the guy who’d died on the river a couple years prior. Sobering information.

Stan offers us a ride to our truck at Naturally Superior Adventures. He’s a little surprised when we gratefully accept, considering how close we are, but we’ve got nothing to prove at this point. Ted and Stan go to get our truck, and I haul our outfit up the hill.

When Ted comes back with the truck, I insist he stays inside with the heater blasting. I wrangle the canoe up on the roof.

When I finally climb in beside him, it’s like a sauna in there, but Ted’s still shivering. He’d caught a chill, the early signs of hypothermia.

We fight exhaustion as we drive to Sault Ste. Marie.

“Gggood trip,” Ted chatters, just warming up at last. With a laugh, I agree.

Yup, Lake Superior in spring is the perfect warm-up for our monthlong Arctic canoe trip later in the summer.

This issue’s Journal writer: Jim Baird is a freelance adventurer, writer and videographer living in Magnetawan, Ontario. Jim tells us he was the first on record to complete a self-propelled trek across the Peninsule d’Ungava of northern Quebec in winter – a 230-mile Arctic journey done with only his dog Buck. He, with his brother, won Season Four of the History Channel’s self-shot survival series “Alone,” on northern Vancouver Island for 75 days.