Published: Saturday, February 18, 2012, 5:21 AM
By Laurie Robinson, The Oregonian
We are standing on the shore of spruce-fringed Finlayson Lake in the Yukon watching mine workers in rubber boots tumble out of the 1957 Beaver floatplane that will carry us the next day to the headwaters of the Nahanni River, one of Canada's classic wilderness canoe routes.
Our paddle trip will take us 350 miles from lichen-softened alpine peaks through sheer yellow limestone canyons to big boreal flatlands with a few pop-up buttes, twisted-rock mountains and woodland buffalo.
A short walk away from the dock is pilot Warren LaFave's fuel depot -- a collection of rusty tanks and snaking hoses -- for the floatplane and his Hughes helicopter (one that was used in the filming of "Magnum, P.I." before he bought it used).
We are in the far north now. A vastness of pristine wilderness with pockets of gourmet fishing lodges and other pockets of no-frills gritty practicality marshaled by leather-jacketed men who want to know what jokes we bring from "the south." Meaning Portland. We are pitiful in the joke department. But we tell LaFave our worries.
"Some of us are afraid of the bears," our leader, Tyrae Mahan of Southwest Portland, tells the pilot. We are a group of friends who've been doing unguided paddling trips together for 20 years. We know each other's phobias.
"Some of us are afraid of the whitewater. Some of us are afraid of the plane ride. And some of us are afraid of the mosquitoes."
Mahan is in the "afraid of bears" camp, and the first couple of nights she streaks naked through a cold rain to her tent in the long July twilight because you're not supposed to sleep near the clothes you cook and eat in.
Me, I am in the "afraid of the plane ride" camp. Warren will be strapping our canoes to the outside of the planes, which is something I've never seen done in the U.S. but is a Canadian wilderness tradition.
"Don't worry," LaFave emailed me before the trip. "I have done this many hundreds of times."
It turns out I really should have been in the "worried about mosquitoes" camp. But don't stop reading -- it really was an utterly spectacular trip. The mosquitoes were just how we paid, in blood. Not that it was cheap in dollars.
Eight of us fly into the headwaters of the South Nahanni at Moose Ponds, and LaFave takes us in two trips, with two canoes nested into each other, per trip, strapped to the struts above the floats.
We float over hillsides thick with lichen, which lies like pale green patchy snow, pocked with short spruces that would barely qualify as trees in Oregon.
We fly for about an hour, crossing into the Northwest Territories and then LaFave lands, kicks us out and we are Out There. For three weeks.
Most of the rapids are in the first 60 miles, and some of it has been described as continuous Class 3/4. I figure the ratings are probably inflated a bit to discourage the overconfident. The guidebooks and the Parks Canada website caution us to have spray covers on our canoes, but most of us didn't invest in those.
"It's not our tradition," we tell the Canadians who ask. Our tradition is Clorox-jug bailers.
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