I met Doc Bill Forgey when we both served on the Board of Directors of the Wilderness Education Association. Bill is a wilderness medicine expert, prolific author, entrepreneur, and wonderful storyteller. He shared many stories of his cabin on the Little Beaver River in northern Manitoba. In 1989 he invited a group of us to fly into his cabin and take a week to paddle to the town of Churchill. I didn’t have to be asked a second time.
On wilderness trips there will be adventures that are impossible to anticipate. This trip was no exception. We planned two things: One was a strenuous three-mile canoe portage, and the other was being in polar bear country. We didn't, however, plan on the train and plane adventures we encountered.
We met in Winnipeg for the two-day train ride to Churchill. It travels mostly through remote portions of Manitoba which are either muskeg (a nasty mix of water and decaying vegetation) or tundra. Some might consider it boring – but not in the summer of 1989. There was a record number of forest fires – 1,147 burning over 8 million acres. (Imagine an area larger than the Adirondack Park on fire.) Riding the train was like a Disney World ride where you look out the window at a cataclysmic event, while you are safe (except for the excessive smoke). As the train slowly made its way north, we saw mile after mile of burning trees and ash-covered ground during the day, while at night we saw the flames climbing the trees. Fortunately, by the time we got to Churchill we were safe from the fires well to our south.
Churchill, a tiny, largely native, village of 899 hardy residents, is famous for being the polar bear capital of the world. Literally hundreds of polar bears spend their summers around the surrounding shores of Hudson Bay. In the winter they thrive on seals, but the summer is difficult for them to hunt, and they tend to eat whatever they can find, or they fast until they can travel out on the ice to hunt seals again.
Once we arrived in Churchill it didn’t help that we saw a person walking down the street, obviously a survivor of a polar bear attack. How could we tell? Half his face was missing.
So, if you’re traveling in the backcountry, as we were, you want to be armed – and we were. (Unfortunately, we only had one gun among the ten of us.)
The next morning, we prepared for our flight into the bush. Two people and their gear were crammed into each trip of the Cessna 185 along with a canoe strapped to one of the plane’s floats. It took all day to get the ten of us and the five canoes the 100 miles into Landing Lake. (Every lake you can land a plane on is called Landing Lake.)
Our group’s two youngest members, a couple of boys eighteen, took the first flight. The pilot had lots of experience flying but not much with canoes tied to the side. About halfway into the flight the canoe started to loosen, and as the pilot looked for a place to land, the canoe fell off and floated downward. When about a hundred feet above the river, the canoe took a nosedive. Fortunately, the plane was able to land, float up to the canoe, strap it back on and take off. What could have been a disaster ended up being a memorable adventure for two young men.
Once at Landing Lake our challenge was to haul our canoes and gear across three miles of black-fly infested muskeg, under a blazing summer sun. For those who haven’t had that pleasure let me tell you. First the bugs. I measure bugs by how many I can kill in one slap of my arm. My record at the time was twenty-six. In this instance I slapped my sweaty arm, cupped my hand to catch the dead varmints, and started counting. When I got to forty and saw still more remaining, I threw them on the ground in disgust and started dragging my canoe.
Wait, did I say ground? That’s a misnomer. There’s very little ground as we know it in muskeg country. With every step you take you sink into a foot and a half of wet morass. Now put your 75-pound canoe on your shoulders and start hiking…. for three miles.
I teamed up with fellow wilderness colleague Frank Lupton to get our canoes across the muskeg. We donned our headnets, took a compass bearing, and started dragging the canoe because dragging is a lot easier than carrying.
It was hard, sweaty, and buggy work, but once we got to the river it was all downstream from there. It was a pleasant 125-mile, one week paddle to Churchill. Pleasant, except for one thing…our concern about polar bears.
The closer we got to Churchill the more concerned. The last night of our trip, a short distance from Churchill, we debated whether to have an overnight watch for the critters. Ultimately decided that we didn’t need to.
I guess we made the right decision because no one got eaten.
The only polar bear our party encountered was the next day, when two members hiked into town to get transportation and saw one scramble into the alders.
I’m glad for that bear sighting for two reasons. One, it was two miles away from the rest of us. and two, they had our only gun.
(Learn more about Doc Forgey's cabin here: https://www.docforgeycabin.com/)