Mike said: Back in 1967, a group of paddlers used big North canoes to cross Canada following the old canoe routes as a Centennial project - they ended at Expo 67 in Montreal. This has been repeated several times since, so those routes are known and may be documented on the web. I was one of the paddlers on that 1967 trip. We wore voyageur outfits, slept under the canoes and generally tried to live a voyageur life while we paddled. We carried no furs other than a pet raccon which we managed to hand off to the Montreal Zoo. Unfortunately, I was too young to drink like a voyageur, so the high wine went to other, older, guys. We had three canoes, one of which was a birchbark North canoe. It now resides, as far as I know, in the Northwest Fur Company museum in Williamstown, Ontario. We 'officially' ended the trip at Expo 67, even carrying the canoes up into the Ontario pavillion. But the real end was Williamstown where we carried the birchbark, which we called "Reluctant Rosie" because it was not the easiest thing to paddle, into the museum, never to touch the water again. It was made by First Nations people with the understanding that it would be put in a museum but, it seems, no one told them it was going to be paddled to the museum. It leaked, it had a permanent left turn and it weighed a ton after soaking up a lot of water. But we had fun. The other two canoes were fibreglas, one was a North and the other was a 35 foot Canot du Maitre made by Ralph Frese, who also captained it. Hugh McMillan was one of the organizers of, and a paddler on, the trip. He authored a book called Adventures of a Paper Sleuth which tells of his historical research. Memories. . . Jim Tibensky Our longest portage, to get back to the original topic, was nine miles! (Canada was still on the English system of measurement in those days.) So not all the Voyageur Highway portages are easy. *************************************************************************** PaddleWise Paddling Mailing List - Any opinions or suggestions expressed here are solely those of the writer(s). You must assume the entire responsibility for reliance upon them. All postings copyright the author. Submissions: PaddleWise_at_PaddleWise.net Subscriptions: PaddleWise-request_at_PaddleWise.net Website: http://www.paddlewise.net/ ***************************************************************************Received on Thu Dec 14 2006 - 05:44:55 PST
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