Day 9. Last night we camped at the Gate, a much-photographed landmark in the Northwest Territories’ spectacular Nahanni National Park Reserve. It is here that the Nahanni River narrows to a sharp hairpin turn guarded by picturesque Pulpit Rock, a rocky promontory which is itself dwarfed by the 500-metre-high walls on either side of the river’s Third Canyon. Picturesque and much-photographed on most days, perhaps. But not today.
This morning the famous scenery is obscured by equal measures of rain and worry. Our party of ten paddlers – eight paying guests and two guides in five sturdy 17-foot expedition canoes – is huddled on the shore amidst a furious downpour. Yesterday we’d been warned by park wardens to expect nearly 8 inches of rain over the next 72 hours. Last night our guide learned via sat phone that the river is now closed to new visitors. Later we’d find out the wardens themselves were evacuated by plane because of the storm.
The Nahanni is prone to flash floods due to its distinctive topography. The sheer walls of its four towering canyons – in places reaching nearly a kilometre high – funnel rainfall directly into the river with immediate results. The beach where we’d landed our canoes last night has vanished. As we eat breakfast a distinctive squarish white rock across the river our guide calls Megatron, after the Transformers cartoon character, gradually disappears from view. In our time at the Gate, the Nahanni rises over five feet and its flow more than doubles.
Beyond threatening our usable foot space, the flood has also turned the river into a thoroughfare for forest debris. A convoy of once-stranded driftwood lifted from riverbanks and live trees ripped from shores is careening past like some ghostly migration of silent wooden beasts. Added to this unsettling vision is the sound of occasional cracks of rock and, a few seconds later, cannonading splashes. The driving rain is prying chunks from the canyon ridge above Pulpit Rock and dropping them into the river below.
Driftwood express: During a flash flood in late June, the Nahanni rose five feet and quickly filled with logs and live trees ripped from the shoreline. Click on the image to view a time-lapse view of the flood in action; the white Megatron rock is at the waterline on the far shore in the centre of the frame. (Source of video: Ian Todd)
As our guides confer out of earshot, the general consensus among the fee-paying customers is that we’ll soon be unpacking our canoes and setting up our tents again to wait out the storm. Head guide Margaret Fahey returns to explain the day’s plan. “We’re going,” she says, with steely resolve. The risk of our campsite disappearing underfoot apparently outweighs the risks waiting for us on the river.
Yet the current is too strong to simply put in from our campsite. Instead, we must wade into the fast-moving river and drag our canoes upstream, kicking logs and other debris out of the way as we go, to a small eddy where we can assemble in reasonable order for a mad dash to the other side. We will ferry across the river. That is, paddle at a slight angle against the current so that by the time we make it (hopefully) to the other side, the relentless flow will have pushed us around in the proper direction. This should allow us to gain the inside corner for the turn at the Gate.
Our goal is to avoid being tossed into the standing waves in front of the cliff face beside Pulpit Rock on the outside of the turn. But even so, the ideal line isn’t clear. As Fahey notes, it is impossible to see around the hairpin from where we stand. This means she can’t tell if Pillow Rock, a typically reliable feature on the Gate’s far side, is still visible or has also been submerged by the flood and thus poses an additional, unseen hazard. “As soon as you get into the current, you’ll be moving fast. Keep paddling and stay together,” Fahey advises. She puts in first and quickly disappears around the corner, yelling some final piece of advice that’s obscured by the storm.
‘It is not the biggest river in Canada. It is not the most challenging, dangerous or wildest either,’ says author and canoeing enthusiast David Finch in an interview. ‘But the Nahanni is certainly the most famous.’
Helmets and PFDs on. Watertight paddling suits cinched tight. Spray-deck taut over our canoe. Ian, my canoeing partner, and I backpaddle quietly in the eddy waiting our turn to leap into the current and make for the other side. Arrayed against us: the rain, a flood-swollen river, a floating convoy of wooden flotsam, a crumbling ridgeline and whatever other unseen obstacles and surprises lurk around the corner.
Is my bucket list about to do me in?
The Holy Grail of Wild Rivers
In a country full of wild lands, the Nahanni – technically the South Nahanni River to distinguish it from the nearby North and Little Nahanni rivers – is arguably Canada’s best-known wilderness river. It is undoubtedly the river with the most effective marketing department. “It is not the biggest river in Canada. It is not the most challenging, dangerous or wildest either,” says author and canoeing enthusiast David Finch in an interview. “But the Nahanni is certainly the most famous. It has a very, very big reputation. Within the outdoor community, and Canadian paddlers in particular, it is considered the Holy Grail of rivers. You simply have to do it at some point.” Finch, a veteran of seven trips down the river, is resident historian for the guiding company Nahanni River Adventures.
Nearly the entire Nahanni watershed is encompassed by the Nahanni and Nááts’įhch’oh national park reserves, which comprise 35,000 square km in the remote southwestern corner of the Northwest Territories near the Yukon border. For those who like to keep score by landmass, the two parks together are equivalent in size to Taiwan. The Nahanni River itself has been protected within a national park since 1976; in 2009 Stephen Harper’s Conservative government expanded the park sixfold to its current size and scope. The raw beauty and uniqueness of the area caused it to be among the first places selected as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1978, when it was inducted alongside the Galapagos Islands and Wyoming’s Yellowstone National Park.
Unlike most other parts of Canada, which experienced repeated and prolonged glaciation, the Nahanni Valley was largely spared glacier activity over the past several hundred thousand years. Because of this, the river is preserved in a much older state than the mountains surrounding, which results in numerous geological rarities. According to the UNESCO designation, “The South Nahanni River is one of the most spectacular wild rivers in North America, with deep canyons, huge waterfalls, and spectacular karst terrain, cave systems and hot springs. Exposure of geologic and geomorphologic features includes the meanders of ancient rivers, now raised high above present river levels.”
Such physical diversity is a big part of the appeal, observes Wendy Grater, past-owner of Black Feather Outfitters, another Nahanni guiding company. “What is unique about the river is that there’s something different to look forward to almost every day,” she says, noting that a visiting adventurer can hike a mountain, see bald eagles or moose, soak in a hot spring, peek into old cabins or visit rare rock formations as they paddle its length. “That variety is quite unusual for a wild river experience.”
The park’s centrepiece, both geographically and metaphorically, is Virginia Falls. With a 96-metre drop, it is nearly twice the height of Niagara Falls and divides the river into two distinct parts. Above the falls the Nahanni offers paddlers a peaceful ramble on gently flowing water amidst rolling hills with the statuesque Mackenzie Mountains off in the distance. The water here tends to a placid avocado green.
The Grand Canyon sees about 5 million visitors a year. The Nahanni welcomes 1,000 to 1,500 annually…Its reputation far exceeds the number of people who actually see it for themselves.
Below the falls the river picks up pace and the water becomes darker and more foreboding as it narrows to pass through four numbered canyons. These towering walls of limestone, shale and sandstone display the many faults, folds and layers of their creation like an ancient library of the past. Numerous thread-like waterfalls spill from high upon cliffs, bouncing and dividing into multiple pathways as they make their way to water’s edge. The route through the canyons is widely considered one of Canada’s most beautiful places.
Who Goes There?
In a search for superlatives, it is common to refer to the Nahanni as Canada’s Grand Canyon. Such a characterization may be apt from a physical standpoint, but the comparison falters in other areas. Notably, the Grand Canyon sees about 5 million visitors a year. The Nahanni welcomes 1,000 to 1,500 annually. Of these, about a third are day-trippers who fly in from Yellowknife to visit the falls for a few hours. Last year a mere 795 paddlers and raft trippers made their way down the river to see the canyons, while a few dozen climbers tested themselves on the granite peaks of the Cirque of the Unclimbables, one of the world’s toughest and most remote cliff faces, located near the headwaters. The Nahanni’s reputation far exceeds the number of people who actually see it for themselves.
This limited access is partly by design. Only three outfitters are licensed by Parks Canada to offer trips on the river, including Nahanni River Adventures and Black Feather, and they are capped at 15 total participants per trip. Some campsites have a two-night maximum and other desirable locations, such as Kraus Hot Springs near First Canyon, are off-limits entirely to camping. To discourage stays at another popular site, Parks Canada imposes a requirement that all human waste must be packed out.
Another limiting factor is the price of admission. A two-week guided trip costs nearly $9,000, not including getting to and from the staging point in Fort Simpson, NWT (from Toronto, add another $2,000 including layovers in Yellowknife), renting a paddling suit and other expenses. “It has the reputation of a rich person’s river,” quips Finch. And while no self-respecting journalist considers themselves rich, I will admit to indulging in a lifelong dream with an old university friend.
Before I left on the trip, I joked to friends that based on the cost, all my fellow paddlers were likely to be doctors and lawyers. Of the eight paying guests, three are lawyers and four are parents of med school students. There are also three MAs in economics, including Ian and myself. Most of us are in our late 50s or 60s, although a mother with her daughter and father with his son bring down the average considerably. Grater acknowledges the typical Nahanni guest is “a reasonably affluent professional with an inquisitive mind.” Plus, she adds, “There are very few trips that don’t include at least one physician or lawyer.”
The Nahanni’s popularity among the bucket-list set of aging urban adventurers has other serious canoeists turning up their noses at the experience. “It is a very busy river that is easy to access,” sniffs James Raffan, author of numerous books on canoeing and traversing Canada’s north; in 2020 Canadian Geographic magazine named him one of “Canada’s 90 Greatest Explorers.” While Raffan acknowledges the Nahanni’s beauty and grandeur – “the geography and topography are so incredibly impressive” – those few hundred paddlers a year are enough to keep him well away. Raffan, who works as an onboard expert for Adventure Canada, a tourism company that offers small-ship cruises of the Canadian Arctic, says he prefers “more remote rivers where the reward is an absence of traffic. The chance that you might meet someone [on the Nahanni] is a feature of the river I choose to avoid.”
The Nahanni’s big brand name may even be playing a role in the declining popularity of other wilderness canoe trips. Raffan recently wrote about how Barrenlands rivers such as the Thelon, Coppermine and Dubawnt, which are much farther north in the tundra and hence more difficult to access, have become “forgotten” among current outfitters and trippers. The reason, he suspects, is a lack of commitment to arduous canoeing experiences among Gen Xers and Millennials, while once-adventuresome Baby Boomers are simply aging out. Yet amid this generational collapse, the Nahanni still retains its cachet as “the proverbial marquee bucket list item” among the well-heeled lawyers, doctors and economists who appear to keep the entire northern canoe outfitting business afloat.
Grater, who continues to guide for Black Feather since selling her stake in the firm last year, readily admits the Nahanni’s outsized reputation means it stands atop all other destination rivers in Canada. “It is the single biggest draw for what we do and, I suspect, the other outfitting companies will tell you the same thing,” she says. Often Black Feather clients begin by doing smaller, less-intimidating outings elsewhere with the goal of working their way up to the Nahanni as a capstone achievement. Says Grater, “It is our flagship. We see a lot of celebrations on our trips on the river.”
On the Water
Raffan’s complaint that the Nahanni is “easy to access” must be considered a relative notion. There are no roads into the river; outfitters and adventurous independent paddlers must instead rely on a small but well-established transportation infrastructure of Indigenous and non-Indigenous entrepreneurs to access the area. Our party of ten people and five canoes arrive at Rabbitkettle Lake, 120 km upstream of Virginia Falls, by Twin Otter float plane from Fort Simpson in two loads: three canoes plus half the gear and passengers stuffed inside on the first trip, the remainder on the second. Also along for the ride is a swarm of “bulldogs,” the local nickname for an enormous northern variant of horsefly. After takeoff, these pests congregate on the cockpit’s windshield, a welcome relief for the passengers but an obvious distraction for the pilot. The low-tech solution is a short piece of garden hose wielded by the co-pilot to spirit the pesky bugs out an open window through a vacuum effect.
In four days of leisurely paddling above the falls, we camp mostly on gravel bars and enjoy the wide-open river valley scenery. The kitchen on our trip comprises a pair of upturned canoes crossed to form a two-level counter; all the food is cooked over a driftwood fire, in ample supply and surprisingly good. Guiding companies seem eager to exceed the expectations of their guests at meal time. A choice of red and white wine and several jars of Bick’s pickles are among the least-expected offerings. (Both also prove weighty additions to the food barrels we haul at least twice a day when making and breaking camp.)
Head guide Fahey of Black Feather oversees the entire operation – the regular routines as well as the crises – with a quiet rigour. This is her 20th trip down the Nahanni and her ample experience is belied by her youthful 33 years. Perhaps in explanation of her career choice, one evening she recites Robert Service’s poem “The Men That Don’t Fit In”:
They range the field, they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;
Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.
Despite claims the park is overrun with tourists, we won’t see another person on the water until we’re nearly out of the park. Prior to that encounter, Virginia Falls offers the most convincing evidence that civilization still exists. This Parks Canada site boasts several float plane docks and bear caches, a boardwalk, warden station, presentation area and outhouses. An inspired, artistic touch is the presence of two red Muskoka chairs high on a hill overlooking the falls, creating a unique photo opportunity from afar and up close. Disappointingly, it appears impossible to leave Canada’s fraught identity politics entirely behind, even this deep in the wilderness. The Canadian flag at Virginia Falls is at half-mast and has been since May 2021, “because of the discovery of all the dead children,” a warden unhelpfully and incorrectly informs us.
Traversing the falls requires several trips up and down a 1.3-kilometre portage trail to a steep cliff path. It is a trek that becomes increasingly difficult with the onset of the rainstorm that will reach its peak when we arrive at the Gate in two days. As we prepare for the second half of our journey, we don paddling suits for the first time. Spray-decks that cover our canoes are also necessary to avoid being swamped in the long stretches of whitewater that await us, including the aptly-named Tricky Currents Rapids. Here one canoe in our party will capsize in a whirlpool, necessitating a rescue. This is not an unusual experience. Finch has a similar anecdote to tell involving another close call at the same spot also involving a father/son canoeing tandem.
Back to the Gate
At the Gate amid the clamour and chaos of the storm, there is much to think about as Ian and I, in the stern and bow respectively, prepare to ferry across the river. Hydrometric data from the time we are there show a peak every bit as spectacular as the Nahanni’s famous canyon walls. From the start of the flood on June 30, the river’s discharge rate rises from less than 450 m³/second to over 1,100 m³/s as the water level surges in similar fashion over the next three days. The river’s surface is glassy and taut despite moving at a spritely 13 km per hour, which is quite a bit faster than most people can run a 5 km race.
In his 1975 book Nahanni, local river guide Dick Turner made a point of emphasizing that ‘in high water [George’s] Riffle is spelled with a capital R.’ Sometimes it deserves ALL CAPS.
Paddling hard, Ian and I lean into the current and, as instructed, reach the other side to gain the inside corner opposite Pulpit Rock. A bit too successfully it turns out, as our vigorous paddling sees us momentarily pointing backwards while rounding the turn. The situation is soon corrected as we pass rapidly through the opening. (Good work, Ian!) The rest of our party negotiates the various obstacles in similar fashion, although two lawyers from Vancouver miss the turn and must fight their way through the choppy water in front of Pulpit Rock after drifting off-line. Pillow Rock is still visible on the backside.
The next major whitewater comes a day later at George’s Riffle, a well-known obstacle in First Canyon. In his 1975 book Nahanni, local river guide Dick Turner made a point of emphasizing that “in high water the Riffle is spelled with a capital R.” And sometimes it deserves ALL CAPS. Here is Turner’s recollection of his experience with George’s Riffle in the 1930s: “The water was black, the foam was grey and it looked like a boiling mass of trees and logs going through that they could hear the slamming into the cutwall at the foot of the Riffle.” Backwoods grammar aside, it’s a fair approximation of the Nahanni circa July 2023.
With the four other canoes lined up behind her “ducky style,” we follow Fahey into the Riffle. A complication soon arises. What is usually a dry channel connecting an island above the rapids to shore has now flooded as well, creating a new and unstable current on the island’s backside that produces a worrisome boil – a circular whitewater feature caused by too much water being forced to the surface too quickly – to the left of the usual standing waves. The normal route down the left side at George’s Riffle is no longer an option.
The crash of water is deafening as the standing waves’ rooster tails throw ribbons of spray several feet in the air, giving the whole scene the look of a watery Dante’s Inferno. “Keep paddling!” is our guides’ best advice. Recognizing at the last moment that she cannot take her normal route, Fahey in the stern of the lead boat leans far out of her canoe to plant her paddle. So far out, in fact, that some other paddlers think she’s decided to abandon her canoe altogether. Rather, she’s making a quick, hard draw to catch the narrow seam between the waves and the boil. Like good duckies, the rest of us make a similar, if less dramatic, turn through the Riffle.
The trip’s final obstacle comes on the last day of our three-day soak, and is as much mental as physical. After running the Gate and negotiating George’s Riffle, we find most of the remaining campsites in the park submerged and beyond use. A long day of paddling brings us to the last remaining option at Lafferty’s Creek. But two rafting groups, their own schedules disrupted by the rising water level, have beaten us to it. As the rafters have occupied the best and most convenient tenting sites, we must cart all our supplies, including canoes, food barrels, personal gear and collected firewood, from the beach through the rafters’ kitchen area and on to the cheap seats at the back of the creek valley.
Sodden, grumpy and bone-tired, it is then that the luxurious nature of rafting down the Nahanni is fully revealed to us. Safely ensconced beneath their large tarps enjoying what appear to be pre-dinner drinks on folding bar stools while their dinner sizzles on a gas grill, the rafters accept our apologetic nods with only slight annoyance as we repeatedly interrupt their repast. Our humiliation is not quite complete, however. Lafferty’s Creek is the campsite where visitors are required to pack out their human waste, an eventuality for which we are entirely unprepared. A jerry-rigged solution is soon contrived and I can assure Parks Canada that no rules were broken. (Don’t ask what happened to the “fire” barrel, however; we are all sworn to secrecy.)
The next day breaks sunny and clear. A welcome camp day allows us to hike the surrounding area and dry our gear. Two days later, after passing through the Splits, where the river widens and slows into a multitude of islands and channels, we arrive at Nahanni Butte, population 87, just outside the park boundary at the river’s end. From here we catch a pickup truck, scow, van and ferry over and around the Liard River to return to Fort Simpson and then onwards home.
At the conclusion of any aspirational, once-in-a-lifetime trip, it seems appropriate to measure the experience against one’s expectations. I had expected to see one of Canada’s most beautiful places. I was not disappointed. I had also expected a physical challenge. Again, the results were in line with expectations; the trip was often very hard work. As for potential risks, forest fires seemed the most obvious threat, given the summer’s news cycle and recent events. Before leaving for Yellowknife, I obsessively checked fire alerts for the NWT. Yet it was not fire but too much water that posed the greatest risk in our trip.
For those considering the Nahanni trip as an addition to their bucket list, it remains an attainable adventure if you have the requisite money, fitness and basic canoeing and camping skills. The rafting experience lies within the grasp of an even wider, and decidedly less active, audience.
While the flash flood had a substantial impact on our journey down the Nahanni, in the end it was just another obstacle to be overcome. Setting aside the temporary drama caused by the rising water level, most of the rapids on the lower part of the Nahanni are rated Class I/II and easily negotiated by paddlers without advanced whitewater abilities in normal conditions. Also, perhaps surprisingly for a trip this deep into the wilderness, bears were entirely absent. And the Arctic’s infamous biting insects were hardly a bother, either. For anyone considering a Nahanni trip as an addition to their bucket list, it remains an attainable adventure provided you have the requisite money, fitness and basic canoeing and camping skills – and barring unexpected fires or floods. The rafting experience lies within the grasp of an even wider, and decidedly less-active, audience.
But was it worth it? Or more to the point, did I deserve it?
The Case Against the Case Against Travel
In a recent essay in New Yorker magazine, philosopher Agnes Callard laid out “The Case Against Travel” in which she dismisses almost all forms of tourism, and in particular bucket list travel. The problem, she writes, is that “touristic travel exists for the sake of change.” Yet most people return from their trips no different than when they left. Upon arriving at the Grand Canyon, Callard opines, a tourist compares the vista with their prior mental image of the same thing. If it measures up, the trip is a success. A box is checked. And then you go home. Callard asserts that proper travel must be transformative and profound. Instead, most people simply focus on getting themselves from one place to another in order to justify their own pre-existing expectations, what she calls the problem of “locomotion.”
In our interview, wilderness purist Raffan makes a similar point about tourism in northern Canada. “The ethics of this kind of travel are shifting,” he warns. To justify a trip to the Nahanni or elsewhere, he proposes a ledger that requires a deep transformation in the traveler’s personal opinions about the environment and native rights in order to balance off the damage done by all that carbon-spewing locomotion and encroachment on Canada’s wild spaces. For Raffan, “the benefits side of the equation for the awareness changes and potential behaviour changes vis a vis consumption,” must outweigh “the expenditure of energy.”
Unlikely to survive Raffan’s ethical accounting exercise are all those low-effort rafters camped ahead of us at Lafferty’s Creek. “Are they coming with the expectation of being changed…or is it just about having fancy meals in different locations?” he asks. He suggests most rafters could probably be satisfied with a float down the Ottawa River, saving all that wear-and-tear on the north. Canoers who “have to work for it” gain a modest advantage in his scheme. But still, he asserts, an appropriate enhancement in “awe and reverence” for the forces of nature is required to absolve the burning of all that jet fuel. Big sigh.
Demands that tourists commit to being transformed into environmentalists or Indigenous policy advocates as a requirement for seeing one of Canada’s most beautiful places seems yet another depressing example of the dourness and enforced conformity of elite opinion today. It undermines the anticipation and sense of accomplishment that comes from planning and following through on a once-in-a-lifetime trip. And it turns travel into yet another front in our endless culture wars.
Was I changed by the Nahanni? Perhaps in some small, accretive way. Seeing such a special place for the first time inevitably adds to one’s appreciation for nature and life. But with the exception of a temporary beard, I returned fundamentally the same person I was when I left. A change from one’s normal routine – filled with spectacular scenery, new challenges and old friends – is plenty change enough. Of course it was worth it.
“Still the Dangerous River: The Nahanni Part II” will explore the legends and literature that have shaped the river’s aura of mystery and danger.
Peter Shawn Taylor is senior features editor of C2C Journal. His trip down the Nahanni with Black Feather Outfitters was at his own expense.
Source of main image: Ian Boeckh.