Sarah Hooper's blog - Chapter 5 (Portages & Flowers)

Portages spoil a good canoe journey.

There is no fun to be had in lugging heaving gear in the rain or heat with mosquitoes bugging you along the way. No sooner have you begun to enjoy the river then you had to unload everything again and carry your stuff for 100s ( sometimes 1000s) of meters across rocky boggy ground. They are a pain in... [more]

Sarah Hooper's blog - Chapter 4 (The Wildlife)

The wildlife we saw was incredible and at times I felt as though I was at home watching a wildlife documentary.

There are a few reasons why we may have been so lucky - traveling in a small group meant that we could stop and investigate where we wanted without having to push on to a schedule, it may have been the remoteness of the area... [more]

Sarah Hooper's blog - Chapter 3 (The Rivers)

(This is just my rough memory of the river at the moment and am sure will get more detailed info from Dave when he has reviewed the map and notes we made on the trip)

Hooper Creek

As I mentioned previously we didn't land quite where we had planned. In order to get to the south branch of the Rae ( thus far unnamed and now known as... [more]

Sarah Hooper's blog - Chapter 2 (Pre-trip Planning, Gear & Food)

As you may know from previous posts, much of the river we paddled was relatively unknown.

Much of Dave's interest in this river was about John Rae himself, the Artic explorer [ more about him later ] Whilst not quite bold enough to say we were the first to paddle some of this, we can say that the only account of this area we were able... [more]

Sarah Hooper's blog - Chapter 1 (The Team & Getting to the River)

Now what you have to understand is that my paddling companions, although looking forward to our river journey, were pretty old hands when it came to flying out to rivers and landing in the middle of no-where.

I, on the other hand, was like a small child on Christmas Eve, I was so so excited ! I couldn't sit still for a moment in the Air... [more]