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KEN MCGOOGAN
Canada, Scotland, Arctic 2016

Showing posts with label Arctic Return Expedition. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arctic Return Expedition. Show all posts
Arctic adventurers recreate trek to Rae Strait

Arctic adventurers recreate trek to Rae Strait

November 27, 2018
The Arctic Return Expedition is all systems go. A reconfigured four-man team will set out March 25, 2019 to recreate the most successful Arctic overland expedition of the 19th century. On his 1854 surveying adventure, accompanied by an Inuk and an Ojibway, Orcadian explorer John Rae discovered both the terrible fate of the lost Franklin expedition and the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage.
Next March, veteran polar adventurer David Reid will lead an outstanding team in traveling 650 km overland from Naujaat (Repulse Bay) to Rae Strait, following in the footsteps of John Rae, William Ouligbuck Jr., and Thomas Mistegan. When personal considerations forced withdrawals, Reid rounded out his team with experienced, highly skilled adventurers.
The party now includes:
 n  Canadian adventurer Frank Wolf, named one of Canada’s top 100 explorers by Canadian Geographic Magazine in 2015. Wolf, the first to canoe across Canada in a single season, also cycled 2,000 km in winter on the Yukon River from Dawson to Nome. He has documented his adventurers in articles and films and recently published his first book, Lines on a Map (Rocky Mountain Books).
  n  Scottish adventurer Richard Smith, PhD, who studied as an astrophysicist, moved into Information Technology, and served with the Royal Marine Commandos and the Special Boat Service. Smith has climbed, trekked or kayaked in Alaska, Greenland, Nepal and the French Alps, and explored the jungles of Belize and the deserts of Oman.
  n  Adventure film-maker Garry Tutte, who created an educational web-series from Mt. Everest, documented a 7000 km car rally from England to Gambia across the Sahara Desert, and travelled from the remote islands of the Philippines to Hong Kong to create an award-winning film. In 2017, Tutte led the media team aboard the Canada C3 expedition as it circumnavigated the country’s 23,000 km coastline from Toronto to Victoria via the Northwest Passage.
  n  Reid himself, who lived on Baffin Island for 20 years and has led, organized or participated in more than 300 Arctic and Antarctic expeditions, trips and projects. In that time he has traveled thousands of miles by dog sled, ski, snowmobile, boat, kayak, ship, foot and most recently by bike, becoming the first person to cross Baffin Island by fat-tire bike.
The expedition is hoping to raise funds for the restoration of John Rae's birthplace, the Hall of Clestrain. The flagship sponsor is The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS). The award-winning travel company Adventure Canada and Canada Goose are also lending major support. For more details check out the expedition website.


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Ken McGoogan
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Braving storms in search of John Rae

Braving storms in search of John Rae

May 09, 2018


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What was he thinking, explorer John Rae, when he built a stone house in the High Arctic? He hired local Inuit to use their dogs to bring him big rocks. This was at Repulse Bay in 1846 with winter coming on. He got the house finished, a big room for the men and, because he did not smoke, a smaller one for him. With temperatures plummeting, he named the place Fort Hope.
What was he thinking? He was thinking of home, of growing up in Orkney, of riding out from the Hall of Clestrain with his musket to hunt for hare, and for curlews and grouse and lapwing.  He was thinking of one place in particular, a stone-built house near his favourite hunting spot in the rolling hills, where because of the distance from home, roughly fifteen miles, he would sometimes ask and receive permission to stay overnight.
This afternoon, on Orkney's Mainland, four of us visited the ruins of that stone house: me and Sheena and historian Tom Muir, our sortie led by Andrew Appleby, president of the John Rae Society. The house is located at Cottascarth in the Harray district, directly behind the Eddie Balfour Hen Harrier Hide – a bird-watching sanctuary.
Rae would have seen many such houses, of course. But this was the one where, according to local lore, he stayed more than once. And, though we have no documentary evidence, this was almost certainly the one that sprang to his mind when he needed to build a shelter. The style of construction is identical.
During our visit, after an initial half-mile slog from where we parked, the rains came on. We clambered around regardless, snapped a few photos, and even made our way through the grass to a winding stream or burn. This was it: another house in which John Rae once slept.
At Fort Hope, in the Arctic darkness, Rae learned the meaning of Real Cold. But then he visited some Inuit in a snowhouse they had built. He realized: wait a minute! it’s far warmer in here. He converted on the spot and, nostalgia be damned, never built another stone house. Oh, and one thing more. Next spring, when the Arctic Return Expedition sets out to retrace Rae's route of 1854, the team will visit Fort Hope before striking westward.



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Ken McGoogan
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Louie Kamookak discovers John Rae's cairn

Louie Kamookak discovers John Rae's cairn

May 02, 2018

The late Louie Kamookak has rightly been celebrated as a searcher for John Franklin. But more significantly, in my view, Louie was the man who discovered the cairn that explorer John Rae built in 1854, marking the final link in what would prove to be the first navigable Northwest Passage. I touched on that in Dead Reckoning, but I detailed the adventure in Fatal Passage. There, I described how in 1999, from Gjoa Haven, we set out east across Rae Strait in Louie’s twenty-foot motorboat. Quoting now:
During the thump­ing, exhilarating ride across waters so cold that a swimmer would not survive ten minutes, and in which hitting a floating log would mean almost certain death, I scribbled in my notebook, “Incredible to think that I should find not one but two fellow madmen to join me in this lunatic quest.”
Once we had established our camp on the coast of Boothia Penin­sula, our first objective was to find the cairn that Rae built. Fortunately, the explorer not only described the place where he created the marker, but also noted its geographical co-ordinates. Both Cameron Treleaven and Louie Kamookak carried Global Positioning System receivers that draw on globe-girdling satellites to specify locations and distances.
John Rae, of course, had been forced to rely on less sophisticated equipment. Because he was meticulous, his latitude reading, I believed, would be quite precise. But in the mid-1800s, the portable technology to provide accurate longitude readings had yet to be perfected. Indeed, when I checked the map, Rae’s longitude put the cairn far inland, which did not match his description of having travelled north along the coast.
Even so, we headed inland that first morning, roughly northeast, with a view to reaching Rae’s designated point and then heading west along the correct latitude so that we could not possibly miss the cairn. Under a limitless blue sky, we hiked for hour after hour across treeless, rock-strewn tundra, slogging through marshes, scrambling over ridges, and occasionally spotting caribou in the distance. A couple of times, we sighted landmarks that resembled grand cairns on the horizon, but they proved always to be giant rocks.

At about three o’clock in the afternoon, when we arrived at a broad inlet we had hoped to ford, we discovered that at best this would mean wading fifty yards through freezing, fast-flowing, groin-deep water while sinking in rock-filled mud to our knees. Treleaven insisted that we could do it, and maybe he was right. Kamookak wryly observed, “It’s too much work, this Rae stuff.” He and I voted to add a couple of miles to our hike, so instead of fording, we all three walked around.
At 4:30 p.m., we again approached Rae’s latitude, only now we were hiking north along the coast, the three of us strung out eighty yards apart, scouring the landscape. As we approached the tip of the penin­sula that Rae had named Point de la Guiche, Kamookak, who was trav­elling along a ridge, found what looked like the remains of a cairn. Instead of hollering, he simply placed his GPS receiver on the capstone, sat down, and waited for Treleaven and me to join him.
The cairn itself had been dismantled but was still clearly recogniz­able as a human creation, even with its stones covered in yellow and black lichen. Nor was it the kind of cairn, Kamookak explained, that hunters would build to cache game: the builder of this cairn had placed big rocks in the centre on top of smaller ones, a practice that would crush fresh meat. It was the only man-made structure for miles. And the GPS told us that although the longitude of this spot differed from Rae’s by three minutes and thirty-six seconds, the latitude agreed within a few yards. This was indeed Rae’s cairn.
Standing in the wind with open water visible to the west, the north­west, and the northeast, I could see the scene as it had unfolded in the wintry snowscape of early May 1854. A resolute man of forty-one, Rae had led his small party across ice and rough country for over 320 miles, man-haul­ing sledges through blizzards, gale- force winds, and temperatures as low as minus 62 degrees Fahrenheit. All the men suffered from snow-blindness, and one froze two toes. Only Rae and his two hardiest men—the Inuit William Ouligbuck, Jr., and the Cree Thomas Mistegan—reached this spot on the west coast of Boothia Peninsula. . . .
[In 2019, the Arctic Return Expedition intends to retrace Rae’s route and revisit this location.]



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Ken McGoogan
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Remembering Louie Kamookak (1959-2018)

Remembering Louie Kamookak (1959-2018)

March 22, 2018
The official obituaries I will leave to others. I feel driven to remember Louie Kamookak as my friend. Louie is well-known now as the foremost 21st-century champion of Inuit oral history – that history which, in 2014, led searchers to discover John Franklin's long-lost flagship, HMS Erebus.
For decades, Louie dedicated time and energy to collecting oral history, traditional place names, and the history of Inuit groups before Europeans arrived in the Arctic. For his contributions, he was made an honorary vice-president of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, which awarded him the Erebus Medal. He also received the Lawrence J. Burpee Medal, the Canadian Governor General's Polar Medal, the Order of Canada, and the Order of Nunavut.
In recent months, Louie made no secret of the fact that he was back and forth to Edmonton, in and out of hospital, and receiving chemotherapy. But he was not yet sixty years old and I was in denial. I felt he would remain with us for years. A couple of months ago, Louie agreed to become Gjoa Haven Consultant on the Arctic Return Expedition slated for 2019.
Together, he and I would meet the four-person expedition at its culminating point, the John Rae Memorial Plaque and Cairn overlooking Rae Strait. By so doing, we would not only honor John Rae, but also mark the twentieth anniversary of when, together with antiquarian Cameron Treleaven, we located that site. I wrote about this in Fatal Passage and Dead Reckoning.
After camping out on Boothia and erecting the plaque beside the ruined cairn, we broke camp to return to Gjoa Haven. Louie said that, before recrossing Rae Strait, he wanted to investigate a spot where sometimes he found good hunting. So, yes, Louie had a keen interest in Arctic discovery. But he was also an Inuk living, and so helping to preserve, a traditional way of life.
Louie Kamookak was an Inuit hunter at home in this High Arctic world. In summer, he went hunting in his twenty-foot boat. In winter, he used a dog-team or a Skidoo. The water, the ice—they belonged to his world, and to the way his Inuit ancestors had lived for generations. With Louie at the wheel, away we went, south down the coast of Boothia.
We entered a nondescript bay, hauled the boat onto a sandy beach, and climbed a ridge to scan the horizon. I saw nothing. There was nothing to see. But Louie pointed and whispered: “Caribou!” A huge-antlered animal, all but invisible against the brown tundra, stood in profile more than one hundred metres away. Way too far, in my opinion. But Louie fell to one knee, brought his gun to his shoulder, and fired. Nothing happened. I thought he had missed completely.

But no! The caribou dropped down dead where it stood. I could hardly believe it. We all three went charging across the tundra. Louie was jubilant. When he reached the caribou, he cried: “Straight through the heart!” Treleaven and I watched as he skinned that dead animal, hoisted the heavy carcass up onto his shoulders, and staggered back to the boat. Heaving it into the stern, he said: “Meat will last all winter.”
We hauled the boat into deep water and set out for Gjoa Haven, returning from what had evolved into a successful caribou hunt. Louie Kamookak was feeling good. All three of us were on top of the world And as we pounded across Rae Strait in the wind, I vowed that, some day, I would put that moment on record.

[Photos: Louie at the ruined cairn in 1999. Three adventurers toast John Rae, William Ouligbuck Jr. and Thomas Mistegan. Both pix shot by tripod. Louie and me in Gjoa Haven. I asked him if he was an elder yet. He insisted that he was still too young. Photo by Sheena Fraser McGoogan.]


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Ken McGoogan
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Before turning mainly to books about arctic exploration and Canadian history, Ken McGoogan worked for two decades as a journalist at major dailies in Toronto, Calgary, and Montreal. He teaches creative nonfiction writing through the University of Toronto and in the MFA program at King’s College in Halifax. Ken served as chair of the Public Lending Right Commission, has written recently for Canada’s History, Canadian Geographic, and Maclean’s, and sails with Adventure Canada as a resource historian. Based in Toronto, he has given talks and presentations across Canada, from Dawson City to Dartmouth, and in places as different as Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Hobart.