A Month Spent in the Canadian Wilderness

This past summer, I embarked on a month-long canoe camping trip in Northern Quebec and Labrador. Although I have gone on many of these trips throughout my life, this was by far the longest and most challenging one I have ever experienced. Normally, on this kind of trip, the length that we are on the water varies every day, getting to the campsite at 12PM one day and 5PM the next. It is also typical on these trips to have at least one “rest day”, when you spend a day not moving campsites and resting. But, on this trip, we were consistently one day behind our planned itinerary, so every day we were pushing as hard as we could to get as far as we could. As a result, we pulled over to camp at our stopping point of around 6 or 7 everyday. We were supposed to have three rest days throughout the trip, but we ended up having only one, which was a mandatory rest day since we were getting resupplied with more food on that day. The lack of rest made the trip the most physically and mentally taxing experience I’ve ever had, but it forced me to grow a lot and strengthened my mind and body, which I am eternally grateful for.

Throughout the entire trip, the only people we saw were other trips from our camp. We were in a very remote part of Canada and there were no marked campsites or trails, so we “bushwhacked” our sites. It was very refreshing to get a break from the world and stay in an isolated bubble for so long. We also didn’t have our phones throughout the trip. As a teenager, I am always on my phone, scrolling on social media, and so were the other girls on my trip. It felt very welcoming to enter into an environment with no screens available, and to simply enjoy the company of one another. We found ways to entertain ourselves, such as narrating the plots of our favorite movies in excruciating detail to each other on long paddles and making inside jokes. Due to the close proximity between me and the seven other campers and two counselors on my trip, with the removed factor of our phones, we all got incredibly close. At the beginning, we expected to be sick of each other by Day 31, but in the end, it was the opposite. We had gotten so close that we were nervous at the thought of being apart. When we did get back to camp and we did separate activities around the campus, we always came back together at night and talked about each of our days and cherished the time left that we had with each other. Even when we got our phones back on our last night back at camp, after spending ten minutes on our phones, we realized that we weren’t talking to each other. So, we agreed to all put our phones away and talk for the rest of the night.

Since I’ve gotten back home, I’ve been asked many times to tell stories from my time away. The most significant event I can recall (and definitely the most exciting) is what my friend likes to jokingly call “The One with the Gun”. It was on the eighth day of our trip, and we had had a long day of paddling and portaging. The sun was setting so we started looking for a place to camp for the night. At around 7PM, we found a small island that was suitable enough to sleep at. We began to unload the gear out of our boats, when we saw a metal briefcase in the middle of the clearing. At first, we ignored it and kept unloading. When we were mostly done, someone opened the box and found a snow boot inside. She immediately assumed that there must be a foot in it, so everyone dropped what they were doing and went to investigate. We stood in a circle around it, chattering and giggling nervously about the possibilities for what the shoe could hold. One girl, Lila, decided to step up and look inside. She got out her gloves and began to unwrap the shoe laces that were tied around it. Inside the boot, there was not a foot, but a garbage bag that had been wrapped around itself, and clearly had something inside. Lila remarked that the bag was too heavy, and there couldn’t be a foot in it.

She felt around inside the bag and said, “Guys, don’t be alarmed, but I feel something hard, I think it might be an ankle bone.”

Shrieks emerged from everyone, obviously, when Lila pulled out the object in the bag, revealing it to be a handgun.

“IT’S A GUN!!!” We all screamed and some of us ran back to the boats, while some stayed back. One of our counselors told Lila to put it back in the box so she put the gun back in the bag, into the boot, into the briefcase, and closed it. Suffice to say we did not stay on that island and we paddled across the lake to another spot. By that time, the sun had set and it was too late to make dinner, so we set up our tents and our counselors gave us Snickers bars for dinner.

Since it was a handgun and not a hunting gun, which would be more expected, we all assumed that whoever it belonged to had committed a crime and wanted to hide the evidence. The conspiracy theories about the gun continued until the end of the trip and even after, when we were telling the tale to people at camp.

I’ve spent a lot of time complaining, but while the trip was extremely challenging, it was simultaneously my favorite trip I’ve been on in my eight years of being at my camp. At my camp, we call this “Type 2 fun”: when one goes through a particularly difficult experience that may not be enjoyable in the moment, but is rewarding when looking back on it. In addition, we always made the best of a tough situation, whether it was singing songs like Natasha Bedingfield’s “Pocketful of Sunshine” to vanquish a rainstorm or cheering each other on a hard portage trail. Our collective positive attitude is probably the main component to us making it through the trip relatively unscathed with somewhat of a found family. Before signing up for this trip, and even after I signed up, I was nervous about going on it because of the length as well as the fact that I wasn’t particularly close with the people going on it. Now that I have completed it, I would definitely do it again and think back on it as one of the best experiences of my life, if not the best.

Some Photos from my trip: