The Infinite Land

This book contains the story of an 870-mile canoe trip through the Canadian Barren Lands west of Hudson Bay that two friends and I completed in the summer of 1988. The trip took 55 days. We started on Wollaston Lake, in northwest Saskatchewan and ended at Baker Lake in the Northwest Territories (now Nunavut). The journey took us through remote areas of the boreal forest country to the Arctic divide and into the vast Barren Lands of the Northwest Territories. The area we traveled through has become part of Nunavut as the result of the Nunavut Land Claims settlement. We faced many difficult portages, swarms of blackflies, dangerous whitewater, strong winds, and expansive ice-cold lakes. We retraced significant portions of J.B Tyrrell's 1893 and 1894 geological expeditions in the Barrens and explored Farley Mowat's "The Deer's Way", described in his book People of the Deer, that separates the waters of the Dubawnt and Kazan Rivers. We traveled part of the route used by the tragic Arthur Moffat expedition in 1955. We saw effects of past continental glaciation, herds of caribou and muskoxen, white wolves, abundant bird life and much evidence of past cultures that had once occupied the land.