By The Tha-Anne River first started flowing through my imagination in August 2019. After 42 days of criss-crossing Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nunavut, I was descending the very final rapids of the Thlewiaza River when I glanced over my left shoulder and saw another river – the Tha-anne – surging in from the North and merging with my river before the combined current swirled into the icy salt water of Hudson Bay.
As I mentioned in my book, Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic, at the time I thought that maybe, someday I would return and explore that river too. Well, someday is here, and that’s what I’m hoping to do this summer.
Track my trip progress on the map starting July 6th, 2026.
Then scroll down further and check out the updates I’ll be posting on social media from the field.
July 6th
Today started early, long before dawn as I made my way to the part of the airport reserved for northern airlines and charters. About 20 people boarded the Calm Air Charter, all bound for Kasba Lake Lodge: 19 fishermen and me.
After an unscheduled stop in Thompson Manitoba for emergency maintenance we finally made it to the lodge. The thick cloud and bumpy landing suggested that the weather report were correct: there were very rough conditions on the lake.
The lodge is beautiful and full of people, hoping to bag record pike, lake trout, and Arctic grayling. I don’t fish on these trips, but if I did, it would be good eating every day.
Fortunately, the gear shipped to the lodge months ago was all here, and it took about an hour to load and prepare the boat with the eavy stuff towards the bottom at all costs. Even with 140 pounds of food (rectangular yellow bags) it almost all fit under the spray deck, just my camera gear and some paddles needed to go above it. This made for a stable boat that would keep most of the water in the lake. Pl
The fishing guides at Kasba Lake were very friendly and helpful, but they reported 4 foot rollers out in the middle of the lake. This was a problem for their 20 foot long aluminum boats with 40 hp motors, so it did not bode well for a canoe…
As promised, conditions were rough out on the lake. A strong headwind that created large breaking waves whenever the wind could blow across more than a few hundred meters of open water. Consequently, I snuck along the shore for.much of the afternoon, only covering about 5 km as the fish swims or 3 km as the bird flies.
In the distance, I saw the fishing boats from Kasba Lake Lodge dodge behind islands and seek the lee to stay out of the big waves. Everyone was having a rough go of it today and I hope tomorrow is easier. The spruce trees were definitely swaying wildly along the shore – a sure sign of high wind just a little further out to sea.
After this shakedown cruise, I made camp on a small island behind a dense lump of spruce that blocked some of the wind. I spent the rest of the evening re-organizing my gear and making the little adjustments that happen in the early days of every trip.
I continually remind myself that while bears and rapids and forest fires are real dangers, the real killer of people out here is hypothermia and drowning on the large lakes. I will continue to push north but this portion of the trip will also take as long as it takes. The weather has the deciding vote here always.
July 7th
Today there were loons, eskers, and patches of tundra appearing amidst the boreal forest, and it feels like home.
I paddled for about six hours today. From 8:30 to 11:30 AM I maintained a good pace despite the omnipresent headwind
. After a quick stop to stretch my legs in a beautiful patch of bouldery tundra I continued northward, but was not quite able to maintain the same pace. Preparation is really important, but ultimately only the activity itself can fully prepare you for the activity, therefore my plan is to start out with some easier days and then begin to ramp up the number of hours on the water. It would suck to get an overuse injury thus early in the trip.
The weather today was better than yesterday, but still mostly overcast and windy. The black flies are beginning to come out and I’m guessing that on a calm day they will be terrible. The bandanna tucked under the brim of my Tilley hat helps keep them off the back of my neck on the water, but shore breaks of more than five minutes now require the full on bug jacket.
With any luck, I will cross to the other shore of Kasba Lake early in the morning when the winds are low and then on to the outlet that feeds into the Kazan River. It’s tough going, but I am happy.
July 8th
Today there were loons, eskers, and patches of tundra appearing amidst the boreal forest, and it feels like home.
I paddled for about six hours today. From 8:30 to 11:30 AM I maintained a good pace despite the omnipresent headwind.
After a quick stop to stretch my legs in a beautiful patch of bouldery tundra I continued northward, but was not quite able to maintain the same pace. Preparation is really important, but ultimately only the activity itself can fully prepare you for the activity, therefore my plan is to start out with some easier days and then begin to ramp up the number of hours on the water. It would suck to get an overuse injury thus early in the trip.
The weather today was better than yesterday, but still mostly overcast and windy. The black flies are beginning to come out and I’m guessing that on a calm day they will be terrible. The bandanna tucked under the brim of my Tilley hat helps keep them off the back of my neck on the water, but shore breaks of more than five minutes now require the full on bug jacket.
With any luck, I will cross to the other shore of Kasba Lake early in the morning when the winds are low and then on to the outlet that feeds into the Kazan River. It’s tough going, but I am happy.
July 9th
The first few days of the expedition are always a rude shock for the body. Even using the kayak paddle I just couldn’t maintain the pace of the first three days of the expedition. My shoulders hurt and my energy was tanking.
Near continuous headwinds in the morning and early afternoon today, but this river twists north, south and east, meaning that 20% of the time I could use my sail to ride the crosswind or even tack into the wind a bit.
My Falcon sail is very well designed and was incredibly when topography and wind cooperated to give me a break. But it is also the most dangerous piece of kit I am carrying and that includes a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot. If there is a sudden gust and you’re not paying attention, you’re going over, and in a large lake or in cold water that could be the end of here. Accordingly, I was in a low brace position the entire time I was sailing.
I was pretty much done physically by 3pm, but then the wind shifted just enough to allow sailing across Tabane Lake and from there I could ride the swifts to Ennedai Lake, the center of Ahalmuit inland Inuit culture in the first half of the 20th century. This is a giant lake and I can’t wait to explore it.
July 10th
Today was supposed to be a bit of a rest day. Some easy, cruising, assisted by the sail, but when the wind died in the afternoon, I kept on going. I’ll feel like an idiot if I sit on shore on such a nice day because there certainly will be days of horrid weather in my future, and those are the days I should rest.
I pushed on for about 30 km and conditions became extremely hot. I started looking skyward for thunderheads and the bug came out with a renewed fury. Black flies, mosquitoes, and a shocking number of horse flies. On days like this, it’s better to live in multiple layers and sweat like a pig than get eaten alive.
Dinner was a hasty affair because I saw a giant set of thunderhead approaching. Then I heard the rumbling of thunder all across the southern horizon and the first raindrops hit the tent a few minutes later. Now it’s the windiest I’ve ever seen it on the tundra and wind resistant Hilleberg tunnel tent seems like the best investment I’ve ever made. I’ve tripled and quadrupled the windward tent pegs and am in full raingear in case the tent starts shaking itself apart. It’s gonna be a doozy of a night.
July 11th
Last night from 10pm to midnight was wild as a giant thunderstorm proceeded along Ennadai Lake just north of my position. A creeping barrage of detonations accompanied by extreme winds and rain, but the Hilleberg Keron 3 tent held up magnificently. The The weather was still tumultuous in the morning but by early afternoon it calmed down enough to head out on the water.
Despite the extra sleep I’m feeling pretty depleted – 6 days of travel and not enough rest or calories (the bugs make lingering over dinner difficult) so I’m probably overtrained. On my first long solo canoe trip ever in northern Ontario 30 years ago, took half a day off every five days; perhaps it’s now time to take a full day off every five days.
I came across a gorgeous cabin on a bluff and, miracle of miracles, it was bugproof. I’ve had to set up my tent inside cabins before in order to stop the mosquitoes from eating my face as I sleep, but I don’t think that’s going to be required tonight. A fine place to rest up, and I’ll repay the owner’s inadvertent hospitality by tidying up the mess some animal made after it forced a window.
July 12th
Whatever it was that eviscerated me yesterday was better today. It wasn’t the quality of sleep last night, actually that was pretty bad because it was too hot in the cabin, and I still had to get up in the middle of the night to erect my tent inside the cabin to protect my face from the mosquitoes that emerged from their hiding spots. Probably it was just a question of going too far too fast, and I need to ramp up the speed and time on the water consistently but slowly to give my body time to . acclimatize.
I’m still on huge Ennadai Lake but as I paddle northward, the trees become smaller and more sparse, and the patches of tundra grow larger. Today was a cloudy day, but this country would be so beautiful with beams of sunlight playing across the landscape. Maybe tomorrow that might happen.
Since people are always interested in beat precautions, in the second half of this video I go into detail about the five main things I’m doing to protect myself from black bears and tundra grizzlies, both of which I might run into at this latitude.
I have no way of seeing feedback on these videos, but I hope you’re enjoying them!
July 13th
I am a little bit worried by how little distance I am covering each day on Ennadai Lake. I have to get to the top of it to continue the trip, and I’m doing my very best but I seem to be getting repeatedly stymied. Today involve no less than four attempts to get going as this rough schedule shows…
630 am, wake up, eat breakfast, excited to make good progress today.
730 am, big thunderstorm coming in, stop breaking down camp and back to bed.
12 noon, looks like the storms have passed so break camp a second time.
1:30 pm, actually on the water paddling north.
2 pm, another storm inbound right to my location, so I pull back to shore in a different place where I get poured on but also see the first caribou of the trip.
3:30 pm, back on the water.
4 pm, a giant thunderstorm occupying a third of the horizon is inbound. It looks like I might be here for a while so I set up the tent to weather the storm.
5:30 pm, storm passes, pack up the tent, back on the water.
8 pm, make camp on a stunning tundra peninsula jutting out into Ennadai Lake. Bugs are very bad tonight and all the wood is wet making fire building slow, so dinner is a huge bite of Parmesan and two energy balls.
9:45 pm, in tent writing notes and repairing a broken bear alarm.
I don’t mind going slow per se, it gives me more time out here. But I do only have 28 days of food and there is still a lot of big lake upriver, overland, and then downriver miles left to do. Let’s see how much weight I’ve lost by the time I get home!
July 14th
Better weather today but brutal headwinds. I labored into the wind for eight hours straight using my kayak and canoe paddles (I would periodically switched to give aching muscle muscles a bit of a rest) and although I did not cover a great distance, I think the effort and suffering quotient was met.
I am currently in the abandoned settlement of Ennadai. There is so much history here I’m going to have to relate it in a different format, but it’s kind of spooky to know that this was an inland Inuit settlement within living memory and now there is just an unmanned weather station. I wonder if the shards of caribou bone emerging from the sand are modern fragments or historic ones.
The landscape is indefinitely, changing as I go north. The size and variety of the tundra patches is growing, the trees are shrinking and are usually just found close to the water. As the spruce shrinks the option for sheltered locations to camp in reduce as well, and one had better have a tent well suited for the relentless cold summer wind up here.
July 15th
Stunning weather for finishing the top part of Ennadai Lake and getting back on the Kazan River again. Hopefully I can make Dimma Lake and the big junction point by tomorrow. I’ve been putting in really long days and need to sleep now, it’s one of the few things I can do to allow me to recover from the continuous push.
July 16th
Today is a huge inflection point for the trip. It’s the last day of following the Kazan River downstream and across lakes, and the juncture at which I start heading upriver into an extremely remote corner of the Arctic Barren Lands. I’m camped on Dimma Lake and the creek I’m ascending has no formal name I’m aware of, but try to connect Dimma Lake and Hicks Lake on Google Maps, it’s a maze!
I’ve been pushing it pretty hard these last few days trying to take advantage of good weather, but my body is getting worn down. My paddling output really plummets after about four or five hours on the water. I can still move forward, but man, am I ever limping long slowly. It’ll be interesting to challenge the body a different way for however long it takes to go upriver and overland to Hicks Lake and then see how my paddling muscles have healed and hopefully strengthened.
My campsite is beautiful tonight. I’m enough of a northern nerd to have my favorite kind of tundra to camp on and the bench above the Beech has that magical crowberry-arctic cranberry-dwarf Labrador tea heath. It’s not raining here, but distant cumulonimbus clouds are dissipating the heat of the day with rumbling thunder. And there are lots of Arctic wolf prints on the beach – maybe I’ll get lucky and see the pack!
July 17th
The truth is that going upriver by canoe is a slow, tedious, and difficult affair. In fact, it took two hours to complete a section of river not even a kilometer long. Tracking a boat with ropes can be elegant when there is a walkable shoreline, but when you are navigating shallow rock gardens, you have to get into the water.
The river bottom is a very unstable surface with invisible randomly shaped boulders covered with algae and other slime, meaning that every third step slips off in some random direction and to a random depth. At the same time, your canoe is like a 200 pound disobedient dog that continuously wants to stop or turn around. You have to worry about not getting your arm or leg wrapped in the rope- because that could actually be lethal – while fighting off the mosquitoes and black flies.
On the other hand, it’s true that that as difficult as it is, proceeding this way is 1000 times easier than portaging through the willow swamp on the shores.
The weather today was unseasonably hot (hot enough to melt chocolate stored in a Ziploc bag and undercover in the canoe), which made being submerged in water a much nicer proposition. The sky was also very hazy, I suppose the results of massive forest fires burning in western North America. At times, I could actually smell smoke in the air, but I don’t think there are any forest fires close to me.
I have only recently started thinking about using helmets for wading and tracking upriver, but I’ve really come round to the idea now. I must have fallen down flat at least 10 times today, and while the lifejacket provides some protection for the body, I could see doing severe damage to your unprotected melon. I’m carrying a helmet anyway for the white water section of the trip, so it would be foolish to not pull it out now.
Tomorrow, the upriver journey continues…
July 18th
By some measures I only covered a pathetic distance today; just 7 km or a little under 5 miles. At the same time I’m very satisfied with this distance because it included climbing seven of the eight remaining rapids between last night‘s camp and the next watershed. Some of those rapids took over an hour to ascend, explaining why the horizontal distance is relatively small. Tomorrow I have a couple hours of paddling and if that goes well, then I’ll be starting the first of four trackless portages from tiny lake to tiny lake to get to the headwaters of the very rarely travelled Kognac River.
This headwaters country at the borders of these two great watersheds is very pretty. Tonight I am camped between a lake and a great plain that stretches on the limits of your vision; it would not be surprising to see a band of horsemen ride out of that horizon except this a crowberry and lichen tundra, not the Eurasian grassland.
The last time I looked, the tundra had a few unripe blueberries hidden an inch off the ground. Today I look again and it’s an explosion of blue. The Arctic summer is so insanely brief, a couple of months for plants to flower and fruit, for animals to be born and grow strong, for trillions of insects to take to the air before the cold blasts of September cut them down. It’s a compressed timeline, and I feel honored to be out here for the peak of it, even if two of my wrists and one of my ankles look like they have smallpox because of blackfly bites.
The Tha-anne 2026 Expedition Consists of Four Stages…
Stage 1, Kasba Lake to Dimma Lake on the Kazan River (downriver)
The trip will start in the boreal forest as it falters towards the treeline, just to the north. I hope to descend the upper Kazan River down to Dimma Lake. Most travellers would continue northwards on the Kazan towards Baker Lake, but at this point I’ll hang a hard left and start heading upriver.
The Kazan River is fairly well described by many modern travellers, so there shouldn’t be any huge surprises here.
Stage 2, Dimma Lake to Hicks Lake (upriver and overland)
Although this will be the shortest stage distance-wise it will probably be the most challenging and slowest-going travelling of the trip. I’ll be wading and tracking upstream in mid July, a time when the bugs will be fiercest and the little creeks will be brimful with meltwater. The final portion to connect the Kazan and Tha-anne watersheds will involve extensive portaging and route-finding, requiring a minimum of 3 loaded carries and 2 return trips because I’ll still have a lot of food at this point.
I know one person (Calem Watson) who has done this short section in the opposite direction from me, so I know it’s possible, but other than that, there is very little information about this section of the trip.
Stage 3, Hicks Lake to Hudson Bay on the Kognak and Tha-Anne Rivers (downriver)
From Hick’s Lake to Hudson Bay is downriver, so it should be easy going, right? Hang on a minute!
First of all, there is a ton of whitewater as the river falls 291 meters (almost a thousand feet) off the plateau on which it was born.
Secondly, this river is very poorly described. The only written source of which I’m aware is a missionary’s report from the 1800’s by the Reverend J. Lofthouse. He didn’t have a ton of details, and also didn’t go as far upriver as I’m starting. Other than that, I’ve chatted briefly with a paddler called James deMello who did the Tha-anne (but not the Kognak) in the 1980s, and Cliff Jacobson who cut across to the Tha-anne from Seal Hole Lake on the Thlewiaza with a group that then flew out before they reached Hudson Bay.
Anyway, the upshot is that there isn’t a lot of information about this river and I’m going in pretty much blind other than my maps and studying the rapids on airphotos (my procedure for that is described here).
Stage 4, Mouth of the Tha-Anne River to the town of Arviat (open ocean)
Hudson Bay is a terrifying place. The massive 10-14 foot tides, combined with enormous tidal flats, combined with a dense population of polar bears makes it an extremely anxiety-inducing place. I’ve paddled portions of the coast before and also have seen 14 polar bears in 24 hours on a different trip, so if I can avoid the coast I will.
My current plan is to contact Inuit friends of mine in Arviat and have them pick me up with a motor boat, but if communications fail or the plan falls through because of other reasons, then the last 100 km of the trip will be a terrifying paddle with very little sleep.
Follow Along for Live Updates from the Field!
If all goes well with my cameras and satellite connection, I should be posting live updates from the field on my various social media channels. Please follow on the platforms of your choice…
- Essential Wilderness on YouTube (I also put lots of long-form content on here as well).
- Essential Wilderness on TikTok (don’t worry, I’ve never done a TikTok dance and probably never will)
What Gear Am I Taking?
I broke down my food, gear, boat and paddles for this Tha-Anne expedition on YouTube in a video called All My Gear to Canoe Solo in the Arctic for 30 Days ($21,000+).
My 2024 Thlewiaza River Expedition
This trip from a few years ago took me across Nueltin Lake and down the Thlewiaza River. It’ll give you an idea of what I’m in for.
Perseverance, the Book in Hardcover, Kindle, and Audiobook Format!
For the detailed story of my 42 day expedition on the Churchill, Reindeer, Cochrane and Thlewiaza Rivers I’d be thrilled if you’d consider taking a look at Perseverance, Life and Death in the Subarctic. It has received great reviews on Google, GoodReads, the CBC, and Library Journal.
