Скачать или смотреть 2024 Wilderness and Canoe Symposium: Jim Boone "Across the Subarctic"

This annual symposium is a mid-winter gathering of kindred spirits in search of knowledge and a sense of place. Its purpose is to educate and remind us of how sacred, fragile, and endangered the remaining natural wilderness areas are, and to celebrate wilderness experiences in our northern Canadian habitat. Each speaker offers a unique perspective on far-ranging topics that include subjects such as ecology, First Nations, guiding, history, unique trips, conservation, etc. Visit www.wcsymposium.com

“Across the Subarctic” is a super-8 film made on a very early recreational canoe trip in the Barren Lands. On a summer’s day in July 1969, two twin-engine Otters glided to a smooth landing on Sifton Lake, northeast of Yellowknife, setting down on strip of open water flanked by ice and the rolling tundra.

The paddlers rented “U-paddle” Grumman aluminum canoes from the Hudson’s Bay Company and had acquired a roll of a relatively new material called “plastic” to line their packs. Three weeks and two days later, having run down the Hanbury and Thelon Rivers, and then battling through ice on the big lakes, Beverley, Aberdeen, and Schultz, they paddled into the community of Baker Lake. In 1969, this was an epic canoe trip for eight young men from Ontario. Jim Boone, one of those young men, now 96, will share his memories and his short film with us, the first time it has been shown to a “public” audience outside his family and friends.

Jim grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. He started canoeing as a boy at Camp Onondaga, sent there for the summer to avoid the Polio epidemic in the city. Later, as a camp counsellor, he canoed many of the lakes in Algonquin Park. He was a pediatrician at the Hospital for Sick Children at the time of his first Barren Lands canoe trip on the Thelon River in 1969. Jim was later Chair of Pediatrics at Western University for twenty years. During this time, he returned to the Canadian Arctic several times, canoeing several rivers, including the Coppermine and the Hood. He fly-fishes to this day and still enjoys a stiff rum toddy that was first introduced by Eric Morse during a whitewater training trip on the Petawawa River in the 1960s.