Garth Wallbridge, a corporate lawyer in Yellowknife, was making the final preparations to embark on a long canoe trip on Great Slave Lake on Tuesday.
Yellowknifer interviewed him this past May about his two-year passion project to restore a canoe and take it around the perimeter of Great Slave Lake, a 3,000-kilometre journey that Wallbridge estimated would take him eight weeks to complete.
“I was hoping to be gone by now but I just had a busy summer building,” he said. “It’s probably going to be another 10 days, about the 20th of July.”
Wallbridge said he plans on making the entire journey all at once, which amounts to approximately 1,340 hours of solitude. The canoe has a motor so he will only be paddling when he goes to shore, where Wallbridge said he would be spending his time reading and writing.
“I have a large collection of thousands of books and I’ve been picking the ones that I want to take with me to read,” he said.
One book he has a particular interest in reading is As Long As This Land Shall Last: A History of Treaty 8 and Treaty 11 by Rene Fumoleau. He said he read it years ago and he looks forward to reading it again.
Wallbridge doesn’t only plan on having his nose in books for the entire trip — he also talked about walking inland and taking in the scenery.
“From wherever I might stop on a given afternoon, once I get my camp set up I might walk a kilometre or five and have a look around the country along the shoreline,” he commented.
His travel plan is to head counter-clockwise towards Behchoko, paddle down to Hay River, around and up to Fort Reliance where he will go visit friends nearby at Hoarfrost River, then continue onward back to Yellowknife.
“I could do it in about two weeks if I was traveling hard, but I don’t intend to travel hard,” he said.
Relaxing as the trip may be for him, there are still dangers involved, he said, emphasizing the size of Great Slave Lake.
Being the 10th largest lake in the world, Wallbridge said that the main source of danger is the waves, noting that if you were in the middle of the lake, it would be like being on the ocean.
Despite it, he confidently said that he was not concerned about them, citing his past experience canoeing, which included an instance when his vessel tipped over and he was in the water for 40 minutes before getting back into the boat.
Supporting a museum
On June 13, Wallbridge hosted an event in Yellowknife on behalf of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough, Ont., of which he is a board member. His intention is to to raise the profile of the museum and talk about how, over generations, canoeing has remained significant and has shaped travel through barren landscapes. He said about 50 people attended.
“I would say a lot of people are really interested in the work of the museum,” he said.
The construction of the museum is a $40-million project which will have 600 watercraft, including canoes and kayaks from Canada and around the world on display.