Wilderness Canoeing - Trip Planning: Key Items to Bring

It’s about time to plan our annual canoe trip, and this year we are heading up to Canada again to run the Missinaibi River. My friend, June, says that we are psycho-canoeists just because 5 years ago I took her out to a local pond and almost flipped her. I mean what’s a little swim? It was warm.

While I know some of you who read this blog are canoeists and some of you who read this blog are certifiably insane, my guess is that most of you don’t do a lot of wilderness canoeing and probably lay awake at night wondering….”What is the nature of God…. Does the Universe have a beginning or an end and what is wilderness canoeing really like?”

So I thought for the next little while I will talk about planning a wilderness canoe trip and share some of the excitement that ripples through our household in anticipation of our trip down the Missinaibi.

To give you an idea how that excitement flows through our house, I’ve give you an example of a typical morning conversation over fresh brewed coffee.

“Good morning my darling husband”

“Oh, my sweet wife, you look so lovely. Were you dreaming of our canoe trip this summer?”

“Golly, as a matter of fact I was.”

“Hi Mom and Dad. Before I sit down and eat my nutritious breakfast, I better take out the trash. Are there any other chores you want me to do?

“Golly, honey, as a matter of fact, could you bring up the dehydrator from the basement for me. I better get cracking on dehydrating all our deliciously nutritious meals for our canoe trip.”

“You sure are the best Mom ever. I love your deliciously nutritious meals especially when they’re dehydrated. Golly, don’t forget to dehydrate extra spinach so I can be strong when I get up to paddle on our canoe trip”.

“Golly honey, I’ll make sure to dehydrate extra just for you because you are so special to me, and I’m going to make Daddy’s favorite, too: Dehydrated Four-Bean Chili. You know how that gets him going every morning on our canoe trip”.

Food, as you can gather from our typical family talks around the breakfast table, is a critical component of a successful wilderness canoe trip because without it, we'd starve. So to conclude today’s blog, I will review the two most critical food items in a wilderness canoe paddlers’ kitchen pack: Alcohol and peanut M&Ms. I’ll concede that it is true that you should not drink and paddle at the same time but once you set up camp…. Come on. There is no T.V. What else are you going to do?

Canadian provincial parks don’t allow glass containers, so that narrows the wilderness alcohol consumption playing field considerably. We discovered, however, that Canadian Mist comes in plastic bottles. Last year when we paddled through Killarney Provincial Park, my friend, Carolyn and I also decided to add a little refinement to the trip by bringing boxed wine. Unfortunately, the cardboard box melted over time (like the time we forgot to put it away when it rained). But, the real issue was that wine and wilderness don’t mix. You can swig whiskey from a plastic bottle, wipe your mouth off with your sleeve and then head off to build a fire or gut a fish. Swigging boxed wine has a few logistical limitations, and even when we succeeded, we found ourselves discussing our favorite books and thinking about gardening.

Last year, since we had to paddle into and out of Killarney on the same route, my husband, Brian, and our friend, Pete, decided it would be great to sneak in beer and bury it, so that it would be waiting for us on our way out of the park before we took out our boats. The only problem was that we sort of forgot to bury the beer, and by the time we realized our mistake, it was too late. So in the interest of managing the weight of all the gear that we had to portage between lakes, we had a fantastic beer fest the first night, after which, of course, we built a fire and gutted fish. Fortunately, the peanut M&Ms gave us enough strength to drag a 5 gallon bucket filled with empty beer bottles the entire course of our trip.