David and Enid's Travels

Lunch spot on the way back to Stanley

It was a very different day, cloudy, a bit of a north east wind, and occasionally light snow.  The temperature was also much warmer and was -17 C when we got back to Stanley about 4:00 pm.

We’d hoped to get away early, but I slept in until after 8:00 am, after keeping the fire going all night.  We first packed up my toboggan, however after getting the tarp all tied down noticed that we had forgotten to tie on the foam sleeping pads.  We had to untie the entire load, put the pads on, and then do them back up, which wasted about 15 or 20 minutes.  After we’d done my toboggan we took the stove out of the tent and dumped the coals onto the lake (we were afraid if they’d been put on the ground they might have melted down to the ground and caught the brush on fire).  Then we packed up the tent and Graeme’s toboggan, and got away from our campsite at 11:15 am.

We crossed Iskwatikan Lake heading west, fortunately with the wind on our backs.  As we left the lake where the trail went through the bush we saw that there was water running out of the bush and along the trail.  Dark brown tea colored water it obviously was running from the muskeg, and the snow was soft as it had not yet completely frozen.  We commented on how easy it was to walk over the frozen ground compared to the bog this trail must be in the summer.

We ate lunch about 3.5 km from our campsite.  It was snowing, about the heaviest snow we got all day.  Shortly after lunch we met a family on two snowmobiles.  The father was driving with his young son riding in front of him, and they were towing a large sleigh.  In the sleigh were a woman with another younger child.  They were almost buried under a mound of blankets.  We waved and the man said, “its a lot warmer today,” which was certainly true.

The bottoms of my feet were sore.  However it seemed to be easier to tow the toboggans, since it is a bit more downhill going back to Stanley.  Unfortunately my camera had frozen up (it did that yesterday too, but in the morning I kept it wrapped in my coat with the insulated hot water bottle until we took the pictures at Nistowiak) so it would no longer take any pictures.

As we approached Stanley we saw a lot more snowmobiles.  One passed us going south pulling a sleigh, then passed us about half an hour later going back in to town with a load of wood.  Once again my toboggan tipped twice in the rough tracks going back to town.  Up the hill, the steepest of the trip into town, and we were done at just a few minutes before 4:00 pm.

It was certainly a very cold first two days.  Though our last day was much warmer, it didn’t have the beautiful clear blue sky that we enjoyed as we went in to Nistowiak.

If you want to follow our route, here is a Google Earth track, and pictures of the trip.

Sunrise on Iskwatikan Lake

It was a very cold morning, but with a beautiful clear sky and sunrise.  Since we didn’t have a thermometer we guessed that it was below -30C (and when we got home found that it was -32C in La Ronge, so we would have been that cold or colder).

Although we’d planned to cross-country ski to Nistowiak Falls, but we felt it was just too cold to do so safely.  Even with an extra sock cover for our ski boots we were worried that our feet would freeze.  So instead of skiing we decided to snowshoe.

After sunrise, close to 10 am, we set off down the lake following the snowmobile trails.  It was much easier walking without towing the toboggans, and we got to the end of the lake about noon.  The trail leaves the lake about 400 metres to the west of the canoe portage, and cuts across to the north until you reach a path that heads east to the falls.  The last part of the trail is a snowshoe only path, and when we reached the falls we stopped to eat our lunch.

It was bitterly cold at lunch.  Our sandwiches were pretty much frozen.  Our cookies were in crumbles (since I’d stepped on our lunch this morning), but we gulped them down as fast as we could. Although it was beautiful and sunny, there was a very light south wind blowing off the river towwards where we were eating, and the moisture combined with the cold and wind made it very frigid.

By the time we’d finished lunch we were getting cold, but we took pictures as fast as we could.  The falls are spectacularly beautiful with ice crystals on all the surrounding trees.  Across the river on the east shore is a solid wall of ice from spray which has frozen agains the rock wall.

Above Nistowiak Falls

Above the falls the river remains open, so there are clouds of steam rising into the air.  Then the water falls over the ledge.  Unlike the summer the falls are muffled.  With all the snow and hoar frost on all the surfaces to deaden the sound, there is only a soft rumble, not the loud roar of summer.

Nistowiak Falls

We didn’t stay long.  My fingers were very cold from operating my camera ((in fact when we got back to the tent I discovered that I had frostbitten my fingertips, and they were quite sore).   When we left the falls, too soon for they were so beautiful, but we were also so cold, we both wore both our sweaters and down parkas.  We walked for over half and hour until we had warmed up enough to take off the parka layer and gp back to our lighter walking jackets.

After snowshoeing about 15.5 km we got back to the tent in time to start the fire, eat some gorp, and then cut a huge stack of firewood.  Graeme thought we had enough, but I said I wanted to make sure we had lots to get through the night, so we cut some more (as it turned out, we didn’t need it all and still had a lot left the next morning).

Supper was supposed to be turkey stew, but when I opened the cooler Graeme said, “does that label say ‘Turkey Broth’?” 
And of course it did, as I’d taken the wrong container out of the refrigerator.  Fortunately there was a few pieces of meat in the broth, and we had some homemade buns, so we didn’t go hungry.  However we did joke about our arctic explorer broth of shoe leather.

Tent lit by lantern light

It was very cold, but also very clear, and the full moon lit the sky brightly  and reflected from the snow on the lake.  It was so bright that you could only see a few of the brightest stars. 

I kept the fire going all night, awaking every three or four hours to re-stoke the stove.  It made for a pretty comfortable night.  As well there was a rapid change in the weather.  At 11 pm the sky was still clear and it was bitterly cold, but an hour later at midnight the sky was clouded over and the temperature was rising.

The church at Stanley Mission

It was a very cold morning as we left Prince Albert at 6:30.  We’d hoped to leave about an hour earlier, but I slept in longer than we had planned, as the alarm didn’t ring (perhaps we set it for 5:00 pm).  The temperature was near -29C as we drove north, and though it warmed up periodically to about -25C as we travelled through various different weather systems, it had dropped again to about -27C  by the time we reached Stanley shortly after 10 am.

We drove to the Northern Store (I’d phoned the store last week, and they said we could park there), and located the manager.  He was pretty surprised that we were planning to snowshoe in, as it was very cold.  We said that our target low temperature had been -25C, and that we hoped that it would warm up to that during the day.  He checked his iPhone and said that the forecast was for about that temperature during the day.

“You’ll be warm enough whie you’re walking,” he said.

“And we have a stove, so we’ll be all right at night,” I replied.

Leaving Stanley Mission

We finished packing our toboggans, tying the skis, poles and shovel on, then set off.  There is a large open patch of water just to the west of the church (there must be a fairly strong current there) and fog was rising above it.  After taking a couple of pictures, we set off quickly across the lake, following the snowmobile trails which skirted another patch of ice that had been slushy, though now at this temperature it looked solidly frozen.  In the rough tracks as we started my toboggan tipped twice and I was very concerned that it would be unstable.  However, it seemed to work well after that and never tipped again.

We headed to the south east to where the trail follows out a creek which flows into the south end of Mountain Lake.  It was easy travel at first since the trai was going across the bay and was smooth.  Soon however it left the water and began to cross overland.  Then the trail got a good deal rougher as it crossed many frozen hummocks in the spruce bogs.  It also climbed upwards steeply enough that it was a tough pull with the toboggan.  Though never long hills, the trail did go up and down quite a bit.

Lunch along the trail

We stopped aong the side of the trail after about one and a half hours, at a spot where there was enough room to pull our toboggans off the trail and clear from the path of snowmobiles.  Just before we ate lunch two snowmobiles had stopped and we spoke to them briefly.  They were on their way to Hunter Bay on Lac la Ronge, and the lead man said that, “it’s supposed to go up to -10C tomorrow, according to my iPhone,” so that gave us some hope that we would have a warmer day tomorrow.

I’d wrapped my coat around my insulated water bottle and sandwiches before putting it in my pack.  The water bottle had been filled with boiling water when we left Prince Albert, and when I took my sandwiches out the cheese had melted and they were still warm.  We ate our peanut butter cookies, drank our litre of hot chocolate and some water, and then headed off after a short stop of about ten minutes.  We were already starting to get cold from that brief stop, so walked on for another hour before we paused to eat our gorp.

The trail was easy to follow as it is used by enough snowmobiles to be well packed.  If it were not for them we could not possibly have completed the trip.  I was pulling a toboggan that weighed about 95 pounds, and a 25 pound pack, while Graeme’s toboggan weighed 115 pounds and his pack 20.  The sleighs were not hard to pull on the flat, though up hills were tough, and the constant jerking of the tow lines as the sleighs climbed up and down the frozen hummocks made it a strenuous walk.  This was particularly true for the three or four kilometres before reaching Iskwatikan Lake where the trail winds a lot as it crosses overland.

Finally we reached our destination of Iskwatikan Lake, though we still had a couple of kilometers to go until we reached a spot to camp.  A small point of land, not too high and with enough open space that we could clear looked promising.  Best of all, it had a great deal of dead spruce, both standing and deadfall, for firewood.

We set up the tent quickly after I stripped off my wet shirt and put on my down coat.  Graeme just put his parka on over his wet clothes, which was a mistake.  He was all right until we got the ground shovelled clear of snow and set up the tent.  Then he got very cold very quickly.  I got a few twigs collected and the fire started as fast as I could, then he changed into dry clothes and ate some gorp while I sawed and split some bigger wood, and we soon had it warm in the tent.

It got dark very quickly, so it was good we arrived when we did about 3:30 pm.  By the time we had the tent set up and the stove going it was already getting dark.  I tried to pump the lantern, but the pump was jamming and very hard to use.  We did get enough pressure to set the new mantle, though not well.  Once the lantern warmed up it worked a bit better, but later in the evening after supper I took the pump apart and used the one drop of oil we had in the stove repair kit to lubricate it.  It wasn’t perfect, but it was a lot better after that.

After our supper of chile and rice we went out to cut a good deal more firewood.  We sawed the entire tree which was beside our tent, until we got to the base where it was too thick to cut easily.  I did most of the sawing and Graeme split the wood.  We stacked enough in the tent to last through the night.  We did let the fire die down, but about 3 am I awoke and my face was very cold (though my body was fine) so I restarted the fire and kept it going until morning.

It was a long walk of 12.3 km pulling our heavy loads, and a very, very cold day,  It did not warm up above -20C near noon, and by late afternoon the temperature wa back t -25C..