In pursuit of caribou: Minnesota man heads north in search of remnant herd of species
This summer, Rob Kesselring is in search of caribou. Not a brand of coffee, but a famous group of caribou known as the Beverly herd that roams the tundra of the Canada provinces of Northwest Territories and Nunavut.
The Apple Valley canoeist and adventurer knows the animals well. He has made more than 15 canoe trips above the 60th parallel (above which lies the Northwest Territories and Nunavut), and in the 1970s, he and his wife built a cabin near Great Slave Lake and lived off the land for more than a year. Caribou were a staple of their diet.
While Kesselring easily could hire a bush plane to see the Beverly herd, he and friend Peter Lenmark of Helena, Mont., leave this week to begin a 910-mile journey by canoe across Canada’s subarctic tundra.
It’s a six-week trip that involves three portages more than a mile in length. Starting just east of Great Slave Lake, the two men will race the summer clock to reach the Inuit village of Baker Lake before late-August storms rake the north.
They’ll travel a region the size of Minnesota and the Dakotas combined where there is not a single permanent human resident.
Kesselring wants to see the Beverly herd because the animals are quickly dying out. once numbering more than 400,000, the herd mysteriously has declined by 90 percent in recent years, and Kesselring wants to see it while it’s still around.
“One of the goals of our trip is to look for remnant populations of the herd and other clues about what might be wrong,” Kesselring said.
Canoeing in the tundra above the 60th parallel isn’t unusual for Minnesotans. several YMCA and other youth camps send elite young paddlers to the tundra each summer, and the annual far North Symposium is held every March in St. Paul for paddlers to talk about their trips. I spent two weeks in 1997 canoeing the Kazan River in the “Land of little Sticks,” an Inuit name for the region because it’s too cold to grow trees.
(I recall epic clouds of biting black flies and mosquitoes that invaded the smallest opening of my clothing, even flying up the cuffs of my pants. And, indeed, the caribou were numerous.)
Kesselring and Lenmark’s six-week trip is unique because of its length and the route. It is so far north that many lakes are only ice-free in July and August. during the first leg of their trip, beginning around July 4, they’ll use a small outboard to push their canoe 160 miles upstream on the Taltson River.
Kesselring leaves this week to drive to Helena, Mont., to pick up Lenmark. from there, they’ll drive to the community of Yellowknife on the north shore of Great Slave Lake. (The drive to Yellowknife from Apple Valley is more than 2,500 miles.)
They’ve hired a bush plane to fly them 160 miles to Nonancho Lake, where Kesselring has a canoe stashed at a cabin. They’ll make any repairs to the canoe, then with a 2-horsepower outboard motor, they’ll take their canoe and gear up the Taltson River and another unnamed river to a high point of land called the Arctic Divide, where water flows to either the Arctic Ocean or Hudson Bay.
“With only six weeks, we need to get up the Taltson as fast as possible,” said Kesselring, explaining the use of the motor, “because we won’t be in Baker Lake until the end of August when the weather can get pretty nasty.”
This area around the Arctic Divide has significance for Kesselring because it is where a grizzly charged him and his niece during a 1997 expedition.
From there, the two will paddle hundreds of miles down the Elk and Thelon rivers and eventually through three giant lakes – Beverly, Aberdeen and Schultz – before reaching Baker Lake.
Kesselring and Lenmark won’t be resupplied during the trip, so they’ll carry enough food to sustain them for six weeks. They’re carrying flour, lard and baking powder to make bannock, a type of flat bread, and they’ll carry 60 meals of instant oatmeal. They’re also bringing bags of dried eggs and fruit.
“We’ll count on eating lake trout every other day, if not every day,” he said. “We’ve never had trouble catching them.”
The men expect to see musk oxen and moose, and they are bringing along a lightweight shotgun for protection against grizzlies.
A new winter road and power line are being constructed in the region, opening it to mining, and Kesselring wants to experience the country before development comes. “It’s an extremely pristine area with so few people,” he said. “I want to document it the way it is today.”
In pursuit of caribou: Minnesota man heads north in search of remnant herd of species
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