Somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the most limiting factor for trips across the Great Northland might be "time". Or to quote Ernst Ferstl: "Everyone has a watch, no one has time." While adequate equipment contributes to comfort and safety, poor equipment could be compensated with more time. Outdoor savvy certainly helps but could also be replaced (to a certain degree) with time. And canoeing skills are without dispute of advantage but again can be substituted to a certain degree by time. You simply portage doubtful rapids. In other words: you don't have to be a superhero to make it back in one piece from the far reaches north of 60. Common sense and a humble approach will take you a long way.

Any trip along the shores of any river or lake north of 60 is first and foremost asking for your time.

Greg Allen – a paraplegic who canoed the Mackenzie River three times solo – was the first to bring this home to me. He once wrote:

Being solo becomes a matter of time not physical ability. Rushing almost always leads to mistakes. Mistakes almost always lead to problems. Problems almost always lead to disaster in a wilderness situation. When you travel solo you can not afford any mistakes. Any mistake can be disastrous.

In the winter 1996 issue of Nastawgan (the quarterly journal of the Wilderness Canoe Association) George Luste wrote about another of his epic trips (“canoeing” Great Slave Lake in June). Among his reflections I found some very good advice.

“So today I am more apprehensive about getting myself into dangerous and extreme situations. As I age I have become more conservative, more careful, in what I commit myself to. I no longer possess the physical resources of a younger me, and I try to use my experience, and ‘an ounce of prevention’ instead of relying on quick reflexes and pure strength as a ‘pound of cure’.

I am still a good ‘plodder’, however. I can put one foot in front of the other on a long steady grind on a good portage trail – but I no longer have the agility to skip across wet rocks while carrying a canoe. I no longer want to test my survival ability by running an intimidating rapid. I no longer care to be as casual in expending my energies in futile efforts. And so today I am more inclined to paddle long hours on a calm day or evening and not paddle at all if the weather looks unstable and threatening. I’m more inclined to stop early at the end of a normal day if faced with a rapid, or the possibility of a dump, or even the need to make a marginal decision late in the day. I have convinced myself that plodding is alright when tired. Dealing with risk is not.

Thus I have come to embrace a varied and flexible paddling schedule on my long trips. There are advantages to doing so. One expends less energy for the same distance and I think it makes for a safer overall trip. But it also means that one is faced with more decisions and uncertainty about when to stop and start than a rigid nine-to-five routine implies. Perhaps if the conditions are stable, then a schedule makes sense. If the conditions vary considerably, then a varied schedule is preferred.”

For some people a similarly difficult question may arise. Namely: to go solo or not go at all. This was the question for me in the very beginning – some 20 years ago. There was just no one with ample time and money and a congenial mindset at hand. And today I am glad I went. Though, admittedly, with my pants plenty full. Without much of a clue really about wilderness travels. But with a spot of luck I made it all the way to Dawson City on the Yukon. Today I chuckle when I recall launching my historic Klepper folding kayak. So heavily laden that the stern upper (canvas) deck was under water. Only by levelling out that preposterous load to perfection was I able to move off down the Teslin River from Johnson’s Crossing, with an inch of freeboard to spare. Those were the days when I carried a family-size cast-iron frying pan weighing more than ten pounds.

I am writing this to encourage people to set out on their own. There is a great deal to be gained by going solo. There are many blank spots to be discovered within oneself on a solo trip, from Angst to pure bliss – the whole works. And I found prominent backing for this view in an interview with Robert Perkins on herondance.org.

“With another person it's twice as hard. If you are with five people, it's five times as hard. You end up tuning in to them, wanting to take care of them. Letting them take care of you. Are you alright? Can I help? Your mood is up. Mine is down. We are always looking in each others eyes. If I am alone, I don't experience that. Instead, I have the sights and the sounds of nature. Of other creatures. They become companions.

Solitude is the deepest well I have ever come across. I imagine it would be different if solitude was forced on you, but to choose it is to find a source of sustenance that never runs out. It places a person in proper alignment, in proper order....Some people are less interested in trying to understand or pursue or embrace their inner life. Every time I go on a solo canoe trip, I have to listen carefully to my thoughts and memories. It's the impact of stepping outside with a minimum of things and a great deal of landscape around you. A great deal of quiet. You begin to listen to what is around you and to what is going on inside of you.

It doesn't matter what your concerns have been over the past year -- they just kind of boil off over the two months. Like maple syrup. You get down to some pretty fundamental, beautiful moments where you just catch yourself doing something. With no prior thought and no afterthought. You are totally absorbed making a fire, cooking dinner or just paddling. Those moments are the reason I do it. I just love those moments."

A word about luck:

For a long time I kept pushing the subject of luck ahead of me. It has no real how-to component, after all, so it seemed out of place in a chapter like this one. But after an enormous stroke of luck in 2026 there is no getting around it any longer: luck is part of the equation. Certainly for me, and I suspect for most others as well.

And I am not talking about the mere absence of bad luck. I mean the real thing – the luck that saves you from catastrophe after you have already made your mistake.

The real danger out there is not the bears, and not any other wild animal. It is you. And on that subject you are hearing from a specialist: mistakes are my field, and some of them were plain stupidity. Most of us get things wrong, make the wrong call, forget something important. And then you can only hope there is enough credit left in that imaginary account to get off with nothing worse than a fright.

On the Horton River I did not tie the canoe to a willow. I dropped a large loop of line over a boulder instead. It held perfectly well against the wind, which was the only thing I had given any thought to. Then it rained hard, the river came up in the night, and at some point the loop floated off the top of the rock. The canoe went with it.

It fetched up a few metres downstream on a shallow bar, held there by the rainwater it had taken on. An hour more rain, or a little less water in the hull, and it would have been gone, and most of my gear and most of my food with it. I am reluctant to unload the canoe completely: it is a lot of work, and an empty canoe is so light that the wind takes it, so it has to come up the bank and be weighted down anyway. A second barrel of food had been set down higher up still, above the very rock the bow line was looped over – and it was not high enough either. That was gone too. I found it a kilometre or two downstream, caught in the willows – which I could only do because I still had the canoe. Without it I would have been standing on that bank with a tent, my clothes and a wanigan holding a few days’ food – and nothing left to do but press the SOS button on the inReach. Apart from drowning, I can think of no worse way for a trip to end. And none more shameful.

None of that was bad luck. The luck was all in how it ended. A loop over a boulder is fine while you are there – going ashore for an hour, with the boat in sight and the water where you last looked at it. It is no way to leave a canoe overnight, and least of all on an evening when it has already started to rain. That was the moment to act on, and I did not. What I needed was not more skill but a rule instead of a judgement: either the canoe comes out of the water and up the bank every night, heavy as it is, or it goes on a willow. Decide once, and you never have to decide again at ten in the evening in the rain.

So if you are a born unlucky fellow, be extra careful. And if life has treated you as a lucky one so far, do not count on that for a single moment and be just as careful – because you never know how much is left in your luck account. To my mind, coming back from out there safe and sound takes a minimum of luck as well.

If there is a how-to component to any of this, it is this: you cannot top that account up, but you can slow down the withdrawals. Every extra day of food, every rapid you portage instead of run, every morning you sit out the wind on shore, every time you tie the canoe up properly, is a withdrawal you do not have to make. Which brings us right back to where this chapter started: time. Time buys you most of that margin. The rest is discipline – rules made in advance, so that nothing has to be decided at the end of a long day in the rain – and sticking to them when it comes. Luck only has to cover whatever is left over.

And one more thing worth keeping in mind: every trip report you have ever read was written by somebody who came home. The ones who leaned on their luck and lost it never wrote theirs. Which makes the whole record look a good deal safer than it really is – mine included. So be careful about measuring your own risk against other people’s stories. And expect every trip to hold a lesson you have not had before.

But I'd like to end this chapter on a more encouraging note:

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it;

Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.

And no matter how practised you are out there: put some tobacco down before you leave. And practise gratitude – for every day granted without mishap, for tailwinds, a good campsite, sunshine and so much more. Again and again. Because "It is not the happy people who are thankful. It is the thankful people who are happy." – attributed to George Herbert Morrison, The World-Wide Gospel (1933), and long misattributed to Sir Francis Bacon. And if you prefer it with some science behind it, these two are worth a read: Why Gratitude Is Good – and, on gratitude’s sister appreciation, A Scientific Reason to Stop and Smell the Roses.

Both the (First Nations') rite of offering tobacco for a safe passage and the gratitude that follows will, if practised over and over again, take your mindfulness to a new level, sharpen your awareness and ultimately make for a safer journey. It may sound esoteric, but it really isn't. And of course it is not foolproof either, as I found out the hard way on the Burnside River.