We lie in our tents, totally drenched in sweat from portaging one of our folding Klepper kayaks, plus a double-weight pack, to a ledge at the edge of Thelon River Canyon. Although water is the usual mode of transport with kayaks or canoes, occasionally they are transported by land. This is the case at Thelon Canyon.

Our trip began at Whitefish Lake, the true headwaters of the Thelon River,

Thelon Canyon:
Tyrrell's ending is our beginning

which means Whitefish River in the Dene language. Our destination was Baker Lake, near Chesterfield Inlet, Hudson Bay, 1050 km away to the northeast.

A Great Canadian Wildlife Adventures base camp was on the west shore of Whitefish Lake and ‘Tundra Tom’ was there. He seemed like a benevolent Kurtz: the size of a bear, with a gruff exterior and a heart of lightness. Tom and his family founded this ecotourism

company and he has been flying and guiding in the north for decades. He freely shared his knowledge of the river route and history of the people who lived and died in this place. He helped us annotate our maps. Pointing at Thelon Canyon, he advised, "take out below the island on river right."

At the end of July 1900, James W. Tyrrell, Robert Bear and Toura ended their three-day portage of Thelon Canyon where we start ours.

Although we knew that the Canyon had previously been lined along the left bank, Tom’s advice was plain: "I don’t care what kind of boats you’ve got, don’t try to run the canyon!"

This is tough medicine to take considering the descriptions of the Thelon Canyon portage that Paul 'Tuktu' Jensen and I have read " 6.5 km of excruciating pain " but, we swallow the advice with another tip from Tom. He said, "I never

go as far as Clarke River. There’s a little creek about halfway. Go down there. You can ferry upstream outside of the ledge on the right shore.”

James Tyrrell was the first person to photograph this canyon. On February 26, 1900, he left Edmonton, Alberta, on a

the canyon. Rather than dismantle the Kleppers, we came up with a plan to wheel them down the ledge as far as we could and then haul them up the bank to the canyon rim. We did this successfully with a few carries over voids where the shelf had collapsed into the rapids below. Here, each of us held the ends of our boat with an outside hand, suspending it over a 2 m drop until we could get to the other side. Walking backwards along one 40 cm-wide ledge, Paul nearly

Occasionally, a kayak toppled sideways. Finally, we reached a narrow ravine covered with birch, willow and spruce. We had portaged 884 crow-fly m from the start of our portage. This effort took us forever. We wearily pitched camp.

7360 km expedition to explore and map the divide between Great Slave Lake and Hudson Bay. His party of nine men and three canoes descended the Hanbury and Thelon rivers to Beverly Lake and then split up. James Tyrrell, Robert Bear and Toura headed back upstream to explore the uncharted main branch of the Thelon. On July 28, Tyrrell and his party reached the Hanbury-Thelon junction again. They portaged the canyon and headed upriver into unknown country on July 31.

We started paddling out of that country on July 12, 2003, through Whitefish and Lynx lakes, and reached Thelon Canyon on July 24, 103 years after James Tyrrell. We pulled out at a low sloping ledge directly above the first drop of

became a space walker. We used wheels, a belay rope and wrestling techniques to pull our 35 kg kayaks to the top of a steep 10 m-high boulder gravel bank. Then, the hard work began.

We struggled across the rock-strewn tundra to our first camp on the canyon rim. Life on the Thelon depends on food, shelter and movement. We took 210 kg of food and gear for our 33-day trip. The boat-wheels generally worked well, but our forearms strained and jarred when an axle or wheel slammed against a rock.

We continued our portage the next day. In turn, we slid the boats on top of the willows down the ravine and gasped as we tugged them up the steep slope on the other side. Our second load took us three hours. Our 115 L waterproof yellow packs were bulging. At first, we carried a pack each and jointly pulled the kayaks. Later, we leap-frogged packs and boats, depending on which muscles were freshest. Blood vessels burst in my right bicep. We pushed, pulled, lifted and slid the boats and packs to a steep bank above a platform of rocks below us. We wrestled our boats down the bank and camped next to the river. We searched for suitable

curves in the bedrock to match the forms of our backs. When you find such a place, you are truly at one with the world. Here, at the ending, we were only 2.2 crow-fly km downstream from where we began our portage. The two days

of exhausting effort had taken us over 27 km of rough ground.

That evening, we hike along the canyon rim on paths that Tyrrell’s party must have followed as they traveled upstream with their canoes on their heads and shoulders 100 years earlier. Thelon Canyon’s sloping, white-crowned ledges are river-wide before us. Foaming curls of clear, green water race below over

boulders, gravel, sand and water-worn ledges. The chute runs straight for about 3 km and then makes a sharp left turn past the mouth of Clarke River to the junction with Hanbury River. There is no driftwood for a fire here. A few gulls call out over the water. A merganser fishes in a backwater in front of our tents. At four in the morning, I look for a peregrine falcon. I search for animal tracks. The sound of the rapids dominates all things here, even the peregrine’s call.

C. B. Sikstrom is a professional biologist and award-winning writer who lives in Calgary and at Marie Lake, near Cold Lake in Alberta. He recently returned from working and paddling on Sakhalin Island in Russia.