The Thelon and Elk Rivers

Big screen tents keep the bugs out at chow time

The lower Thelon from Beverly Lake to Baker Lake is true tundra and is the ancestral home of the Inuit who now live in Baker Lake. Avoided by most paddlers due to the chance of being wind-bound on the 110 mile length of Beverly, Aberdeen and Schultz Lakes, this was for us perhaps the best five days of our trip.

I still have vivid memories of gorgeous tundra campsites, unbelievable fishing, hardly a biting insect, ancient sites where Inuit lived. One night paddle along the shoreline of Aberdeen Lake took us past huge ten-foot-thick sheets of ice looking like glaciers where they were calving into the lake. A lone caribou walked across the top of one as we slid by.

Later, as we glided across mirror-smooth water, we were enveloped by a night fog. Feeling like passengers on the Titanic, we blindly navigated several bay crossings by compass and watch alone. The shoreline disappeared behind us as the dense fog swallowed us ... and then as we listened to the haunting sound of loons as the shoreline reappeared mere feet before we paddled into it.

When we finally decided to camp for the night we drifted into a beach and watched as several of the large rocks came to life and disappeared into the mist—a small group of caribou. And then the next morning when we awoke to a hot sunny day we saw where our new friends had come back to sleep on the beach beside us.

Aleksektok Rapids marks the end of the large lakes. This is a big piece of ferocious whitewater. Just past the tight right hand corner there are several holes and ledges that are not easily avoided and could easily swallow an elephant. The cross on the hill bears grim reminder of what can happen if you have trouble.

We paddled down an easy channel right of center and worked our way along this margin until just before the corner where we did an aggressive front ferry into a boiling tight eddy—the kind of eddy where I couldn't quit paddling until Lynda leaped out and held the front end of the canoe.

From here I easily lined the boat a few hundred yards past the worst of the rapid and then we paddled the bottom. Alternately the portage is about one mile on river right. From here the Thelon is like a bob-sled run—you could easily run the entire 50 miles in about 8 to 9 hours.