This is the twelfth trip that the Arctic Division of the Geriatric Adventure Society has made to northern Canada in those twenty years. In late afternoon a few days ago a Twin Otter on floats ferried us from the city of Yellowknife to the western end of Dismal Lake and put us off on a narrow sand beach backed by willows and swamps. We were pretty beat from about sixteen hours of virtually seamless flying, so simply set up our tents, fired up the Coleman stove, made supper, and went to bed. Eric, of course, went fishing, and naturally caught a lake trout.

Dismal Lake was no doubt named by a homesick British explorer on an especially bad day. The Inuit have always called it Tahikyuak, “long lake.” It’s anything but dismal: open tundra stretching to a horizon punctuated by glacier-scoured basalt mountains that look just as they were described by the first European travelers to venture here over a hundred years ago. Those early explorers were navigating by common sense, instinct, and information gathered from natives. We have maps, a GPS, and even color photographs, taken by satellite, of our entire route. A couple of shacks on an island in the lake are reminders that the Inuit from the coast come here by snowmobile in May to hunt caribou. An occasional lonely claim stake along the shore is a further reminder, of corporate interest in deposits of uranium and diamonds assumed to lie in the lake basin.

All but one of us on this trip are in our seventies now. But I don’t notice much diminution in our abilities. True, the canoes do tend to get dragged across the tundra now on portages, instead of carried, but they get there just as fast as ever, and the thickly matted knee-high willows and birches cushion their passage quite gently. Carrying a canoe through that toe-tangling mess of bushes is almost impossible, anyway.

The pilots of the Twin Otter had mentioned the possibility of ice on the lake “in the Narrows.” Sure enough, there it was next morning, shore to shore and impossible to push or chop through. We were contemplating a very disagreeable portage up and over a hill when somebody noticed that the ice, pushed by an east wind, was moving toward us; further, that where it crunched against the rocky shore on its way past, there was a small band of fractured, floating ice cakes. We were able to push through, and a little later, where the ice was stationary, to make an easy half-mile portage over flat ground. After that, the wind kept the ice away from our shore. We could concentrate on getting used to paddling again, and upon getting used to each other again.

There are no new men on this trip; we’ve all been north at least twice before. We’re what would be called, in an educational setting, slow learners. For us, bugs and cold and strenuous portages are simply devices employed by Nature to keep the tourists away. The challenges of the trip, the vast, brooding tundra; and the wildlife everywhere, from almost-tame ground squirrels to inquisitive, lumbering grizzlies, are what keep drawing us back. This time, so far, we’ve passed the nests of several eagles and gyrfalcons (terrible judges of human intentions), who either try to huddle out of sight or fly out to shriek at us. We passed a gull rookery on one island, and the parents came streaming out, like World War II dive bombers, and behaved very disagreeably. It’s easier to imagine than describe how disgusting it is to be hit by one of their bombs.

After three days on flat water, we eased into the Kendall River, the outlet of the lake that feeds the Coppermine a day or two farther down. Reading the journals of the early European travelers here – Hanbury, Stefansson, Hornby, the Douglas brothers, and a pair of Catholic priests – we’ve been prepared for tricky, threatening rapids, but they’re yet to appear. The water level is perfect for our canoes, the rapids just steep enough to be exciting, and the lake trout at the foot of each pitch just aggressive enough to give us plenty of fillets for supper each evening. Not knowing whether we’d find firewood, we brought eight liters of fuel. But there are dry willow and birch branches lying everywhere along the banks – even enough for a reflective campfire after supper.

There’s no after dark, by the way. Although the days are shortening rapidly here now, five weeks after the summer solstice, I still can read in my tent at solar midnight. Almost every day has started the same: gray, lowering skies and a north wind at breakfast time, slowly giving way around noon to patches of blue sky big enough to make a Dutchman’s breeches, and finally to clear skies and light breezes by suppertime. Bob has been meticulous about hydrating the dried food and producing gourmet meals; Rick, if he learned nothing else at Annapolis, sure did learn to wash dishes; Eric provides several pounds of trout per day, either as an hors d’oeuvre or the entrée; Al is turning out to be a genius at picking routes down through challenging rapids and stretching our estimate of what’s possible; Alex’s steadfast good humor is infectious; and my game leg is actually getting stronger as the first week progresses. And wonder of wonders! We’ve finally struck on the technique for making our daily pudding dessert actually “pud,” instead of just lying there in a yellow, liquid mass. I hope the trip will get better as we go on, but I don’t know how it can.