8 Days on the Steel River

Cliff is pissed. Partly because we failed to notice the sign in the first place, but even more so because there IS a portage sign, compliments of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources. “Well, there goes the wilderness,” he harrumphs as we pull our canoes onto the rocks and unload. Three years ago, “there was no goddamn portage sign, let alone this hideous stop sign. I sure hope the government bureaucrats haven’t civilized anything else.”

Backwoods magellan: Jacobson knows topos.

No worries, Cliff, at least in regard to the portage trail. From what we can see, there is no trail. Instead, we’re faced with schlepping four canoes and way too much crap hand-over-hand up a narrow pass between two low mountains. According to the map’s contour lines, the first 1,200 feet alone of the infamous, mile-long carry requires 450 feet of elevation gain.

“This, my friends, is why virtually no one undertakes this trip,” Cliff says as we prepare for our monumental climb. “Most paddlers these days have gotten soft and downright wimpy. They aren’t willing to put up with the pain to get into really wild country.”

As much as I worship wilderness canoe tripping, something I’ve been doing for 35 years, I’m beginning to feel like one of those lightweights Cliff has just described as I wobble upward with an unwieldy boat over my head and a heavy pack digging into my back.

Four sweltering hours later—after three round-trip carries and one knee badly wrenched in a boulder-choked ravine bristling with fallen trees—we at last stumble onto the marshy shore of aptly ¬named Diablo Lake. Throwing off my pack and collapsing to the ground next to a prostrate, near-comatose Cliff, I thank him for the umpteenth time for inviting me on this masochistic little “boy-bonding” fling.

“Larry, my man, you’re most welcome,” Cliff wheezes, the veins on his neck bulging like garden hoses as he laboriously picks himself up off the leafy forest floor. “Trust me, this trip’s going to be great. But enjoy my company while you can, because at my ripe ol’ age, with my short, stubby legs, I might be dead by the time we’re done.”

I tell Cliff that I’m feeling the burn too, despite my daily regime of hiking, biking, or paddling in Colorado’s high country. “And take a look at Jimmy,” I say, pointing to our conked-out, mid-50s friend.

“Yeah, we’re all a bunch of geezers,” Cliff agrees. “Except for Gary. Did you see him fly across that portage with a smile on his face? Carrying the same junk we were, plus a 40-pound camera bag?”

We three Americans force down some energy bars and feel our mojo start to seep back. So I ask Gary if his wife Joanie, at 110 pounds, would have been able to do the portage we manly men just finished. “Are you kidding?” he breaks out laughing. “She absolutely loves this kind of stuff, the tougher the better! She’d run up that mountain carrying a 17-footer by herself and a heavy pack, go back for another load, then hop across that rocky ravine without missing a beat.” Gary must notice how emasculated I look, because he adds, “Well, Joanie probably wouldn’t want me to repeat this, but I did see her cry once on a portage. However, in her defense, it was an incredibly difficult one, the absolute worst I’ve ever done.”

As we push across long mountain lakes, Gary spins tales of his many adventures—paddling whitewater rivers, sea kayaking to distant islands, and hiking, skiing and snowshoeing on forest trails blazed by moose and wolves, almost all in the company of Joanie. His best story is about the day 25 years ago when he won Joanie’s affections. They were college students on a wilderness-studies field trip, a winter ski trek across Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario. They spent a night at 40 below and then, Gary says, “things got really interesting.” He had probed a frozen river crossing and pronounced the ice solid. But when Joanie slid down the bank, she immediately broke through the ice and into the deep, moving water. “So I did what anyone would do,” says Gary. “I reached down, grabbed onto her by her hair, and pulled her out. She had zero romantic interest in me up until then.”

The following year, the couple was through-hiking the Appalachian Trail and dreaming of canoeing 6,000 miles from the Atlantic to the Arctic Ocean. “We had lots of time to dream and plan, but no money,” laughs Gary. So with remarkable savoir-faire, the shy 20-somethings looked for expedition sponsorship in an unlikely place—Labatt Breweries.

Labatt’s agreed to fully sponsor the trip, and with the company’s considerable PR muscle behind them, the McGuffins became known across Canada as the “honeymooning canoeing couple.” Major Canadian newspapers and radio stations followed their progress, and a full-page photo of them in their canoe—prominently emblazoned with the Labatt’s logo—landed in People magazine. The McGuffins had found their calling, and the way to make it happen.

Solo trippers don't always go alone.

Several more well-publicized expeditions followed, all of them designed to draw attention to Canada’s wildlands, among them a 2,000-mile circumnavigation of Lake Superior a three month, 1,200-mile canoe trip through northwestern Ontario’s ancient forests. In 2002, they paddled the entire length of the wild and majestic Great Lakes Heritage Coast in a 21-foot cedar-strip canoe with their three-year-old daughter Sila and malamute Kalija.

Through these trips and other activism, the couple has shed valuable light on efforts to create 378 new parks and protected areas as part of Ontario’s Living Legacy Trust. They serve as official “Champions of the Coast” under the Great Lakes Heritage Coast program, and in 2003 received the Premier’s Award and the Queen’s Golden Jubilee Medal in recognition of their wilderness preservation and environmental education achievements.

The awards are nice, Gary says as we glide toward our camp for the night, “but the ultimate fulfillment of our environmental work is to know that our daughter will be able to bring her children back one day to the pristine rivers and lakes of her childhood.”