Voluntary Simplicity
& CanoeSki

What is the final connection between my background and CanoeSki Discovery Company? The values I acquired in my formative years have definitely influenced the company's direction. As a child, I grew up with a conservation ethic - saving, making do with less, recycling, patching, improvising and reusing. Our family lived what is now known as a life of "voluntary simplicity" - except that it wasn't really voluntary - it was essential for survival! We were wise beyond our years and ahead of our time, at least in the as yet unheard-of practice of environmental stewardship.

Transferring this background into the operation of CanoeSki Discovery Company has been a seamless endeavour. There is a natural fit between my personal values and the business values of an ecologically oriented adventure enterprise. I have enhanced the fit over the years by involvement in local environmental organizations such as the Saskatchewan Environmental Society, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Nature Saskatchewan, and in recent years, the Ecotourism Society of Saskatchewan.

I can not conceive of a more gratifying experience than to be the owner of a business that offers a socially redeeming product while contributing to the betterment of the planet. And that is what CanoeSki does!

I have been working since 1986 in my own practice as a Registered Massage Therapist. In addition to my home-based business, I am a single mother with 4 children, now young adults each discovering in their own way the wonders of our great Earth. I live and work in Saskatoon where I was born. In 1974, I went to live in New Zealand and spent 15 years there before returning to Saskatchewan in 1989.

While living in New Zealand on the shores of Lake Taupo, I became involved with a group of families concerned with integrating wholistic medicine into their lives. This is where I studied massage therapy along with many other types of bodywork, and herbal remedies. This is also when I began to explore my spirituality, and a big part of that was being at one with Nature. Living on the lakeshore presented plenty of opportunities to go sailing, but I had never been in a canoe before becoming involved with CanoeSki and the women's tour program.

CanoeSki offered the opportunity to combine my life's work with my love of nature in a challenging situation where I could also accomplish some important personal growth. How could I resist! I must admit I had to go into training, knowing the

demands on my body would be great, as not only would I have to paddle my own canoe, so to speak, but I would be on call to help the guides in any way they needed as well as soothing all the participants' aching muscles after a day of paddling.

The women's canoe trips have meant more to me than physical challenge. The rewards of helping paddling companions find relaxation, working on them as they sit on a log, or a huge rock, or leaning against a tree overlooking the river, are incredible - spiritually, mentally and emotionally. At the same time we might be watching thunderclouds roll in, or listening to the sound of loons as they circle around our island campsite, keeping an eye on us. Also, the opportunity to meet like-minded women from all over North America has been a real pleasure.

Through working with CanoeSki, I have been able to overcome my water-based fears and my life has been incredibly enriched by the opportunity of paddling the Churchill River System in the company of some really great people.

I've been a lover of camping and wilderness experiences for as long as I can remember, drawing more inspiration from nature than from any other external source. I love the challenges of wilderness canoeing and fondly remember the women's camp "villages" of trips past that would spring up out of nowhere within an hour of landing and unloading our canoes each day.

As a mother of four and a professional songwriter, poet, composer and book artist, I've learned that it's little moments that make up a life. For me, being out in nature has inspired many memorable moments that have become part of the fabric of my own life.

In my urban life, I write contemporary folk and classical music, and publish haiku poetry internationally. I especially love hearing and creating harmonies, through singing short songs and rounds from around the world and playing both old and new folk songs. As official camp musician, it is my job to carry a guitar over lake and land so that making music can be as much a part of daily camp life as listening for loons. For those inspired to write, my dry pack also holds paper, pens and a book or two.

For the Women & Waves trip in 1998, I published a small, handbound chapbook entitled Paddle Sounds in which I invited haiku poets from around the globe to submit canoe and wilderness-inspired haiku and haibun poetry. Canoe trip participants every year receive a copy and are invited, during the trip, to try their hand at any kind of writing on their own.

In an effort to keep my wife and two children in a state of total confusion, I thrive on variety. In addition to my love of canoeing, wilderness camping, cross-country skiing and related activities, I spend much (all if possible) of my time running, taking photographs, running, working in my darkroom, and running. Sometimes I even find time to go for a run. So, to sum up my recreational interests, they are: running, black and white landscape photography, running, and anything to do with wilderness protection and enjoyment.

When not running or taking photographs, I do find some time to work. I am a senior environmental planner with Stantec Consultants Ltd. and also teach geography as a sessional lecturer at the University of Saskatchewan.

My non-recreational interests include: recreational (there it is again - I can't get away from it even when I work) and historical geography, northern development, regional geography, and ecology.

In addition to having degrees in both biology and geography, I have been actively involved in many organizations and committees involved with wilderness protection and conservation.

For many years I was the chairman of the Saskatchewan Chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society. Currently, I am the president of the Saskatoon Road Runners Association (did I mention I love running??).

I try to bring my diverse background with me on my trips with CanoeSki. Hopefully, I help participants better understand the environment we are enjoying. For example, on the Sturgeon River canoe trips I introduce participants to both the natural and human history of Prince Albert National Park. Our discussions are wide-ranging and include glacial and fluvial geomorphology, southern boreal forest ecology, historic timber harvesting, national park management, and regional history. I also help Cliff in his efforts to introduce wilderness camping and respect for the land to tour participants.

I took up canoeing as another way to get into nature; it gives me access to wild and beautiful places. I love the openness and freedom of the lakes and the self-sufficiency of travelling in a canoe.

I got serious about canoeing when I lived on the Roseway River in Nova Scotia, as a Katimavik group leader, in 1983. My free hours were spent exploring up and down the river, alone in a canoe, trying out the moves pictured in Bill Mason's book Path of the Paddle. I attended a 10-day canoe course where I attained my instructor certification. I also took the Nova Scotia Outdoor Leadership Program, attending weekend clinics on wilderness survival, navigation and environmental ethics.

Back in Saskatchewan, I did a lot of canoe tripping in the north and got my Senior Lakewater Instructor certification. Since then, I have also attained my Canoe Tripping Level 2 Instructor rating.

When I moved to Stanley Mission to teach in 1987, I was in paradise - canoeing the Churchill River after school and all summer. My first summer, I paddled solo from my front yard to Pelican Narrows, 125 kilometres downstream.

I also learned the efficient art of marathon paddling, for there were a lot of top marathon racers in Stanley Mission.
The school sponsored a race from Missinipe to Stanley Mission each fall, which I entered. The race took about 4 hours. The same route with my Grade Sevens, as a class canoe trip, took 3 leisurely days! One November, when the river froze solid and smooth with a fine dusting of snow, some of us skate skied our marathon race route and saw it from a new perspective.

I now live outside La Ronge with my two children and husband. In winter, I teach art classes at La Ronge's two colleges. Each summer, I give Canadian Recreational Canoeing Association sponsored clinics around the North to adults and children. Since 1996, I have guided women's canoe trips for CanoeSki. I also do annual canoe trips with my family, and these allow me to paint and sketch the outdoors.

It is important to me that people act respectfully and responsibly toward nature. Canoe guiding allows me to help nurture this attitude in others.

I was first introduced to our north country in 1963, as one of three Junior Assistants on a Saskatchewan Research Council geological survey crew based on Hanson Lake, headed by Dr. L.C. Coleman of the geology department at the University of Saskatchewan. I got this, my first outside-the-family-business summer job at least in part through my friend Clay Van Dyck, who had worked the previous summer on a similar field crew in the Flin Flon area. These five-person crews (more usually sent out by the provincial Department of Mineral Resources) worked for many years to carry out the baseline mapping of Saskatchewan's Precambrian Shield geology. For some time now, I think, this kind of mapping has been done remotely, by aircraft.

I was the full-time camp cook on this expedition, and this was an excellent "trial by fire" introduction to cooking, a practice I have enjoyed since then.

My second summer in the north, along the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border north of Flin Flon, was a more intensive introduction to living in the north, since the three Junior Assistants rotated both cooking and traversing duties. We all tallied many miles over the summer, slogging over all terrain - memory tells me that it was all deadfall and quaking bog - over which the Junior Assistants/packhorses carried packs full of very heavy rock samples. This summer involved a lot of motorized canoe travel, but also an introduction to paddling, and I've loved canoeing ever since.

Murray Pyke, a legend in geological circles, was the crew chief. He loved the north, and he had a strong interest in its characters and history. At the start of the field season we went to visit Harry Moody at Denare Beach. Harry was a retired trader and an active, accomplished local historian and amateur ethnographer. Working with local Cree people, and drawing archaeologists and historians to his beloved Amisk Lake area, Henry amassed archaeological and historic artifacts, and a great deal of local history pertaining to northeastern Saskatchewan. The beginnings of today's excellent Northern Gateway Museum in Denare Beach arose from Harry's collections and organization in the 1960s.

Meeting Harry and learning something of this history turned out to be a life-changing experience for me. Near the end of that summer I was told about some paintings that were on the cliffs in a narrows down the lake on which we were camped. I had never head of such things in our north, so was intrigued enough to go and see and photograph them. When I showed my pictures to Dr. Zenon Pohorecky, who was teaching the first University of Saskatchewan classes in anthropology and archaeology that fall, he became excited, and obtained a grant from the Institute for Northern Studies for me to begin recording such sites in the summer of 1965.

The rest, as they say, is archaeology. I was hooked on studying these curious and fascinating remnants of past cultures, and this fascination continues with me. My studies led to my M.A. thesis in 1974, entitled The Aboriginal Rock Paintings of the Churchill River, which is the most comprehensive study of the subject done to date. Truth be known, it is the only such survey done so far, and it is certainly possible and desirable to study these sites more intensively.

I've made a number of bus-man's holidays to see rock art in Finland, France, Spain, and Canada from Ontario to British Columbia, and the southwestern United States. I've also made many trips to our north strictly for pleasure, as well as to do archaeology, although not as many as I would have liked.

My interests in archaeology and history are not confined to rock art - I've worked on Plains camp and kill sites and boulder configuration sites, fur trade sites, and an industrial archaeology site in the far north, both as executive director of the Saskatchewan Archaeological Society and as an independent consultant. I have been involved in multi-disciplinary teams involved in a variety of museum and tourism development studies, and currently teach anthropology and ethnology of North American Indians at the Saskatoon campus of the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College.

My "day job" (80% time) is executive director of the Saskatchewan Archaeological Society, a position I have occupied since 1987. The S.A.S. is one of the continent's most active volunteer archaeological organizations, presenting over 20 programs annually in various aspects of archaeology, including advocacy for conservation, touring, consultative services, publication, providing learning activities for the public, and public education in general.

Two of the Society's current projects, with which I am intimately involved, deal with northern Saskatchewan rock paintings: a 45-minute film, and a travelling exhibition. Both will be completed and ready for circulation by late spring, 2002.

My involvement with CanoeSki Discovery began in 1997, when Cliff approached me to be involved in the Rock Art Camp, as an archaeologist who was knowledgeable about northern Saskatchewan archaeology in general, and rock paintings in particular. I jumped at the chance, partly because the last time I had been to the sites was over 20 years before.

Since the first Rock Art Camp in '97, my Board has approved the participation of theSaskatchewan Archaeological Society and myself, as part of its mandate for public outreach and education. (As a "by-product" of our involvement, we developed a set of guidelines for visiting archaeological and historic sites. These guidelines have been requested by various agencies, and are now part of the accreditation program of the Ecotourism Society of Saskatchewan).

Aside from my involvement with the Rock Art Camp as a representative of the archaeological society, I have a pretty broadly-based interest and knowledge about all aspects of the natural and human heritage of our north, including more recent history, botany and ethnobotany, and geological and glacial history.

I've had a canoe to call my own since I was 18, which is a very long time ago. All the same, I'm no expert at paddling (that's why we take Cliff along!) But I do know something about the birds, animals, plants, insects and other living things that we are likely to encounter along our route.

It would be my pleasure to tell you what I know and to share new discoveries with you. When I'm not canoeing, I write books about wildlife, natural science and a wide variety of other subjects.

I first became interested in plants during a year that my husband and I spent living in the Nova Scotia woods. There I had time to explore the possibility of putting food on the table from the forest we lived in. Time I needed, because before collecting them, I had find out what the plants were. This was an interesting and fun challenge that continued a year later when we were living a subsistence lifestyle in a Newfoundland outport.

When I entered university in Saskatoon a few years later, I followed up on this interest by taking most of the botany courses offered, including several taxonomy classes that taught me the fundamental skills needed for plant identification.

On graduating, I took a job surveying eagle nest trees in northern Saskatchewan that brought me into contact with a Cree woman who, to my surprise, knew Cree names for many of the plants that I had studied in university. Because of my interest in this, she encouraged me to record traditional knowledge of Cree plant use, which she was aware was being lost as members of her parents' generation passed away. This sounded much more appealing than working in a lab, so I undertook the project as part of a master's degree in ethnobotany at the University of Saskatchewan.

The summers of 1979 and 1980 were spent talking with Cree residents of the Churchill River area in the eastern half of Saskatchewan, a group known as the Western Woods Cree. This was a wonderful project and I very much enjoyed my time with these most hospitable people, who knew much about the plants around them and generously shared their experiences with me.

After completing this project, I raised a family full time for about 10 years, and then slowly got back into botany work. This included fieldwork as a plant taxonomist close to Saskatoon (at Wanuskewin) and as far away as fly-in lakes near Wollaston (remote northern Saskatchewan); a 10-year field study of the population dynamics of Saskatchewan's native wild lily; some teaching and curriculum development for the Saskatoon Board of Education as well as for Wanuskewin Heritage Park (interpreters), University of Saskatchewan (students), and Saskatchewan Environment & Resource Management (plant survey crews).

Several small publications, as well as numerous articles and public presentations, have come out of these years of work. In addition to my master's thesis, published by the National Museum in Ottawa, the Lac La Ronge Indian Band published a small booklet written with a Cree woman on native hide tanning methods, and a booklet on local, traditional plant use for school children.

In the last several years, editing various books and publications on Saskatoon birds, Saskatchewan butterflies, and nature in the prairie provinces (a quarterly called Blue Jay) consumes most of my time.

Travelling on the small gem-like lakes in Nova Scotia was my first introduction to canoeing and when my husband and I lived in the woods, we used a canoe regularly (and skis in winter) to cross the lake to get to our cabin. Starting with that year in the woods, we also did a lot of primitive cabin living in different places, including Newfoundland and Saskatchewan. I enjoy living outdoors, and also enjoy sharing what I have learned about ethnobotany, especially how the Cree, whose homeland the CanoeSki tours pass through, used plants in daily life on the land.

Tansi! I'm Bonnie Hamilton - a wife, mother of 3 children, and care-giver for 13 sled dogs. The lower Foster-Churchill River area of Northern Saskatchewan is my home where I was born and raised. Mine is a traditional Aboriginal family of Cree and Dene descent. Hunting, trapping, fishing and gathering are important activities in my family background.

Many of my skills I acquired in the traditional way. My teachers were skilled Native craftspeople and elders who taught me by example. For many years I have been instructing others in traditional native arts and crafts. There is a special kind of excitement I share with my students when they have learned a new skill.

The wilderness is a very special and important part of my family. We live outdoors as much as possible. It is part of our home. Our lifestyle includes travelling in the wilderness; canoeing and dog-sledding are favorite ways of getting around.

I have a native arts certificate with honors and I have apprenticed under people, expert and experienced in native crafts. I belong to the La Ronge Environmental Society, I am involved in land use planning for the area that is my home, and I participate in community and environmentally-friendly events. Our family is also involved in and part of a community school. We are members of the La Ronge Ski Club. We have a child and dog-centered home near the town of La Ronge. Ekosi!

I am told that my first canoe trip was in Algonquin Park, Ontario, when I was six months old. My mother tells me it was fantastic: I lay peacefully on the bottom of the canoe, didn't eat a great amount, and wasn't too heavy to pack across the portages. Many more canoe trips followed this.  My first paddle (after graduating from tree branches) was a little Canadian Tire kid's paddle tied to a thwart, but I soon learned the strokes.  From then on I was hooked.

When I was six my family decided to try an adventure. We built a log cabin just north of the Churchill River, Saskatchewan, and homesteaded there for seven years. There was no road access, no phones, and no running water. Our family car was a 16ft cedar canvas canoe called Phoenix. In winter we cross-country skied everywhere.

Needless to say, I grew up immersed in wilderness, and loved every day of it. We watched the seasons pass slowly by; laughed when the bald eagle chicks across the bay learned how to fly and got excited when the trout came up to the shallows in the springtime. These years shaped the person I am now and will always be a part of me.

Life goes on however, and we moved to Saskatoon in 1987 to rejoin civilization.

I went on to obtain a biology degree from the University of Saskatchewan and a fine arts degree from the University of Ottawa. I also wanted to explore the world, so I spent a year studying in Sweden and five months exploring South America. Currently I am working towards a Bachelor of Education in Saskatoon and hope one day to teach young children.

Throughout these years I have gone north in my canoe as often as possible, both visiting the family cabin and tripping along the Churchill with fellow paddlers. My love of canoeing has landed me in marathon racing canoes, dragon boat races, slalom C1 events, and white water adventures in both canoes and kayaks. In winter, I race in the provincial cross-country ski loppets as another excuse to get out into the wilderness!

It was only recently that I started guiding for Cliff, but already I feel part of the team. I can think of no better way to cope with the stresses of life than to head into the backcountry with a group of wonderful people and a flotilla of canoes. There has been so much good feeling, laughter, reflection and awe at nature's beauty that has come from these trips that I look forward to every one!