One of the people who paddled the fur trade rivers in almost every province in Canada to travel from Fort St. James, B.C. to Ottawa, Ont. for Canada’s 150 birthday recounted the journey to an attentive audience at the Rossland Museum last Wednesday.
Wayne Wilson started working in museums in 1978 doing exhibit design and development, moving through various positions throughout his career, and finishing it with 12 years as the executive director for the Kelowna Museums Society. Now that he’s “retired” he still does consulting and is, in fact, consulting on the Rossland Museum & Discovery Centre’s renewal project.
It was a colleague in Kelowna who suggested he take up paddling trips.
“When I was still at the … Kelowna Museum, my board present had done the trip from Rocky Mountain House to Thunder Bay, and he came to a board meeting one time and he said, ‘Wayne, you gotta try this. You’d love it.’ And as it turned out, I’d been with the museum for a long time, I had six weeks holidays, I saved it all up and I took that six weeks and we went down the Columbia River from Invermere to Fort Astoria,” Wilson explained.
Since then he’s also done a trip down the MacKenzie River, and this summer participated in Paddle Canada 150 — a trip from B.C. to Ontario, covering many of the old fur trade routes, in voyageur canoes.
Wilson and the rest of the Paddle Canada 150 crew set out from Fort St. James on June 6, paddling the Stuart River. On June 7, they connected to the Nechako River and on the 8th connected to the Fraser River, finishing the B.C. leg of the journey in Prince George the same day.
In Alberta they paddled Thompson Creek and the North Saskatchewan River, ending their journey in Rocky Mountain House. Then it was onto Saskatchewan where they paddled the South Saskatchewan River from Pike Park to downtown Saskatoon and where they paddled a small section of the White Sand River.
In Manitoba, they paddled Lake of the Prairies from Highway 5 to the Shellmouth Dam and sections of the Red and Winnipeg rivers.
Then in Ontario, they paddled the Ottawa River from Deux Rivieres to Lac Holden. On June 29 they joined the Petawawa Paddlers where they paddled into Petawawa, Ont. And on Canada Day they paddled down the Rideau Canal into Ottawa to celebrate Canada 150 in the nation’s capital.
Wilson got a little emotional as he described waiting in a lock of the Rideau Canal, crammed in with a bunch of the other canoes that were making their way down the canal, when a woman stood up and lead everyone in singing O Canada and when they finished, she started again, in French.
Wilson himself didn’t paddle the whole way, he switched off with other paddlers and joined the road crew. He wasn’t even supposed to be in the canoe on Canada Day, but on such a grand occasion, they loaded the boats past their regular capacity.
Asked why he and the rest of the crew did the trip to mark Canada’s 150th birthday, Wilson said, “We wanted to do something that would be kind of a point of reference for ourselves and for the communities that we went into.”
Along the route, the Paddle Canada 150 crew were greeted at historic sites, where summer students dressed as voyageurs were happy to argue fur trade history with crew members, and by members of First Nations along the route.
Wilson is also a talented artist and chronicled his Paddle Canada 150 trip in beautifully lettered and illustrated travel journals, as well as online at paddlecanada150.wordpress.com.