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14-Day Wild River Camping Adventure - Exploring a Forgotten Wilderness of Northern Quebec & Labrador: Québec's Côte Nord region is home to many wild rivers that spill into the St. Lawrence River and Gulf. It's a rugged mountain wilderness, much of it requres floatplane access. Fly-in fishing for Brook Trout, paddling whitewater and the odd bushwhack portage are key wilderness techniques we’d use on this adventure. We’d be way off-grid for this deep wild camping adventure which would take us down one of the region's far-flung and seldom traveled rivers. This documentary from my trip covers a lot of the backcountry knowledge and skills I learned and used along the way.

The river we planned to paddle is called the East Natashquan which we'd follow to the Natashquan, finishing our trip at the Gulf of the St. Lawrence. The Indigenous, Montagnais Innu travelled the East Natashquan by canoe until the end of the 1940s, since then, there was only one other person who'd paddled it - the legendary Herb Pohl and that was in 1999. It was 2015 when I paddled this river but Herb had since passed and we were left with little information on the river, save for topographic maps and some of Pohl's notes.

The East Natashquan boasts a 4-kilometre long canyon filled with continuous rapids up to class 3. The canyon begins after the river plummits over a massive waterfall that's well over 100" tall. Above that, a canoeist needs to run over 2-kilometers of continous class 1 & 2 rapids that push up to the brink of the falls. Being pushed over the falls would be a certain death. Precedding the rapid-filled canyon lays 20kms of shallow swifts where grinding against the gravel bottom and crashing into stray rocks is enevatable. Because of all this, the traditional route taken by the Innu in bark and later canvas canoes bypassed the entire kit and caboodle via a chain of small lakes requiring a total portaging distance of over 10 kilometers. Since this trail hasn't been traveled in any significant way since the 1940s, the 10km portage would be not far from a bushwhack the entire way. Also, because the huge waterfall and canyon was traditionally avoided, it means that there is no portage trail around the waterfall, making that a total bushwhack portage. Not long after this canyon, there is another one that is more challanging in the whitewater department than the higher one. It again requires a horrible portage, though parts of it it could potentially be run, because my wife and I had only one canoe (making whitewater travel more dangerous) and we had our dog with us too, we knew we had to portage the whole thing. This portage required 18-hours of carrying and touched on three days, we slept on the trail for two nights.

It's because of these obvious canyons on the map, and the not-knowing if they would require portages or not, plus, the difficultly of the possible portages and the challange of the whitewater, that this river is rarely traveled. Now that the Innu don't travel it by canoe, their knowledge of it has dropped considerably since the late1940s / early 1950s when for various politicial and social economic reasons including the opening of Natashquan IR in 1953 at the Natashquan River's mouth where many Innu took up permanant residence. Traditionally, the Innu of the area traveled up into the courty to winter and then spent summers closer to the coast fishing Salmon.

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Here are some more of my videos you may like:

- 11Days Solo Camping in the Arctic Watershed E.1
https://youtu.be/AECycIepMJI

- Lake Trout Fishing in the Northwest Territories
https://youtu.be/OSMtirs_3zY

- Across Baffin Island - Me and my dog trek for 18-days to cross a mountain wilderness in the Arctic winter.
https://youtu.be/8IqgRE_cyAQ

Yukon Wild – 14 Days Solo Camping in the Yukon Wilderness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04mbw...

North of Lake Superior – Baird Brothers Alone in the Wilderness
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IdkGB...

True Wilderness – 14 Day True Wilderness Camping Adventure – Northern Saskatchewan – Full Doc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRxl-...

Thanks again for watching and for all your support!