High Falls on the Namekagon
- a destroyed canoe and lessons learned
by Bryan Whitehead

"How's it look?" one of the fathers asked hopefully.

"Ummm we've got a problem" Steve responded. "I remembered that there was a small waterfalls, but the current picked up and, well... I swamped the canoe, and it's still there."

Evidently as the canoe gathered momentum, he told the youngest boy the no matter what, he was to stay with the canoe. Good instructions, but this canoe went completely under with thousands of cubic feet of water poring into and through it!

Steve had somehow been able to grab the small boy and haul him out by his PFD. He then dragged the boy and his son over to the steep, wet mossy rock walls and they amazingly found handholds and pulled themselves out of the torrent.

Now we had a problem.

The remaining fathers and boys portaged and dragged - bushwacked actually - the canoes through the thick brush for probably 200 yards eventually breaking through to daylight at the pool below the waterfalls - and submerged canoe.

Can you see the canoe? Hint, look just to the right of center and you can see the registration sticker. (click images for a larger views)

The dads and older boys stood around respectfully and looked at the canoe. Ideas started flowing. First we grabbed light poly parachute lines, had Steve wade out to the canoe in thigh deep rapids and fast these three lines on to the forward thwart. Three fathers then waded into the pool and tried to pull the canoe out on the count of three. Of course, it didn't even budge.

We then went across the pool below the falls and brought back a birch log, nicely nipped to size by a beaver years earlier. The log was probably eight feet long with a 4-5 inch diameter. Steve and I waded into the rushing rapids above the canoe and tried to pry the canoe out with the leverage afforded by the beaver wood. The canoe didn't even budge ...but we did manage to break the log.

We'd reached an impasse. The sun was setting and we decided to leave the canoe right where it was (as if we had any choices at this point) and return the next day to work on extracting it. The boys, at any rate, were having a grand time watching us work to raise the sunken boat.

We consolidated our passengers and with an additional duffer in three of the boats, we paddled down the rest of the river without incident, taking an hour or so to retrieve our motors and return to our base camp.

June 9, 1997
The sound of the falls woke me up. Either the wind had shifted the evening before... or there was now more water flowing down the Namakagon.

We fixed and ate breakfast quietly as the fathers further puzzled and plotted on how to get the boat out. A core problem was that we didn't have any line heavier than parachute cord - no match for this problem! Suddenly one of the boys pointed out that we had visitors. Sure enough, there in the canoe we had borrowed a couple of days earlier, were two Canadian Provincial rangers. They hailed us and pulled their canoe up on shore.