Most Americans, perhaps even most Michiganders, think of the Upper Peninsula as the end of the world—remote and frigid wilderness far removed from “civilization” like that found in Chicago or Detroit. Brian Gnauk knows better.
“This is not wilderness,” laughed Gnauk as he sipped coffee and lounged in the living room of his cabin on Lake Superior. “There is not one square mile of the U.P. that isn’t accessible by four-wheeler or truck in some way. Some folks might argue that with me, but those folks don’t know what real wilderness is.”
Gnauk, a professor of business at Northern Michigan University, has spent the last thirty-eight years getting to know what real wilderness is. Along the way, he’s taught dozens of fellow adventurers the comparative tameness of this place we call home.
“The U.P. has roughly 14,000 square miles of land and approximately 320,000 people,” he said. “But in the Northwest Territories of Canada, Nunavat and Northern Quebec, there are 1.3 million square miles and 60,000 people. It’s a playground that is very sparsely populated.
“It’s a different world,” he said. “Once that bush plane leaves, after a 250-mile flight from the nearest town, and leaves you in that wilderness with nothing but your supplies and a foldable pack boat, there is dead silence. You can’t explain it; it has to be experienced. For the right person, it’s the experience of a lifetime.”
So, as each year’s academic schedule winds down, Gnauk busies himself with final arrangements for an annual trek beyond the northern boundaries of Canada’s provinces and into the wild.
While some enter the Northwest Territories or other remote areas in search of solitude, the trips Gnauk organizes and guides are about camaraderie and teamwork.
“I always go with groups, and you have to get the right kind of people,” he said. “The choice of crew is critical; they must have camaraderie, skill and stamina, in that order. Not just anybody can go on this type of trip. You have to find people who won’t give up on you.”
Gnauk, sixty-seven, has guided travelers as young as sixteen and as old as eighty-one. He rattles off an endless list of rivers and lakes encountered on thirty-eight major and twenty minor trips where he served as planner, guide, cook and “chief bottle washer.” This June, he completed a fourteen-day, 125-mile trip on the Snowdrift River in the Northwest Territories accompanied by his older brother Gary Gnauk, seventy (Grant’s Pass, Oregon), Dennis Phillips, seventy (Southfield), Dean Clarkson, forty-one (Bath), and Chris Jensen, fifty-five (Easley, SC).
Gnauk listed the highlights of the trip including amazing views, great paddling and sighting a wolverine. A floatplane flew the crew 250 miles from Yellowknife, only to discover their destinations of Sled Lake and Eileen Lake still frozen over. The trip then diverted to the Snowdrift River, a challenge that included twelve miles of continuous rapids with 400 feet of vertical drop in elevation.
“Wilderness canoe tripping is about exploring the unknown,” said Gnauk, who never repeats a trip on the same river. “It’s also about fishing, ten percent of the time, and about wildlife.”
Gnauk listed wolverines, polar bears, grizzlies, caribou, musk oxen and a plethora of bird life among the attractions.
“And sometimes it’s about retracing historic routes of explorers,” he said. “Wilderness tripping is all of those things.”
Ron Thorley of Marquette accompanied Gnauk on three different trips, to the Walker-Hayes and Quiche Rivers out of Baker Lake and to the Schwandon—a more southern journey taken by the group when weather forced them to cancel plans for an Arctic trip.
“When we were on the Walker-Hayes, it was the first time a white man had ever filed an itinerary to float that river,” said Thorley, fifty-three, who owns Superior Express Care and Wash. “We had to time it right because much of Walker Lake was frozen. We caught it at just the right time.”
Groups fly into the wilderness on Twin Otter or other makes of floatplanes, with plans made for where and when the plane will pick up the group.
“You’re not only dropped off in the wilderness, you’re picked up there,” Thorley said. “So, if something happened to the pilot after he dropped you off, you’d be stranded.”
Gnauk is serious when he says it takes toughness and stamina to enjoy, even to survive, in the north and on the tundra. Paddlers must portage canoes and seventy to eighty-pound packs, at times enduring “clouds” of flies and mosquitoes. Inclement weather or spilled canoes can put a crew at risk of hypothermia.
But putting up with those annoyances is worth it when a voyager lands a monster fish or is awed by scenes like those found on the Mountain River with its six canyons, some with walls as high as 1,500 feet on one side of the river and 300 to 400 feet on the other.
He uses care when putting together a crew, often “testing” first-timers on rivers in Northern Michigan, Wisconsin or Ontario before bringing them to “real” wilderness.
“Brian is probably within the top ten wilderness canoeists in North America,” said Tom Mudge, eighty-eight, of Marquette, who has accompanied Gnauk on twenty-five trips to Northern Canada and more numerous excursions in the U.P. and Ontario.
Mudge said one of the most amazing sights on these journeys to the wild is of Gnauk, a professor and former dean at NMU, who sheds his suit and tie and becomes a veritable voyageur, looking like he could “walk into a gold rush saloon.”
“Wilderness canoeing is a specialty in itself—it involves a tremendous number of abilities,” Mudge said, adding that even at the age of sixty-seven, Gnauk is in prime shape. “He has physical strength beyond what you’d expect of the average professor.”
But according to his fellow travelers, it’s Gnauk’s ability to read rivers, put crews together, plan journeys and teach newcomers to the wild that set him apart from other paddlers.
“Brian is a great leader,” said local dentist Pete Kelly. “He is very cognizant of the ability of the other canoeists in the group. On northern trips like that, you can’t take chances. If you come to certain rapids we might run in Marquette County, up there, we make portage because Brian feels the weakest team won’t be able to run it. In fact, some times he portages when others want to run it. He is very good that way. He really knows the abilities of the other guys in the party.”
Mudge said Gnauk plans for “any eventuality” before he brings a group north.
“He studies maps for a year or more before he runs a river,” the retired physician said. “If you’re paddling with him, you’d almost swear he’d been on the river before.”
Gnauk keeps meticulous records of each journey, then publishes a journal as a gift for each member of the crew. The journals, dating back to 1970, become family heirlooms to many of Gnauk’s traveling companions. By the time the logs are completed, they may be the most detailed documents ever published on those remote Canadian waters.
“If you were to run that river after us, that log would be a valuable document,” Mudge said. “He is meticulous. He tells you how long the portages are, estimates the cubic feet of the flow of the river, the water and air temperature. It’s a thorough document.
“We’ve been on trips where we’ve read everything we could find on the river and (those other sources) are lacking in detail that could make the trip safe and pleasurable.”
While this type of serious adventure travel seems crazy to folks who picture five-star hotels, fine dining and theatre tickets when they think of vacation, Thorley said nothing beats the thrill of a trip beyond the reach of civilization.
“We went a week and a half and saw no sign of man,” he said. “We were probably 150 miles or more from any other human being. In that remoteness, you are responsible for everything that happens to you. You have to figure it all out.
“There is no communication—if somebody had a heart attack, for instance, nobody would come looking for us until three weeks later. It’s about that thrill of adventure.”
And from what Thorley said, there is no shortage of adventure on these trips.
One highlight of any of the trips is fishing, which provides both dinner and recreation along the way. Thorley said on one river, the Arctic char were stacked “like cord wood, with their dorsal fins sticking out of the water” on the Walker-Hayes. The group caught lake trout that weighed in at thirty to forty pounds.
“Those fish have never seen a lure; they have no fear of you,” he said. “They’d swim right up to you, and if you threw a lure in the water, they struck it.”
“I could go on and on—we were charged by a 600-pound black bear on one trip. We could hear it crashing through the trees toward us. I don’t know what stopped it, but it stopped at the river’s edge just thirty feet from Pete Kelly’s kids and kind of followed us along the river bank.”
While adventure abounds in the Arctic, the birds as much as the bears drew Kelly into the wild again and again.
“Everybody on those trips has their own reasons for going and their own favorite things,” Kelly, sixty-three, said. “Brian is always anxious to see what’s around the next bend in the river, and the canoeing aspect, but for me, it’s the biology, the plants and animals. Not just the birds, I like seeing mammals and the fishing, and I like to identify the flowers and the grasses.
“The first big trip I took with Brian was on Victoria Island, a 212-mile trip,” Kelly said. “I saw my first musk ox, my first herd of caribou and first Arctic fox and the birds were nesting. I took a lot of pictures up there. We saw Arctic loons, sandhill cranes, snowy owls, golden eagles.
“It’s totally tundra there. I enjoyed identifying the birds I’d never seen before and finding their nests and photographing them. I was looking for a ptarmigan nest while we were waiting for the plane to come in. I was looking down for the nest and, right behind me, I heard something. I turned around and there was a wolf twenty feet from me. He came out of the tall grass. Then he crossed the river. I took some pictures of him, so at least they’d know what got me, but he just peed on a bush and walked away.”
Kelly said the flowers of the tundra are beautiful, though stunted by the environment, where they bloom for a shortened season and grow low to the ground to survive the winds that sweep the treeless plain.
The history of the Northwest Territories, the Arctic and its native people is another draw, Thorley said.
“You can’t dig where there is permafrost, so the graves are above ground,” he explained. “As you portage, you see the rocks of funeral mounds and inside you see skulls and skeletons.
“You also see Inukshuks, rocks stacked one on top of another like Arctic billboards for communication and hunting. They are just gorgeous. Inuit used them to steer the caribou, which have very poor eyesight, into a specific area where they would encircle the animals and attack with spears.”
Gnauk’s agenda for next year includes a journey to the Nanook River, which flows into Hadley Bay on Victoria Island—about as far north as one can point on a map of Canada. Thorley said it would be a trip of a lifetime.
Kelly, Thorley and Gnauk agreed attitude and perseverance are keys to being a good crew member.
“One minute you ask yourself, ‘Why am I here?’ and the next you are incredibly excited by the wildlife you’ve spotted or the river you are paddling,” Gnauk said. “You are worn out at the end of the day, then the next morning greeted by a spectacular sunrise.
“And the scenery is amazing. On this last trip, we camped where the Eileen River gushes out of a hillside and into a canyon before dumping into the Snowdrift River.”
In his thirty-eight years of wilderness canoe trips, Gnauk said all but three went just as planned, but those three were true “adventures.”
A 1978 trip to the Thlewiaza and Seale Rivers was particularly harrowing. The group flew in to find rivers and lakes covered by heavy ice and was forced to divert eighty miles overland to the North Seale River, where their maps ended . . .

—Eric C. Hammerstrom

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