Don't Throw Your Life Away - Battling Marine Debris from Alaska to Panama
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Voyager3
Active member
I appreciate that, always surprised what comes out of just a phone. There's so much to find everywhere. Is the rice museum worth a look? Maybe I'll look for it after Expo East.
I do, too. It seems that making sure a dog has the best life you can offer is a great way to have one yourself.
Voyager3
Active member
Alright, let's go north. I want to see what Saskatchewan can offer. So we saw some of Price Albert National Park, but it was sort of interrupted by the brakes. It's a lovely area, and we had a nice stay in a cabin. So we were heading further north. We had heard La Ronge might be cool, and I've been wanting to see more of the Canadian shield. I am aware that La Ronge is what experts call a very long way away from Australia but, if you find the right trading post....
It's also a long way from Golden, Colorado, but....
At the visitor's center in La Ronge we met the lovely Judy who convinced us to continue heading north to Missinipe. There was a chance that she could arrange a jet boat ride. I could be talked into a jet boat ride. Further north we finally get to the tiny town of Missinipe where we have another small cabin to stay in. When we arrive, Judy's husband is ready and waiting to take us out on the lakes and rapids in his boat.
So this is Otter Lake, well more specifically, Otter Rapids. More generally, it's all really the Churchill River, all these lakes joined together by small rivers, many with rapids between them. It's a pretty crazy watershed. These rapids are deep because this is one point the whole river has to get through, rather than spread out over a number of other lakes and pinch points.
Lakes into lakes, rapids after rapids
Quite a welcome into a town which in the winter has only as many occupants as I can count on my fingers and toes.
Saskatchewan. Go to there.
It's also a long way from Golden, Colorado, but....
At the visitor's center in La Ronge we met the lovely Judy who convinced us to continue heading north to Missinipe. There was a chance that she could arrange a jet boat ride. I could be talked into a jet boat ride. Further north we finally get to the tiny town of Missinipe where we have another small cabin to stay in. When we arrive, Judy's husband is ready and waiting to take us out on the lakes and rapids in his boat.
So this is Otter Lake, well more specifically, Otter Rapids. More generally, it's all really the Churchill River, all these lakes joined together by small rivers, many with rapids between them. It's a pretty crazy watershed. These rapids are deep because this is one point the whole river has to get through, rather than spread out over a number of other lakes and pinch points.
Lakes into lakes, rapids after rapids
Quite a welcome into a town which in the winter has only as many occupants as I can count on my fingers and toes.
Saskatchewan. Go to there.
jgaz
Adventurer
Yes, the rice museum is worth a look. A lot of your stops are more interesting, at least to me, but the museum and lunch were a great way to kill time until we could get into our rental.
Voyager3
Active member
The following morning we inquired about maybe going up for a flightseeing tour of the lakes, but the weather was too foggy. So we hung around a bit, and I got some writing done while my mom looked into flights for herself to get home out of Winnipeg. Later in the morning we heard one of the fleet taking off from the lake and decided to pack up and see about having another shot, and if not, we would continue exploring. When we walked back into the office again, the owner there, Gary pointed and said "Do you still want to go up?" Yes, absolutely. There was enough of a break in the weather, and they said we could take a Beaver instead of their Cessna 185. Gary was a character, he was quick with a joke and we even left with a couple of signed prints of some of his many paintings. They called a pilot down to meet us, and pretty soon the 20 year gap between flights in a DeHavilland Beaver was over. Again, there are few engines that sound as good as a big radial, especially at idle. Standing next to the Wasp Junior 16L 9 cylinder is like standing next to 4.5 Harley's bolted to a propeller. The flight was great. We flew close to the water for a while exploring the lakes, learning about the area, flying over rapids, the changing colors of the northern forest, the oldest building standing in Saskatchewan, the church at Stanley Mission. And all the time, our pilot Les, knowing my interest in flight, was always explaining what he was doing, what he was watching, and how things worked. I especially liked the hand pumped flaps. He's got some fun stories. Too bad this plane didn't have dual controls.
Mom seems to be enjoying herself, too
Same rapids from the boat, but from the air.
Mom seems to be enjoying herself, too
Same rapids from the boat, but from the air.
Voyager3
Active member
Time for more life advice from Dirt Wilson.
Take it more as a metaphor, whatever you're planning to do, remember to get to the point where you just do it. However, people also jump off of this bridge into these rapids for fun up here. So, there's that. I did not. Maybe find yourself a real Canadian and ask them about courage, I'm just taking interesting pictures. But we have now seen the same rapids from the water, the air, and the bridge. I think most people to visit Missinipe won't get all 3, but this trip is working out in a funny way. I also think most people won't even bother coming up this far to visit Missinipe anyway, and they're missing out. I sometimes see some traveling types on the road, but hardly any in Saskatchewan in the first place, and none up north.
Yeah, nowhere near an ocean. But like I said, lakes, rivers, it's all fair game.
The weather has been on and off snow flurries
But we also ended up going the way I wanted to when I was looking at a map before when all these places were just in print. So Flin Flon, Manitoba, here we come.
Flin Flon, funny name right? Here's the story. That fine looking fellow up there is Josiah Flintabbatty Flonatin from the novel, The Sunless City, by E. Preston Muddock. In 1914 a copy was found by prospectors in the wilderness of northern Manitoba. A year later, these men found a conical hole in the earth showing gold. Tom Creighton, for whom the adjacent town of Creighton was named, remembered the adventures from the book where the character escaped from an underground lake through a gold studded hole in the earth suggested the claims be called Flin Flon as a shortening of Flintabbattey Flonatin. The statue was designed by Al Capp of Li'l Abner fame and erected in 1962.
The town is built basically on old lava rock, and one of the first things we did after the view from the tower at Bakers Narrows was take a walk around Ross Lake in the middle of town.
Take it more as a metaphor, whatever you're planning to do, remember to get to the point where you just do it. However, people also jump off of this bridge into these rapids for fun up here. So, there's that. I did not. Maybe find yourself a real Canadian and ask them about courage, I'm just taking interesting pictures. But we have now seen the same rapids from the water, the air, and the bridge. I think most people to visit Missinipe won't get all 3, but this trip is working out in a funny way. I also think most people won't even bother coming up this far to visit Missinipe anyway, and they're missing out. I sometimes see some traveling types on the road, but hardly any in Saskatchewan in the first place, and none up north.
Yeah, nowhere near an ocean. But like I said, lakes, rivers, it's all fair game.
The weather has been on and off snow flurries
But we also ended up going the way I wanted to when I was looking at a map before when all these places were just in print. So Flin Flon, Manitoba, here we come.
Flin Flon, funny name right? Here's the story. That fine looking fellow up there is Josiah Flintabbatty Flonatin from the novel, The Sunless City, by E. Preston Muddock. In 1914 a copy was found by prospectors in the wilderness of northern Manitoba. A year later, these men found a conical hole in the earth showing gold. Tom Creighton, for whom the adjacent town of Creighton was named, remembered the adventures from the book where the character escaped from an underground lake through a gold studded hole in the earth suggested the claims be called Flin Flon as a shortening of Flintabbattey Flonatin. The statue was designed by Al Capp of Li'l Abner fame and erected in 1962.
The town is built basically on old lava rock, and one of the first things we did after the view from the tower at Bakers Narrows was take a walk around Ross Lake in the middle of town.
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Now that's an interesting trip you have going. Thanks for helping to raise awareness on such an important issue.
Plastic in the ocean is definitely an industrial scale problem and I've recently read about a guy who invented a method to pull tons of plastic out of the ocean.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mn...lean-ocean-plastic-hes-back-and-its-happening
"Boyan Slat was just a regular Dutch high-school student when he went on a diving trip to Greece in 2011. Once underwater, he was surrounded by plastic waste. "There were more plastic bags than fish," he told MNN a few years back. "That was the moment I realized it was a huge issue and that environmental issues are really the biggest problems my generation will face."
I'm old enough to remember seeing barges of garbage out of New York City being hauled out to sea and dumped.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...ABAB&usg=AOvVaw3Nq3zwFelK5gKlq9vgP1Wm&cf=1
By raising awareness, through your fantastic trip reporting, you're helping to educate, and factual education fights ignorance and Prejudice where real progress can thrive.
It's been a long journey.
Plastic in the ocean is definitely an industrial scale problem and I've recently read about a guy who invented a method to pull tons of plastic out of the ocean.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.mn...lean-ocean-plastic-hes-back-and-its-happening
"Boyan Slat was just a regular Dutch high-school student when he went on a diving trip to Greece in 2011. Once underwater, he was surrounded by plastic waste. "There were more plastic bags than fish," he told MNN a few years back. "That was the moment I realized it was a huge issue and that environmental issues are really the biggest problems my generation will face."
I'm old enough to remember seeing barges of garbage out of New York City being hauled out to sea and dumped.
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sou...ABAB&usg=AOvVaw3Nq3zwFelK5gKlq9vgP1Wm&cf=1
By raising awareness, through your fantastic trip reporting, you're helping to educate, and factual education fights ignorance and Prejudice where real progress can thrive.
It's been a long journey.
Voyager3
Active member
Thanks for reading! I have certainly come to terms with not putting a real dent in the issue like that young man is doing. I should even be sharing more stories while I'm pretty much in the center of Canada. I have shared his story elsewhere before, hopefully it works as planned. But we have to adjust our lives on land if we have any chance of keeping the oceans clean. Thing is, there's so much to do just in your local rivers and lakes, and here in Canada and the States is not what makes headlines compared to the Caribbean, the Pacific, the rivers of Asia, trucks backing straight up to the banks of the Amazon and dumping right in the water. For the most part we don't see people dragging bags of household trash to the boat ramp so it can be washed away. But that's the grim truth elsewhere.
When you said industrial scale problem, that's a great way to describe it. The amount of plastic that ends up in our oceans every year now is about equal to the total global production in 1960. It's only accelerating, and if we don't tackle this as united earthlings, we're going to have a much bigger fight in a couple more decades.
Voyager3
Active member
So Flin Flon is an interesting place, and I enjoyed the company of the folks I met there, but it also has a trash problem. All across Canada now there's something going on called Culture Days. Communities celebrating what makes them tick. Art, museums, talks, music and more. Maybe we should get our communities to have cleanup days, not just at Culture Days, not just on Earth Day. Every month. Every pound brought in by a family entitles them to certain perks. I'll think more about how to implement it, but I think if the people of any town got out every month or every couple weeks to clean up after themselves not only would they have a nicer place to live, but they would take another look at how they live their lives the other days so they didn't have as much to pick up. Back at camp we swept campsites as a group in a big line and grabbed everything, ours or not before we left. Every time.
I even got this bottle out of the tree. I wonder if we're going to have a global problem of plastic pollution in trees. The ground was too soggy to stand on, so we found a bit stick to flip it out of the branches and grab it.
Anyway, the town. Yes, it's built on rock. Specifically basaltic lava flows that erupted under water. It's an interesting formation where the superheated, 1200 degree Celsius surface of the lava came into contact with the frigid waters and flash froze into glass. The shock of the temperature difference then cracked the glassy surface into chunks and it was overrun and incorporated into the following flows into pillows building up. These lava formations are ancient from 1.886 to 1.925 billion years old. There also many tiny "bubbles" in parts of it where gas escaped the lava flow and the cavities were filled with minerals like quartz before they cooled again. When it was chosen as a town site, they just had to build on top of it, so in some cases rock is incorporated into basements, and water mains and sewer lines had to be above ground surrounded by wooden boxes, that then became sidewalks.
And it seems the whole area has embraced rock graffiti as part of their identity. I don't know how it started, and it seems to have been going on for quite some time. Seems a lot of other people heart a lot of other people. It's just not my thing. I would much rather look at rocks than this.
It gives folks named Travis a bad name
Nature can always do more interesting things anyway, like freeze mud
I even got this bottle out of the tree. I wonder if we're going to have a global problem of plastic pollution in trees. The ground was too soggy to stand on, so we found a bit stick to flip it out of the branches and grab it.
Anyway, the town. Yes, it's built on rock. Specifically basaltic lava flows that erupted under water. It's an interesting formation where the superheated, 1200 degree Celsius surface of the lava came into contact with the frigid waters and flash froze into glass. The shock of the temperature difference then cracked the glassy surface into chunks and it was overrun and incorporated into the following flows into pillows building up. These lava formations are ancient from 1.886 to 1.925 billion years old. There also many tiny "bubbles" in parts of it where gas escaped the lava flow and the cavities were filled with minerals like quartz before they cooled again. When it was chosen as a town site, they just had to build on top of it, so in some cases rock is incorporated into basements, and water mains and sewer lines had to be above ground surrounded by wooden boxes, that then became sidewalks.
And it seems the whole area has embraced rock graffiti as part of their identity. I don't know how it started, and it seems to have been going on for quite some time. Seems a lot of other people heart a lot of other people. It's just not my thing. I would much rather look at rocks than this.
It gives folks named Travis a bad name
Nature can always do more interesting things anyway, like freeze mud
Voyager3
Active member
Here are some of the sewer boxes
If it was up to me, I'd say leave the rocks alone. Here's urban art I can get behind.
And found this cool critter. The Auto-Neige by Joseph-Armand Bombardier. This was before Bombardier was a company which wasn't until 1942, and apparently there were 12 snowmobiles called B7s like this built in 36-37. This was the beginning for Bombardier.
This is also not a bad place to be a paddler because with some work you could get to the four major bodies of water around this continent from here.
But me, I'd rather fly. Does something about this particular 185 seem strange to you?
If it was up to me, I'd say leave the rocks alone. Here's urban art I can get behind.
And found this cool critter. The Auto-Neige by Joseph-Armand Bombardier. This was before Bombardier was a company which wasn't until 1942, and apparently there were 12 snowmobiles called B7s like this built in 36-37. This was the beginning for Bombardier.
This is also not a bad place to be a paddler because with some work you could get to the four major bodies of water around this continent from here.
But me, I'd rather fly. Does something about this particular 185 seem strange to you?
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Voyager3
Active member
For those eagle eyes out there, yes. It has a turbine in it. Apparently an old helicopter guy named Joe Soloy in addition to making turbine conversion kits for helicopters like the Bell Model 47 and the Hiller Model 12 wanted to make conversions for airplanes as well. He also landed nearly at the top of Mt. McKinley in a Soloy converted Hiller to rescue two climbers once. His prototype was this, built in I think '78 and he used it to tour Alaska in the '80s promoting the possibilities and proving the engine and gearbox. Power is an Allison C20 from a Bell Jet Ranger modified so the exhaust works in a plane, and a gearbox he developed, I think. It seems one other 185 was converted by a customer using the kit, and even an ag plane, a Cessna A188. He went on to do a 206 and a 207. The company still offers Cessna turbine conversions. Anyhow, this thing is pretty cool. The owner here at Bakers Narrows has only had it since the summer and loves it. Yeah, it uses a lot of fuel, but it's fun.
So over dinner, which our host so graciously cooked himself, mentioned that he was hoping to take the plane out the next morning to get some footage of it, since a film crew was here for a fishing show. In the morning, we were in luck.
Thank you Brett, it was a great ride. Glad we didn't hit the film drone.
So over dinner, which our host so graciously cooked himself, mentioned that he was hoping to take the plane out the next morning to get some footage of it, since a film crew was here for a fishing show. In the morning, we were in luck.
Thank you Brett, it was a great ride. Glad we didn't hit the film drone.
Voyager3
Active member
The run down to Winnipeg was a solid day of driving with not many stops. But now mom has flown back to Florida and I have to decide how I'm going to get to the coast. East I guess. We've been doing a lot of north and south over the last couple weeks. I liked the middle of Canada more than I thought I would. Here's a short stop to the waterfront at Cranberry Portage.
Did you know there are coniferous trees that change colors and drop their needles? I did not until now. Apparently I have a thing for larch trees now.
Neat huh? I think it's tamarack.
Cooler than the way we leave our rest stops.
Finally a view of Lake Manitoba. Not a bad place to put a house.
And now I stop the south, north, south, north, south squiggle through the middle of Canada and go in search of bigger bodies of water.
Did you know there are coniferous trees that change colors and drop their needles? I did not until now. Apparently I have a thing for larch trees now.
Neat huh? I think it's tamarack.
Cooler than the way we leave our rest stops.
Finally a view of Lake Manitoba. Not a bad place to put a house.
And now I stop the south, north, south, north, south squiggle through the middle of Canada and go in search of bigger bodies of water.
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Doc_
Sammich!
Thanks for sharing your journey with us. I have to confess that I've kept your writeup as a pinned tab on my desktop at work to squeeze in a few moments of happiness and escapism whenever things go sideways.
Thank you for endeavoring to leave the world cleaner and better than you'd found it wherever you travel. This is an uplifting read.
Thank you for endeavoring to leave the world cleaner and better than you'd found it wherever you travel. This is an uplifting read.
ITTOG
Well-known member
I do the same. I have another I watch as well Something tells me we aren't the only ones doing this.
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