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We invite everyone to partake in our heli-hiking adventures. This is a vacation, an experience, an adventure, a special trip for everybody craving wild places and we will take you everywhere in the spaciousness of the Nahanni country. No special requirements are needed. Pack up your sleeping bag and come.
The essence of heli-hiking is to see the mountain beauties on two feet, but to get there as effortlessly as a bird on the wing.
Our hikes are tailored to all levels of fitness, experience and age. We will split our tiny group if necessary so everyone can stay within their comfort or work out level. Altitude levels will not surpass 8.000 feet or 2.600 m.
To most of us the South Nahanni area is inaccessible. Too far away. Too hard to get to. Too many skills involved to canoe the wild South Nahanni or to survive a three-week, hard core backpacking trip in absolute solitude.
Here is your chance then: Take a scheduled flight to Fort Simpson, NWT, meet our expeditor, climb into a bush plane and arrive in the land of the South Nahanni. Your very small group consists of the only few humans in hundreds of miles, and you will now safely, effortlessly and easily leapfrog days of hard backpacking with our trusty helicopter; being lifted to amazing, truly breathtaking, utterly pristine places throughout South Nahanni's mountain world.
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We will guide you on daily walks, hikes, climbs, whatever you choose, we will establish camps, here, there, and who knows where. The helicopter will lift you gracefully from one spot of eternal beauty to another stunning vista, to the next lovely campsite, making your heart soar above grey or painted mountains below. You may perch wherever you want. You may hike as much or as little as you like, you may stalk sheep, goats or caribou, you can rest and breathe in solitude, fish for supper, take pictures, find fossils, scratch for minerals, search the skies for the first sign of the evening night hawk. The world of South Nahanni is yours, yours to enjoy, effortlessly.
Our trips are extremely flexible: come in a group, come by yourself, come to rest, come to scale mountains, stay for a week or make it three. Work out a program suited to your interests with us. Pick out choices from our list of amazing sights to experience. Glaciers? Hotsprings? Boating? Fossil Canyon? Ram Plateau? Waterfalls? Ragged Range with lakes like jewels? Virginia Falls? Stalk game? Take stunning photographs? Pick Blueberries? Follow meandering wilderness rivers? Dance light-footed over scrubby berries, pale lichen, patches of grass and grey shale? Which one to pick? All.
Remember, you are not carrying your household on your back, just your water bottle and spare jacket.
Without aircraft of any form the greater South Nahanni area would be essentially inaccessible. The country we visit is remote, so utterly remote that there isn't a shred of any evidence of humanity to be seen. Only a helicopter, the great bumblebee in the sky, will be able to gently lift you from one forgotten spot to another unknown area of remote wilderness. Even hard-core backpackers cannot access this area without the help of aircraft, and their laborious daily progress is just a short hop away with the helicopter, giving you a better opportunity at seeing a wider range of South Nahanni ecosystems.
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Safety is important, to us as well as to you. We want to provide you with an enjoyable, adventurous vacation and guide and fly you through it risk free. Our guides are well trained, First Aid equipment is always on hand, pilots, whether bush plane or helicopter are very experienced and all aircraft is inspected regularly and accordingly to strict government regulation. All guests must attend a mandatory and comprehensive safety talk before stepping into the Bell 206 helicopter.
Safety is a shared responsibility and involves you as much as our guides, pilots and aircraft. And the environment. Nature cannot be controlled and while we will teach you how to step cautiously and climb carefully we need you to be aware of the trail-less and uneven terrain as well as unpredictable mountain weather. These are the factors that will make your trip into the unforgettable, out of the way, wilderness, mountain experience you are craving when booking with us. And also for these reasons we will ask you to read, understand, and sign a waiver of liability in preparation of your trip.
Our expediting services start as of Fort Simpson, NWT, which can be reached at least once a day from Yellowknife, as well as three times a week via Whitehorse, Yukon. Yellowknife is easily reached several times a day via Edmonton, Alberta. You can go to Whitehorse via Vancouver, Edmonton, Calgary or twice a week directly from Frankfurt, Germany.
You can also drive to Fort Simpson on paved and then gravelled roads.
We will pick you up at your hotel or the airport in Fort Simpson and will take you to the charter flight company. You will then head to Root River Base Camp with a bushplane. Once in the sanctuary of the peaceful mountains your vacation will start to unfold.
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You are on vacation. You want to be comfortable, sleep well, eat well. And you will.
We will start your trip in the comforts of base camp, our home away from home. Base camp is situated on a nameless tributary to the Root River, in a wide valley, flanked by the symmetry of grey mountains softened by the dark green of spruce and the pale green of caribou lichen. In this bush-style camp cozy cabins, bright and new, equipped with beds and stoves and porches, invite you to unpack and kick back.
A large camp kitchen, bright and sunny, will surprise you with excellent home cooking and baking, with books to read and happy company gathered around a large table. Even from the kitchen you might snatch a view of caribous traveling upriver, of wolves trotting over rocks and sheep standing in the wall of rock opposite, or a grizzly coming down the mountain. You will sit in the middle of nature submerged in comfort.
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The kitchen as well as a bath house have running hot and cold water at all times. You don't have to miss out on your morning or after-the-hike shower, yes, you can even supplement it with a nice, hot stint in the sauna. There is also a regular washing machine in this amazing bath house that will allow you to take care of your soiled things.
A generator provides a few hours of electricity a day, letting you re-charge your camera batteries. There are a few electric lights scattered throughout the cabins as well, but this being the land of the midnight sun you won't make much use of them. Other lighting is accomplished with candles and propane.
Freezers and a fridge as well as a walk in cooler will enable you to enjoy fresh salads, meats, fruits and dairy products.
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But it is the nature that beckons and camp in itself, while giving you a place of retreat and recharge, is an outdoors experience. You will want to sit on your porch, read, rest, gaze, you might want to play horse shoes, or go for a little walk, or enjoy a coffee or a drink on the river bank out front the kitchen. And you will want to explore the surroundings of camp, head up Fossil Canyon where you can't help but keep stepping on ancient sea life, you will want to live hand to mouth, stuffing juicy blue berries or tart cranberries into your mouth, or you might want to try your luck at fishing for grayling. There is endless country to walk through and animals to be observed. You can go up a mountain or stay in the river bed or hike out of sight into the next valley.
Base Camp though is just the starting and resting point of your trip. We want to show you a lot more of the South Nahanni area. This will be accomplished in day trips as well as camping trips of several days. For this we supply all necessary gear and equipment apart from your personal items. We will be down to modern basics though. All gear will be light, high-tech and new/in good working order. As we are so far from anywhere important on the map and have to rely on a helicopter, with helicopters being notorious for being able to lift very little, we need to stick to the newest supreme technology.
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Spike camp therefore will consist of small domed tents with an extra set up of tarps for a dry kitchen.
Some spike camps will be a bit more sophisticated, featuring wall tents with stoves inside and a kitchen tent with benches and stoves as well as an outhouse.
Food will also be of a light, concentrated variety, tasty as well as nutritious, balanced and healthy. Included will be freeze dried meals of superior quality as well as home made flat breads, cheese, sausage, trail mix and other snacks. There is no way you will go hungry for lack of or tastelessness of food.
We also offer rental equipment to our clients, so if you have no use for an expensive, top of the line sleeping bag with thermarest we will be happy enough to provide you with one. A detailed equipment list will be sent to you before your trip.
(You can arrange, and bend and re-arrange this program to your liking)
We offer 12-day programs as of Fort Simpson, NWT to groups of up to 8 people with a minimum of 4 or 8. We are very flexible and should your group size or time allotted vary from the suggestion above, then please contact us.
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Day 1 we will fly you out of Fort Simpson at 9 am, weather permitting. You will find out that weather dictates all flying and with it all human life in the north. An amazing, startlingly beautiful 1-hour flight by bush plane will bring you to base camp on the tributary of the Root River. After a warm welcome from outfitters and crew you will settle into your little cabin in the immensity of the Mackenzies, visit the kitchen for coffee, tea and cookies and explore camp and its surroundings. We will feed you well and will take you for a hike and a first exploration of the surroundings.
Day 2 and a hearty breakfast will see you climb into the helicopter for your first day trip. We will give you a first taste of what heli-hiking means, alighting on various ridges, soaring down to the blue eyes of little lakes, hiking a little here, a little there, enjoying lunch in the solitude of mountains, then following the rushing waters of the North Nahanni. You are likely to spot your first game, dall sheep in a family group on the hill side, two big rams hiding in a tangle of alpine fir, or a lonely caribou on a lonely ridge. We will finish this day of relaxation with a nice soak in warm hot springs, five minutes flying time from base camp, where a nice supper and an evening fire are waiting for you, flames soaring into the mauve colours of a midnight sun sky.
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Day 3 and we think you have adjusted to life in the mountains and are thirsty for adventures of a grander scale. Good, pack up your camping gear and head for the Ram Plateau, an exotic looking mountain range, sticking up out of the expanse of moose muskeg country, totally flat on top, with plunging cliffs on all sides and the surprising presence of dall sheep and mountain goats in its walls and caves. The Ram River, the caves and plateaus will fill your day, will beckon you to the edge of eternity under summer skies. Close up photographs of rams will amaze the photographer in you, and pictures of people perched like peregrine falcons on top of grey cliffs will baffle your friends back home.
We will spend the night beside a small stream, maybe kindle a miniscule fire, feel the intensity of solitude under the light skies.
Day 4 will throw us back into that 'evidence of human civilization'. We all want to see the South Nahanni River and its Virginia Falls, just a half hour hop from the Ram Plateau. After the impossibility of Cimetar Canyon, a narrow gap just as wide as a small bush plane but as deep as the road below off a New York skyscraper, we will fly over the famous South Nahanni River features, the canyons, the Figure Eight Rapids, Headless Valley, and then on to the Falls. Circling with the helicopter you will get an eagle's eye view of this unplugged bathtub effect, of falls that are twice the height of Niagara and with it the highest ones in Canada, split in half by a hardcore rock Sentinel and presented in the arc of a rainbow.
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Photo Courtesy of Parker and NWT Arctic Tourism |
You will also see that human evidence at the falls we are trying to run away from on this trip. Park's Canada built a walkway to the falls in order to combat erosion, as well as a hiking trail, a helipad, a park ranger cabin, docks and a campground. All in all about 800 canoeists ply the South Nahanni, another few hundred visitors get carried to Virginia Falls from Fort Simpson via float plane, and a choice few with a helicopter.
We will meet a park ranger who will be happy to explain natural and historical features of the Falls and South Nahanni National Reserve and will take us up to the Falls lookout. An extended lunch hour will give everyone time to refresh and the more ambitious hikers of the group opportunity to explore the trail system.
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Back in the helicopter we will follow the South Nahanni River upstream, marvelling at its emerald green colours and the lush vegetation along its shores, so unlike the interior mountains we have explored so far. Once the Tufa mounds of the Rabbit Kettle Hotsprings come into view we will enjoy another pleasurable bath and will then take a three-minute hop to our Bunny Bar Camp site right along the shores of the South Nahanni.
That was a big day, Day 4.
Day 5 will therefore start a bit slower, giving everyone the opportunity to either sleep, or hike or fish, or just sit on a bench contemplating those emerald green waters, so famous the world over. Someone might get lucky and spot a bear on the opposite shore.
Today we want to get onto the water. As canoes only wash us downstream but won't re-deposit us in Bunny Bar Camp, we will take a jet boat, drive upstream to the confluence with the Broken Skull River and will then gently float downstream again. Our aim is to spot a moose browsing dreamily on willows along shore, or to glimpse the grey ghosts called wolves. We should find tracks along this major travel route for game, and how about seeing a grizzly from the safety of the boat? No promises, but the chances of spotting game, any game, are very good.
Behind us, sticking up into those summer skies, loom the jagged peaks of the Ragged Range, west, towards the Yukon border. Their beauty will call for us on Day 6.
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Photo Courtesy of Parker and NWT Arctic Tourism |
Day 6 Up early, packing, enjoying breakfast with the river going by, forever, and then we are off in our bird. We don't have far to go to those ragged peaks, and with amazement we will see tight, green valleys, bunches of white sheep, dirty glaciers, blue ice and lakes like turquoise jewels. We need to stop! Set down, you soaring helicopter! Out we spill into this solitude, into this immensity of mountains, into this unfathomable beauty, into this heart leaping life. Where were we all our lives?! This has been waiting for us!
This day will be a rush of pleasure, of heights, of dizziness, of mountains and vistas and alpine valleys. We will share it only with the whistling marmots, the squeaking picas, the soaring golden eagle, that bunch of caribou. You have been waiting for this day, for this country, all your life.
We will hike and film and photograph, we will try and track down game, approach it with observation and pictures in view, we will see and walk on glaciers, drink out of mountain streams, pick the first blue berries. It will be a day very close to heaven.
Day 7 will be much of the same, another heavenly day of beauty and fulfillment.
Day 8 takes us further north in the Ragged Range and closer towards Grizzly Bear Lake. We will have marvelled at Avalanche Lake, at its intensity of blue in the midst of soaring grey mountains, we will have stood on the shores of Glacier Lake, contemplating is grey glacial silt water, standing in awe in front of the Unclimablables, that cirque of cliffs that draws climbers from all the world over. We have followed the South Nahanni upstream, we have gotten lost in a world of empty mountains, empty of humans.
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Grizzly Bear Lake is a lovely spot in open country and framed by mountains like hills. Fishermen can get their rods out again, the rest of us might search for the elusive wolf and spot some caribou. The helicopter lifts us easily to the top of one of the hilly mountains or two or more. Here we hike under the sun in the midst of everlasting scenery, take our lunch at a small stream, running merrily between the turning leaves of bog cranberry and dwarf blueberry before it is swallowed mysteriously by rocks, never to surface again.
Day 9 means we are really ready for that bath house in main camp, for chairs and beds, for wilderness viewed from the comforts of the cabin's porch, for a fresh salad, a succulent meat dish and fancily dressed potatoes. And dessert.
We will break camp again on the shores of Grizzly Bear Lake, will climb into our hawk on the wing and will glide easily towards the Root River. We are in no rush so will enjoy most of the day touching down here and there, wandering through northern vegetation, over rocks, standing in the skies on top of narrow ridges, savouring endless freedom.
We will arrive in camp sometime in the afternoon.
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Day 10 and time for some fossil findings. After a hearty or/and healthy breakfast depending on your choices off the loaded table, we will pack up a lunch and will head for Fossil Canyon, fairly close to camp. This amazing canyon teems with ancient sea life, making you step on and over it with wonder in your eyes. We will crisscross the little creek, will gaze into its pools and pebbles, will search for ammonites, sea shells and a variety of sponges. You will have a hard time concentrating on the breathtaking scenery or the dall sheep traversing the upper ridges of the canyon, while your eyes are glued to the ground and the walls of grey rock.
A helicopter pick up will give us a soaring flight over some more country, allowing us to savour the open space of the top ridges and deliver us safely in the comforts of camp.
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Day 11 comes around and with it the end of your trip draws closer, your expected leave from paradise, so we choose this day to take you to Paradise Valley, to reddish coloured cliffs that drop into the loveliness of a green valley with the clear blue waters of a stream. Paradise is full of game, of goats and sheep, but also of caribou, predators and moose. We brought the spotting scope along for some wildlife observation.
Paradise Valley is only a short hop by helicopter from Little Dal Lake, from Copper Cap Mountain, from Sheepbed Creek, all places you don't want to miss, hiking, fishing, boating and sweeping in one last big arc over the mosaic of mountains inside the bumble bee.
The last evening in main camp will see our campfire soar into the evening sky, into the breathtaking stillness of the Mackenzies, into the soft colours of the midnight sun.
Day 12 means a return to civilization. The bushplane will come from Fort Simpson, ending your Mackenzie Mountain adventure, but letting you step back into the land of noise and cars slowly, allowing you to savour the 1-hour return-flight, gliding over that jumble of endless mountains, soaring in the skies of untouched, northern eternity.
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