Dwayne Wohlgemuth has spent a long time hiking and canoeing the most rare corners of the Northwest Territories but none were perhaps as special as his 2020 summer excursion along the Thelon Esker.
Wohlgemuth was the Charles Camsell keynote speaker at the 49th Yellowknife Geoscience Forum on Nov. 24, and spoke about his 40-day trek across the esker and his encounters with different types of wildlife and landscapes along the way.
As Wohlgemuth described it, an esker is a shoestring-shaped ridge of sediment left behind from ancient rivers that flow underneath glaciers from the last ice age.
The glacial landform runs about 700 km from Dubawnt Lake near the NWT and Nunavut border, mostly across the tundra to the Acasta River close to Gameti.
From his own research, he found that there are more than 20,000 of the rare land-formations in Canada but few have names. Having learned about the geological formation in 2019 from a blog post by Dave Olesen, a pilot and McLeod Bay resident of the East Arm, he said he became fascinated with the idea of travelling and raising awareness about it.
“We had done so many canoe trips and a few hikes in the Northwest Territories at that point, but I had never heard about this esker,” he said.
“And so after reading about it, I thought, how can we make this esker better known and I was like, I gotta hike this thing, I got like this thing. Let’s put it on the map.”
Wohlgemuth received some sponsorship money from the Royal Canadian Geographical Society as the Society’s 2020 Expedition of the Year. He also received some support from Mountain Equipment Co-op and Seek Outside.
During his talk, Wohlgemuth described many of the types of landscapes he encountered from acres of sandy ground to the diamond exploration district and Canadian shield and rocky terrain, to kettle shaped, high quality lakes. On numerous occasions he said he ran into many wildlife, with one special one including seeing a muskox in a sandy area he was observing east of the Thelon River in a sandy area.
“All of a sudden one of the rocks stands up and I realized it in this middle of this vast, huge field of sand there’s a muskox, and it’s almost 30 degrees out,” he recalled.
He noted that it was bewildering how thick its fur was and that it wasn’t overheating.
In other instances he contended with bugs, spotted six caribou and ran into nearly 10 grizzly bears, one which he noted took off suddenly to avoid a standoff encounter.
“The bears were always in my path. They’re always on the esker, eight of nine, were on the esker,” he said. “That’s where they love to be.”
He described some of the challenges of the trek that included rocky, river crossings, extensive windy conditions, and picking the right camping positions adjacent to the eskers to stay safe from stormy weather.
Along the way his diet included many cloud berries that were found everywhere and bowel leaf mushrooms.
“I reached the Acasta River on the third of September, and what a celebration that was,” he said. “Of all the trips I’ve done, this one was definitely more focused on that goal of really finishing.
He said he hopes to provide Indigenous names to eskers in the Northwest Territories and provided 3,500 waypointed photos to researchers at Carleton University.
The trip was also part of a short film called The High Road, which was selected for the 2021 Banff Mountain Film Festival.
The Geoscience Forum wraps up on Nov. 26.