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A group of Canadian canoeists had congregated at the campsite overlooking the gorge, some distance along the sixteen-hundred-metre portage. They were in the process of portaging their gear and were now taking a few restful minutes absorbing the spectacular scene below them — the thunderous applause of a great river squeezed between ancient ramparts of granite. They had no idea of the tragedy unfolding above the falls at that moment. Walking casually along the brim of the canyon, the Canadians came in sight of the first chute, still dazzled by the immensity of the spillway and the gallery of water-worn rocks. They soon saw that something was definitely out of place; the prow of a canoe bobbed up and down in the surging pool between the first two chutes, a lifejacket ripped in half, a pack and a plastic cooler remained partly visible, caught in a boil of aerated water and river foam. Two of the Canadians had already gone back to the head of the portage where they soon met up with the remaining half of the Ohio party who still believed their friends had made it to shore safely, maybe mingling with the Canadians down at the campsite. The utter horror of the situation sank in when they discovered that their friends were unaccounted for, and that the mangled canoe and torn lifejacket had turned up at the bottom of the falls. They were all wearing lifejackets, Zelenak thought aloud.

A frenzied shore search resulted in little hope of finding anyone alive.

On June 21, 1993, the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Trenton, Ontario, responded to an activated Emergency Locating Transmitter (E.L.T.) on the Missinaibi River, almost a thousand kilometres to the north. An Ontario Provincial Police Search and Rescue Team and helicopter were dispatched early the following day and made contact with a group of paddlers camped at Thunderhouse Falls. Four days later, the rescue team located one of the bodies in Bell’s Bay, twenty-four kilometres downstream from Thunderhouse. The second body was found the next day just below Conjuring House Rapids.

Twenty-five days later, provincial police and Natural Resources officials met in Hearst with local coroner, Bertrand Proulx. Proulx had recalled a similar drowning some years earlier at Thunderhouse but did not want to call an inquest because of the expense, according to the records of the meeting. The report adds, “… especially when he knows what the inquest’s recommendations would be, anyways.” There was no mention in any of the records to making any effort to correct the false information on the topographic map that had led the Ohio party astray.

At the time I was writing a canoeing guidebook to the Missinaibi River, initially because it was both a provincial waterway park and a Canadian Heritage River. The scope of the book changed when I heard about the recent drownings at Thunderhouse. I was on the river at the time, near the headwater, and heard about the tragedy in the riverside village of Mattice while picking up supplies. Two days later I was camped at Thunderhouse, trying to picture what had happened to the Ohio men. Beaching my canoe below the falls and canyon, I hiked up to the pool where the non-existent portage was marked on the map — the portage the Ohio men tried to reach. The pool near where I was standing (where the portage was supposed to be) was relatively calm, streaked with river foam and slowly recirculating; the rapid entering the pool was dramatic and tightly wound with a sharp decline toward the first falls. Even a good, strong paddler could not exit the rapids and get across the pond safely here, I thought. My eye caught a flash of sunlight from an object pushed up along the shore rocks. It was a waterproof, disposable camera, probably belonging to the Ohio men that dumped in the rapids. It was a strange feeling to be holding the record of the last hours of the two dead men in my hand.

A year earlier I was paddling the upper Missinaibi with a girlfriend and had pulled over at an open bedrock island in the middle of Albany Rapids for lunch. A Search and Rescue helicopter landed a quarter of a kilometre downstream and unloaded several men and a small boat. We thought this was just a training exercise. Packing up, we pushed on, paddling the rapid in front of the SAR group and exchanging casual waves. When we reached Mattice and dropped in to sign the river guestbook at Nancy’s restaurant, owner Doris Tanguay mentioned that someone had drowned upriver at Albany Rapids about a week ago and that the rescue squad was having difficulty getting the body out of the river. I realized we had paddled directly over a dead man that was wedged in rocks underwater and that the SAR members we had passed were still trying to extricate the body. The log book showed that over a hundred paddlers had passed through in the last four days, and they, too, had paddled over the body in the rapids.

After the two Thunderhouse drownings and the one at Albany Rapids, I was beginning to wonder if there was a trend or pattern to the deaths. I was also curious to see if there were any other deaths along the river in the past years. I was already suspecting inaccuracies with the topographic maps and well knew their faults and failures, but I wanted to find out if any other deaths had been the cause of errant maps. I had appealed to the Natural Resources regional office for funding for my research and was turned down, but I was determined to continue my investigations.

Requesting the appropriate access to information documents, I was finally approved and allowed to visit the Ontario Coroner’s Office in Toronto. I was given a cubicle and instructions how to use their filing system. I’d search back to 1977, or seventeen years of records, and isolate only those boating deaths that had occurred anywhere along the Missinaibi River Heritage route, from Lake Superior to Moosonee on James Bay — a total distance of about 650 kilometres. It was a daunting task, time consuming and unsettling. For the next three days I would leaf through over five hundred police and coroner reports, isolating all the deaths that had occurred along one Canadian river system. Thankfully, there were no photographs in the reports, except in the last file I examined. Leafing through a file dated June 1981, two crisp glossy photographs flipped out on to the table. My stomach lurched at what I saw. I took in a deep breath and stared at the pictures. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. There were two young men, obviously dead, stretched unceremoniously on stainless-steel gurneys — a morgue photo. Both still had their lifejackets on. The cold water of the Missinaibi had preserved their bodies, at least from bloating, but their skin was bleach white, eyes vacant and darkened by death. The whiteness of their skin accentuated cuts, contusions, and fractures; broken necks, crushed skulls, limbs twisted out of symmetry. One dead youth was wearing my brand of lifejacket with extrication knife attached. It was weird; when I first saw the picture it was like I was looking at myself, dead. Both young men were twenty-three years old, from Brooklyn, New York, and had belonged to a whitewater paddling club. They were experienced paddlers. There were four in the party; the survivors reported that their friends had been “sucked” into the rapids and couldn’t get out of the pull to the falls. They were headed for a non-existent portage, just as the Ohio men had done. It was the very last of the five hundred files. I quickly packed up my research material and left the building. I found a quiet park bench and sat down and wept, deep sobs, for the parents of these boys who were probably spared the pictures I had just seen. Then I got angry.

It was even hard writing about this incident fourteen years later without feeling emotionally charged. There had been thirty-five drownings in the time period I had researched, or an average of about two deaths per year. Eleven of those deaths occurred within the boundaries of the Missinaibi Provincial and Heritage Waterway Park; twelve of the drownings, about one-third of the total, were American tourists. Seventeen of the drownings could have been prevented. Five died at Thunderhouse Falls because the topographic map told them to portage at a spot on the river that was virtually impossible to access. Twelve of the sixteen Federal topographic maps covering the river corridor had gross errors. Thirty-five of the ninety-three rapids were unmarked and two dangerous falls were not on the maps at all. Twelve portages were missing and six were marked in the wrong location. I had chosen the figure of seventeen years of research into the deaths because it backdated events to the last map update in 1978. Ontario Hydro at that time had plans of building a dam at Thunderhouse Falls and the topographic map had needed updating for official proposed plans. I interviewed the librarian at Western University’s research facility. She actually knew of the incident where government cartographers had argued over where to insert the portage on the Thunderhouse map. It was arbitrarily affixed to the map at what looked like the shortest route around the falls. Since the map was from a series of “white” sheets, any correction done would now show up highlighted in purple on the black and white maps. The Canada Map Office produces 12,150 of the popular 1:50,000 scale topographic maps most widely used by adventurers — ninety percent of the charts cover “undeveloped” regions above the so-called “wilderness-line,” and are in dire need of revisions, particularly along rivers having park or heritage status.

During the winter of 1993–94, I retreated to a cabin on Lake Superior to write my book. The research was unsettling. I appealed to the provincial coroner, James G. Young, to call for an inquest into the high number of deaths linked to poor maps and misleading advertising by both the provincial and federal governments. I had interviewed Peter Andrews from the Canada Map Office in Ottawa and was told that “… we (Energy Mines and Resources) don’t recommend that canoeists use just the topographic maps for reference.” Andrews also stated that EMR would never advertise in a strictly canoeing or outdoor magazine; however, their full-page “All roads lead to roam” ad, a crowing statement that EMR maps “will lead you in the right direction,” did, in fact, find its way into Canada’s national canoeing magazine, Kanawa, and other American adventure-oriented magazines, as well. The Ontario Tourism Ministry had just spent close to $100,000 on splashy full-page, colour ads in American magazines touting the Missinaibi as a Heritage River you could paddle from start to finish, across the breadth of Ontario, and cross only two roads — the same year the two men from Ohio died at Thunderhouse Falls. Many provincial and federal departments aggressively market to back-country travellers, pitching Canadian wilderness, a product the bureaucrats know very little about. Ad hype and hastily packaged materials continue to lure adventurers to provincial parks and remote rivers.

The Canadian Federal Department of Indian and Northern Affairs “Wild River Survey” was carried out in 1971–73, in which sixty-five rivers across Canada were surveyed for recreational potential. Mike Greco, past secretariat of the Canadian Heritage River Board and Foundation says of the survey:

“… the ten published booklets, although available to the public, were never intended for navigational purposes … some were withdrawn because of inaccuracies — mishaps were occurring, especially in British Columbia because much of the compiled information wasn’t field-truthed … anyone canoeing in remote regions should be extra careful using 1:50,000 maps and avail themselves of any professional literature before heading out.”

Legal counsellor for the Canadian Recreational Canoeing Association, John Eberhard, had told me that “canoeists may have cause for legal action against both the provincial and federal governments determining the lack of ‘duty of care’ in producing public material, including topographical maps.…” Six months had passed since the Ohio deaths, a lapse of too much time to initiate legal action by the family. I had the photographs developed from the camera I had found floating in the pool at Thunderhouse — just a tight group of fun-loving guys having a great time without a care in the world.

I called Brian McAndrew, the environment reporter for the Toronto Star newspaper, and told him about the research I was doing. Within twenty-four hours he was on a plane for Sault Ste. Marie where I would pick him up in my truck and bring him north to Michipicoten, where my cabin was. The feature front-page story on May 8, 1994, read: “When a line on a canoeists’ map spells death at Thunderhouse Falls.”

McAndrew later told me that the story had provoked more phone calls and letters than he had ever received for any story he had written. He was deluged with story after story about close calls and near-tragedies at Thunderhouse and elsewhere along the river, including one about four guys who actually survived going over the falls in a rubber raft.

The Natural Resources provincial office called me shortly after the release of the story and offered to contribute $10,000 to my research costs. It was also agreed that proper warning signs would be erected at Mattice and on an island before the Thunderhouse portage. The faulty topographical sheet was temporarily removed from Federal stock, pending updates scheduled in the future.

The rhetorical question here is, “Who is at fault?” The obvious problem is twofold: the Canadian government is not providing accurate technical information for backcountry canoe routes, specifically for highly publicized parks and Heritage Rivers; and the canoeing public puts too much faith in topographical charts — maps that were never intended for adventure-oriented recreation.

Long before the white man came to Canada, Native people were scratching crude maps in the sand or on rolls of birchbark. People of the First Nations had a “built-in” knowledge of place and distance and were often employed by early explorers as guides. Early maps etched out by John Cabot, Jacques Cartier, and John Davis did not survive; however, in 1604–08, Samuel de Champlain — zealot and cartographer — did give us eleven large-scale charts of eastern “Canada,” drawn to indicate sovereignty over the land and resources therein. Canada was not an easy country to explore because of its vast, rugged topography, extreme environmental conditions, and short travelling season. But not just that, transferring information from a sphere to a flat plane involved advanced mathematics which worked only in open, unforested areas. Errors published on early maps remained uncorrected for centuries, chiefly because of the high cost of changing printing plates. Explorers, too, were not always proficient mapmakers so that a lot of “longitudinal” discrepancies were found in working charts well into the nineteenth century.

The Hudson’s Bay Company’s push for ever more furs prompted the need for more accurate maps of the interior and gave rise to the development of better survey instruments, tools used by the likes of Philip Turnor (1778–79), Sir Alexander Mackenzie (1789–93), and David Thompson and George Vancouver (1793). Much of Canada’s shape and size was well-charted by the turn of the century, although northern Quebec and the Arctic islands remained a mystery.

The Geological Survey of Canada, founded in 1842, went through a period of changes, eventually to become the Topographical Surveys Branch formed in 1883. Burgeoning westward settlement in the United States may have rushed the surveying of Canada by often inexperienced field crews; maps produced in the early 1900s were “so inaccurate that the details were kept secret for 50 years” (Milliken Report). The “Chief Cartographer’s” series of maps, drawn to the 1:250,000 and 1:500,000 scale commenced in 1903. A year later the Survey Division of the Department of Militia and Defence was created with the intent to map all of Canada in the one-inch to one-mile scale (the scale popularized with outdoors people today). In 1902, the DMD had realized the importance of detailed maps during the Boer War. Canada, being short on cartographic savvy, hired R.H. Chapman of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1908 to try and shape up the topographic unit within its Canadian counterpart. There were now three uncoordinated departments producing maps. This continued until 1922, when the formation of the Board on Topographical Surveys and Maps was created to respond to the need for some kind of standardization. The BTS&M evolved into a division of Energy, Mines, and Resources in 1966 (EMR) and it continues to be known by that name today.

Acknowledged as the “map for all seasons,” the one-inch to one-mile series was eventually converted to the popular 1:50,000 scale by photo-enlargement after 1950. By the 1930s, specific geographic areas of northern Canada were being mapped using “air-oblique” methods of range-finding, traverses down the more prominent rivers; methods deemed “sketchy” by the more advanced European cartographers. Photographs depicting water levels during high-flow could not detail many locations of rapids and falls, and consequently some of these discrepancies have not been corrected to this day. W.F. Phelan of the Geographic Survey remarked about pre-Second World War maps that “vagaries of water-courses beyond open-country could not be relied on, but on the whole there was little criticism by those who occasion to use these sheets.”

By the late 1940s, photogrammetry (the science of drawing maps from air photos) improved with the use of “electronic distance measuring devices” or EDMs, where aerial photography now employed overlapping traverse patterns. Maps surveyed between 1945 and 1962, according to the Association of Canadian Map Librarians and Archives in Ottawa, are generally considered “the most inaccurate.” This just happens to include maps covering the greater portion of the Canadian northland!

Today, the use of survey satellites measuring the “Doppler Shift” (change in frequency of sound, radio, or light waves) has improved map accuracy to within inches; that’s great for physical discrepancies, but without information revisions, any updates would not improve maps for the paddler headed for a non-existent portage.

In 1956, the Canadian military found it urgent to map out the Arctic regions because of the mounting threat of nuclear war which would effectively put northern Canada directly between the major powers. These hastily produced maps were very basic and lacked any detail. In 1967, the six-colour map was introduced for “southern Canada,” while the “Wilderness Line” demarked the use of black and white monochrome maps, thus making a clear distinction between settled and unsettled regions. Since the rate of development in the North is slow, revisions were not a priority and would take place every thirty years, unless, as in the case of Thunderhouse Falls, a major development is proposed. Urban maps would be revised every five years. EMR has recently changed their revision policy to every three years.

In 1994, I began my wild river survey research for the Province of Manitoba and Canada Parks, Heritage Rivers branch, which sponsored my first trip down the Seal River. Before any mapping expedition, I make an effort to obtain any current or archival published material and Canada Parks supplied what they had on public file. It wasn’t until I was on the river that I noticed the first quadrant of their map had been produced upside down and backwards. This map had been generated for national distribution, yet had a major error that nobody caught before it was printed and distributed. During this same year, my Missinaibi guidebook was released, correcting all topographic information. In the last fourteen years there have been no canoe-related deaths along the river, chiefly because the Ontario government finally took the initiative to erect proper signage, and supported a concise guidebook that made sure the public was informed.

Canada is a nation of wild rivers. The Missinaibi took the lives of thirty-four people over a seventeen-year period. Over the past three decades there may have been hundreds of deaths across Canada attributed to faulty maps and lack of “duty of care” by parks and provincial government administrations. These same bureaucracies have spent millions of tax dollars on advertising wild Canada and eco-adventure recreation, but almost nothing on accurate, field-truthed support material. Adventurers love to scan maps, longing to find precipitous gradient drops and wild rapids … it’s part of our addiction to rivers and wilderness. Selling maps is big business for EMR, peddling more than 630,000 maps each year. But even if the adventuring public is provided with the best information possible, there exists those who cannot “read” maps or interpret the information from a map to actual landscape visuals. In addition, there are those who put too much faith in topographic maps; in many instances the wilderness traveller relaxes into the gear threshold instead of learning the required hard skills. International adventurers coming to this country for a wilderness experience rely on the information provided, and trust that government tourism agencies have done their field work … in the least, provide the same calibre of maps that they can purchase in their own country. When they get here they are presented with a topographic chart produced half a century ago, maps intended for political reasons, to designate ownership, for military use and resource extraction … not for recreational travel along a wilderness trail.