Along the Deh Cho
On June 14th we embarked upon a kayaking adventure that would take us across the entire Deh Cho river (also known as the Mackenzie River) in the Canadian Northwest Territories. The river begins on the Western shore of Tucho (also known as the Great Slave Lake) and flows all the way up to the Beaufort Sea (which is a part of the Arctic Ocean).
Our journey began on the beaches by the small town Xátł’odehchee (also known as Hay River) and for 54 days we would make our way towards our goal, a small Inuvialuit hamlet known as Tuktoyaktuk. During our voyage we visited small communities along the way, such as Zhahti Kue, Tthek’éhdélį, Łı́ı́dlı̨ı̨ Kų́ę́, Pehdzeh Ki, Tulita, Tłegǫ́hłı̨, Rádeyı̨lı̨kóé, Tsiigehtchic, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk.
The area we crossed during those 54 days was vast – the Northwest Territories are approximately four times the size of our home country Finland, but hosts a population of merely 44.000. (It is estimated that bears outnumber humans in the NWT.) The people who live on the land we travelled through are to the most part First Nations: Dene, Gwich’in and Inuvialuit.
Wherever we landed, we were met with warmth and kindness, and there was not a moment we didn’t feel welcome on the land. We learned a lot from the people we met and the discussions we had helped us gain a better understanding of what life was like in these remote areas.
Along us we naturally also brought our adventure flag – the standard underneath which we felt our journey to be blessed.
The design of the flag, as the journey itself, was a collaborative effort. Alone we are nothing. Christoffer designed the flag, Viivi did the caribou illustration, and Haije served as our seamstress.
On the obverse side the Dene name for the river (Deh Cho) is spelled out along with the year of our expedition. On the reverse side the abbreviated version of Tuktoyaktuk is written on top of a caribou. (The name Tuktoyaktuk can be translated into ”looks like a caribou”.)
The typefaces on the flag are three digital revivals of type from the late 1800s/early 1900s. Mark Simonson’s Etna (a revival of Aetna, William Hamilton Page, 1871) is used for the words Deh Cho, with the year being ATF Wedding Gothic (originally released by ATF as Wedding Gothic in 1901), created by the design team at ATF, and the name Tuk is set in Cottonwood – based on Gothic Tuscan Italian, Wells & Webb 1854. Adobe’s version was designed by Barbara Lind, Joy Redick and Kim Buker Chansler.
The resulting flag brought a smile to the faces of everyone who saw it, and the people we encountered were clearly impressed by our humble effort. The first photo with our flag was taken just when we were about to cast away, the final one when we had reached the end of our journey. The pictures that are in-between these two shows the land we paddled through but they cannot begin to tell all the stories, encounters and events we experienced.
Whatever the photographs lack in artistic quality they more than make up for as memories of a summer well spent.
1 Comment on “Along the Deh Cho”
One more thing that might be of interest to the greater designer community:
In one of the photos we are posing in front of a sign that says Tsiigehtchic. Due to the sign this little hamlet with a population around 170 became know as Little Hollywood in the region. Which we thought was hilarious, given that Tsiigehtchic had very little in common with Hollywood as far as we could deduce.
Not everyone shared our feelings of amusement – the villagers told us they had received an angry letter from a lawyer in Hollywood demanding that the sign be taken down immediately.
Fortunately the locals were not of the easily intimidated kind so they left the sign standing. And it seems that not even a hotshot lawyer from Southern California is willing to travel all the way up past the Arctic Circle to take down a sign themselves.