Four men paddled 140 kilometres along B.C.’s upper Columbia River in record cold temperatures, and not only lived to tell the tale, but caught it all on camera.
“It was -35 C when we were stuck at a camp on the other side of the river,” said Johan Rosén, an extreme snowboarder and director.
“Also, it was about 90 km or 100 km an hour winds, so the windchill made it even colder than -35 C. So it was freezing cold.”
Rosén set out with Nick Khattar, Ben Howell and Seb Grondin to canoe from the foot of the Mica Dam to the top of the Revelstoke Dam in an effort to retrace a portion of David Thompson’s footsteps in two 20-foot canoes.
David Thompson was a Canadian fur trader, surveyor and cartographer who navigated the length of the Columbia River in 1811.
“David Thompson the explorer, he was the first explorer to make maps about this region and open it up for exploration of Westerners,” said Rosén.
“We wanted to dig into what happened when the Westerners arrived here.”
When the crew wasn’t paddling, they were snowboarding.
“Some of the boarding that we managed to get was only possible because it was so cold as well. So the extreme cold temperatures made it possible to ride that low in the valley,” said Rosén.
The film they made about the adventure, Without a Paddle, is available to watch on YouTube and is being submitted to festivals in hopes of inspiring others to go out and enjoy the great outdoors.
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