Trip Report: Paddling the Bloodvein River
3 Jan
Four paddlers traverse a historic river from Woodland Caribou Provincial Park to the Atikaki Wilderness – highlights include pictographs, outstanding whitewater, stunning waterfalls and more…
Trip Overview
This trip can be broken into two major segments: headwaters and downriver. The headwaters segment of the trip is about 45 miles and can be characterized as a series of medium to large lakes connected by small streams interrupted with rapids or waterfalls. We paddled across northern Woodland Caribou Provincial Park from Knox Lake through Murdock Lake, Larus Lake, Lawrence Lake, Barclay Lake, Mary’s Lake and finally into Artery Lake. There are other places to start this trip. We ran into a party of young men who started their trip much further upstream and had paddled down the Dutch and Sabourin River to enter the Bloodvein River at Lawrence Lake. There are outpost cabins within the park and we did see motorboats.
When you portage into Lower Artery Lake, you cross the Manitoba border and enter Atikaki Provincial Wilderness Park. This is the beginning of your 135-mile run down to Lake Winnipeg. This stretch of the trip is classic “pool and riffle” and is characterized by shallow lakes or long narrow stretches of “dead or slack water” separated by rapids or falls. The vast majority of the whitewater features are located downstream from Artery Lake. There are a few active outpost cabins and a couple of “abandoned” cabins along this segment but we did not see any motorboats. The Bennet Trappers Cabin that is just downstream from the confluence with the Gammon River was one of the highlights of the trip. It gave us a chance to sign the “Stagger Inn Journal”. – Read On >
