We all encounter very interesting things while on adventures, the type of items or situations that really make you wonder and want to remember. It is terrific that in today's internet age we can share these experiences with other like-minded people on a forum such as ETS (Thanks Doug) and with most people carrying a camera we can even see the pictures.

So I thought this could be a fun post to "Share Your Adventure" so all of us can enjoy and learn from it.

Here goes,

In late September I traveled to an "end-of-the-road" location in Northeastern Ontario for an Archery/Muzzleloader Moose Hunt. The site was on the edge of the Hudson Bay Lowlands where the Boreal Forest thins out to stunted conifer and muskeg to the north. The area was a patchwork of recent small clearcuts that had been replanted, and it was within these openings that I was hunting. While sitting on a slashpile I noticed a faint trail that ran along a thin ridge, through the harvested area and into the standing forest. I went exploring along this old trail and found that it was a Trappers trail which linked 2 small lakes about 2km apart. About 50m from the shore of one of these lakes I noticed an odd shaped lump, back in the thick bush off the trail.

On investigation I found it to be an old wooden canoe that had been onsite for a very long time. The canoe was made of wooden strips which I suspect are cedar, with wooden ribs, gunwales and seats. I found no evidence of canvas at all and the 100's of tacks used to assemble the canoe were both copper (1.5cm long) and brass (1cm long). The short brass tacks were very interesting as each one was curled over in a small loop at the point, I suspect to have them lock into the thin wood.

I am sure the person who cached that canoe in the bush would have some great stories to tell.

The old canoe in the bush.


Close-up of the canoe stern with my hi-tech muzzleloader for scale.


Thanks for reading along,

Mike

That is VERY cool! Nice find.

I love finds like that because it leaves me wondering about the story. Did the canoe break while on a portage? Did the person hauling the canoe suffer a fatal injury? It's fun to let my imagination run wild with speculation.

I'm always picking up trinkets from my trips. I've got pretty rocks, turtle shells, feathers, glass bottles -- all serve as reminders of great trips.

Pictures work the same way. With today's compact waterproof digital cameras so affordable, it's a snap to documents out travels. Ten pounds of camera and lenses is replaced by a single piece of gear that weighs ounces.

Condor head over trail map petroglyph? (my superimposed lines, I'd just come up the upper fork of the trail)

When I was hiking in Oregon about 25 yrs ago, my dog ran off the trail a bit and had her head down with her tail wagging. I never found what SHE found, but nearby was quite a nice little two-person-sized shelter made from fir branches. I almost missed it.

From the smaller branches all over the top, I would guess that he/she had covered it with needle-covered branches (gone, fallen off). More of the same formed a thick mat on the ground.

And I found a funny, curved little knife, once. The cutting blade was on the inside of the curve.

Sue

Perfectly virgin wilderness isn't very much fun to me. I like finding sparse, old stuff.

Found a very old .30-30 casing up on the tundra in Rocky Mountain National Park once.

I've been hiking a turn-of-the (last) century cattle ranch that's now a wildlife area. There's a book written about those who settled it and there is lots of their decaying work on the land left to see.

One of my hobbies is finding old (preferably military) airplane crash sites out in the woods. Lots to learn and think about with those.....

Sue..your knife find is a crooked knife.they were the main carving and woodworking tool for natives and trappers in the 17-1800's.with one you could make snowshoes,a paddle..a canoe.
and speaking of canoes!!!Swamp's find was like finding a crashed UFO to us canoe trippers.the copper tacks were all placed by hand.the tack was driven in and a metal "shoe" was held inside so the tack bend over and clinched in place.i would guess this is a Chestnut canoe.from the size and where it was found i say a Prospector model.the Hudson Bay Company bought the entire production of those canoes from Chestnut in around 1910 for the Bays use.

I've found the remains of several stills out in the Florida woods. Usually near a stream or spring. These seemed older but stills were pretty common in the Florida woods well into the 50s.

I've also come across several pot fields. One was still in production. I would be leery about exploring near pot fields now but back in the day wilderness cultivators were a peace-loving breed. As long as I didn't mess with their crop everything was cool. Getting too close now might get you shot.

Once I found some aircraft parts that had a story about an airplane that went down in the 30s associated with them. They went down in the sticks and it took weeks for them to find the two survivors. Story was a local swamp rat/ trapper/ gator hunter type, found them and led them out.

One trip we came across a section of tiny light-gauge railroad track that led to a small lumber mill. It was set up in the 20s and was abandoned in the early 30s according to the ranger we asked.

Hard to find anywhere where people haven't been and left marks. Recently, in the last couple of decades, GPS mapping of the amazon rain forest showed that the regular spacing of groves of fruit trees was a man-made and a remnant of earlier tribes. They lived nomadic lives traveling in large circuits hunting, gathering, and living off small clusters of select fruit trees.

Over the years, I have had the opportunity to walk beaches on the Channel Islands, and I have found:

1) fully working flashlights, plus numerous other items of scuba gear (nearly everything except a tank and regulator)

2) Discarded Navy nautical charts, in good condition

3) Unopened cans of beer (in the interests of science, they didn't stay that way very long!)

4) innumerable Japanese glass net floats

A friend has everything I have found beat all hollow. We were walking along, and he spied a boat paddle in a pile of debris. Pointing out that he had lost one from his skiff a few weeks earlier, he walked over to retrieve it - turns out it was the very same one he had lost about three miles away.

Question about the relict canoe that started this thread - Any idea of its age?

Hikemor - I have no idea on the age of the old canoe I found, I do know that the area was accessed by road only 3 years ago. CANOEDOGS may be close on the age and make of the canoe as the area was used by trappers who marketed fur to the Hudson Bay Company. I will be in the area of the canoe again next fall and can check it out closer.

I mentioned the copper and brass tacks in my first post and CANOEDOGS gave a discription of how they were installed in his reply. I removed 2 of the tacks from a piece of the rotton wood of the canoe and the tacks can be seen in the image below, with a couple of period knives.



This fall while deer hunting in Central Ontario I found another neat thing.
I was in a remote location and saw what I thought was a piece of out-of-place aluminum garbage so I walked over to pick it up and pack it out of the bush. It turned out to be a mylar bag and beside it was some stryofoam and electronic parts? The return address on the bag solved the mystery, " National Weather Service Radiosonde Reconditioning Group, Kansas City Missouri", I had found a Weather Balloon "crash site". The radiosonde instrument, the soft battery pack and even the mylar bag were badly chewed by bears. I thought it was neat so I carried it out to show my hunting partners. At home I accessed the Weather Service site and found out that if the radiosonde is damaged then they do not want it returned for refurbishing (I returned a good one in the mid 80's); so my daughter is going to take it into her Grade 10 Science Class as a discussion item when they study weather.

Here is an image of what I found and the Weather Service discription.


Mike