From Wawa to James Bay by showshoe: reflections on a 72-day journey

It's a 72 day hike from Wawa, ON, to the shores of James Bay.

Dave and Kielyn Marrone, who run a travel adventure company called Lure of the North, led a team of eleven snowshoers through the wind, ice and snow of northern Ontario to complete the trek, starting in January and finishing on icy shores near Moose Factory in early April.  

By foot, the group covered almost 700 kilometres across traditional Indigenous routes, enduring temperatures that plummeted to -40 overnight.

Dave said the last half of the trek was easier than the first, as the January sun turns the snow "nice and crusty," making for an easier journey by snowshoe.

"We were getting up at 4 a.m. and it takes us a couple of hours to just sort of wake up, pack up sleeping bags, get breakfast cooked, and then knock down the tents and clean up the site and pack up the toboggans," Dave said.

After striking the campsite, the team would head out, usually walking for 6 hours through temperatures that for the first half of the journey, rarely rose above -20 degrees celsius.

"As the weather started to get warmer, we were finding that in the afternoon the snow was starting to get quite soft," he said. "Travel was just much, much easier during the colder morning, the start of the day."

But it was in these early mornings that the team encountered a daily highlight of the expedition, Dave said. 

"Every morning, around 6:00 am, we would start in the dark and walk into these spectacular sunrises."

Then around noon, the team would stop to set up camp – a three hour process that included searching for and splitting standing dry firewood. 

The group even followed a Lure of the North tradition– on a warmer day, the team would chip out a hole just big enough to dunk themselves in.

"It started as a learning experience, to show people to take some of the fear away from going through the ice and to show people that you don't instantly turn into an ice cube and die," Dave said. "You do have some time to react."

"But we realized it's just a lot of fun as well."

The team's final destination was the shores of James Bay, which took them through Moose Cree First Nation land.