David first travelled north of sixty as a canoeist in 1977, with little awareness of Inuit culture and no notion that the Arctic would become his home and the scene of his professional career as a writer and researcher, historian and ethnographer. All that changed within weeks of a subsequent canoe trip’s arrival in Qamani’tuaq (Baker Lake) near the mouth of the Kazan and Thelon Rivers. In the more than 40 years since then, David has written ten books and scores of magazine articles about the North and its people, much of that writing based on the oral testimonies shared by Inuit elders and inevitably his own experiences on the land. In 2012, he was awarded the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal for “for dedication to the preservation of Inuit oral history and traditional knowledge.” David has been a member of the WCA since the mid-late 1970s. www.davidpelly.com
Jim Boone grew up in Hamilton, Ontario. He started canoeing as a boy at Camp Onondaga, sent there for the summer to avoid the Polio epidemic in the city. Later, as a camp counsellor, he canoed many of the lakes in Algonquin Park. He was a pediatrician at the Hospital for Sick Children at the time of his first Barren Lands canoe trip on the Thelon River in 1969. Jim was later Chair of Pediatrics at Western University for twenty years. During this time, he returned to the Canadian Arctic several times, canoeing several rivers, including the Coppermine and the Hood. He fly-fishes to this day and still enjoys a stiff rum toddy that was first introduced by Eric Morse during a whitewater training trip on the Petawawa River in the 1960s.