PADDLING
The Full Reset Low water but high spirits on the West Fork of the Spanish River
words & photos :: Colin Field The first time I heard about the Spanish River canoe route it instantly made my must-do river list. There are a few of them in Canada: the Nahanni, the Petawawa, the French, the Dumoine… rivers that earn you your paddling stripes. The most intriguing part of the Spanish? The shuttle vehicle is a train. Colloquially known as the Budd Car, the Sudbury to White River train line features a couple freight cars that carry your gear. From downtown Sudbury you load your canoe and gear into one of the freight cars with a little help from a railway employee. It’s $50 per canoe and, as far as I can tell, as much equipment as you want. We had eight days worth of food for our crew of 11, five canoes and not enough beer. Tales abound of the good old days, when you could ride anywhere in the train: the luggage car, the engineer cabin, your choice. Legend has it that beer flowed and good times ensued; those days are long gone. Now, after loading your gear, you ride in the air-conditioned cabin and simply choose one of the seemingly random places to stop along the route. We laughed and joked with nervous excitement the entire time while looking at maps and watching the beautiful scenery flowing by. The track paralleled the Spanish River for much of the way until our chosen stop at Sinker Creek, a middle-of-nowhere spot a kilometre or so from the Spanish proper. We’d opted to do the West Fork of the Spanish, hoping for as much whitewater as possible. The Spanish River’s name is said to come from French explorers who met Spanish-speaking Ojibwe people in the region. Apparently the Ojibwe learned the language from a woman they took captive on a southern expedition. This also led to the names of nearby towns of Espanola and Spanish. For the next six days we paddled downstream. We swam, ate great food, cemented friendships, played guitar and laughed. We laughed a lot. We saw bears, moose, beavers and one of the families got an intimate few minutes with a bobcat. And while the water levels were at a record low, we were still able to paddle most of the rapids. 66
