It took over a year but the pieces finally began to fall into place.

Maps were printed and potential routes were sketched.

Routes were examined closely for problem areas; rapids; waterfalls; narrow sections; the gradient of the rivers and the general topography of the land along the route. For instance ... many areas were showing as low lying and we didn't want to plan a day that potentially ended with us looking for a campsite in a swampy area.

The art of making a map come alive in your imagination takes experience and certain map reading skills ... a good description of this can be found in Cliff Jacobson's book "Expedition Canoeing".

As we looked at potential routes we also did a search on the names of all the lakes along the way. This led us to find the location of many fly in fishing camps that we might use or visit in case of difficulty. The camp descriptions often included maps which further increased our knowledge of the area.

We tried to anticipate where portages would be necessary ... what side of the river they'd be on ... and their length. We marked these on the maps.

Letters were written to each of the First Nations communities describing our goals; requesting permission to travel across their territory and promising to stop at the Band Office as we passed.

Two of the areas we were studying had us stumped as to how we might get through so we called the Band Office of the nearest First Nations community and inquired as to who was the trapper that used the area in question and if we could have his number. This effort was rewarded with one absolute confirmation of a portage and one "I haven't been in that area for a long time but there used to be a path there".

The second response was concerning how to get from Dolphin Lake down to Bullrush Lake ... I got this name from the trapper ... a drop of about 50 meters over a distance of 5 kilometers. The stream showed as very narrow on the map and was crossed by two elevation lines so we knew that this was an area where we'd be doing a lot of carrying. Since it was near the end of our trip our food barrel would be a little lighter therefore we decided to give it a go.

There were many areas where couldn't confirm the existence of portages but the distances were small ... mostly less than 800 meters ... and our experience was that if an area was trapped then trails would most likely exist ... and we were confident in our ability to find them.