As the talk turns to wilderness canoeing trips measured in hundreds of miles, wildlife, and the adventure of the experiences, it is hard not to feel a bit of envy for Bill and Joan Gundlach. Their adventures aren’t like putting in on a local river or lake for a day; their trips involve months of planning, getting to northern Canada or Alaska, flying by float plane to a remote river, being picked up two or three weeks later 200-300 miles downstream, and then being flown back to civilization.

These would be significant adventures for people in their thirties, but Bill and Joan twice that age - 74 and 68 respectively. They are planning for yet another wilderness trip this coming summer - possibly into Alaska's Brooks Range.

This passion is not surprising to folks who knew Bill thirty years ago when he was a kayaker and member of the Spokane Canoe Club. Their first date was – drum roll – a canoe outing on Casco Bay of Coeur d’Alene Lake!

Bill grew up in Coeur d’Alene, the son of a lumber mill worker, and graduated in engineering from the University of Idaho. Joan was originally a nurse from California who had moved to the area in 1977. Both had earlier marriages, and when Joan's son returned from his kayaking class at the YMCA and told his mother about “this very nice man,” well, as the saying goes, the rest is history. They married in 1983.

The next few years saw them taking many canoe trips but primarily in the lower 48 states.

“We’ve done the John Day River in Oregon so many times I’ve forgotten,” Bill states. “The Kootenai River in B.C. quite a few times, the Green River in Utah a couple of times, the Grande Ronde River quite a few times, the lower Salmon four or five times plus the main Salmon and the Middle Fork.” You can add to that list such waters as the Grand Canyon of the Colorado, the San Juan River in Utah, Bowron Lakes in B.C., the Salt River in Arizona, and more as well.

So, with all these rivers and lakes closer to home, why the change in the ‘90s to waters in the far north?

“You start doing these rivers you hear about, these real wilderness rivers up north. There’s just kind of a yearning to do that. I’ve always liked to go to wild places, backpacking or whatever. The idea of going up into the tundra and what they call the ‘barren lands’ north of the tree line was real intriguing. I’d read stories of other people doing it and figured that’s one of the things I wanted to do. I just knew I had to do it.”

Their first trip to the arctic was in 1997 to the Thelon River. That twelve-day trip covered 225 miles. “Maybe 100 people go down this river a year,” Bill explains.

There are logistical problems. “The window of opportunity is from about the first of July for about two months. You can’t go down if it’s still frozen and you can’t land a plane there either,” Joan explains.

The reverse was true for a trip last summer. “This past year the weather got warm early in Alaska and the herd of caribou we expected to see, some 44,000 strong, had gone through our area trying to get to the coast a week before we got there. The whole side of the river looked like a feedlot when we came out. It was just hacked by thousands and thousands of caribou going through there,” Bill relates.

Since that first arctic trip, there have been many others, and the numbers look something like this. They have made eight canoe trips by themselves to the far north and covered 1,625 miles in 138 days. The longest trip was 28 days, and the longest distance was 350 miles. Those are impressive numbers, but they have also made canoe and raft trips with other people, two trips into B.C. and Saskatchewan, and another eight-day trip on the Wild and Scenic Missouri in Montana! And on occasion, they have only seen one or two other canoes during the entire trip.

Viewing wildlife is a major attraction.

“We see a lot of wildlife and have good encounters with them but nothing negative,” Bill explains. “We see lots of wolverines and arctic foxes. We found an arctic fox den area where we could sit nearby and watch them play. It was amazing. We have seen grizzlies on occasion and wolves too. One was right next to a bank. We pulled our canoe in and he was up in the bush just looking at us, yawning. Beautiful!”

“We don’t carry guns, but we do carry bear spray,” Bill adds. Every time we’ve seen grizzly bears, as soon as they get your scent they are out of there; same thing with the wolves. At times, they were close by, they would be howling, and you could watch them. If you howl at them they’ll howl back. It’s been a lot of fun as far as wolves are concerned. We got to a den last year where there were four little ones – popping their heads up and out of different holes.”

The stories continue about wolves, caribou, and others. “You just never know what you’re going to see,” Joan exclaims. “The most thrilling to me was to see my first musk oxen. I was so excited! There were about 18 in the herd including two little ones.”

Bill is also an active birder and records species and numbers of birds they see using GPS coordinates to record that information. They give this information to Alaska and Canadian wildlife officials and it is then assembled at Cornell University's ornithology department. “That’s the way the bird range lists get extended,” Joan points out.

Archaeology is another attraction explains, Joan. “We have photographed Inuit arrowheads, and the inuksuks (man-made stone landmark or cairn) are particularly wonderful… massive rocks and caches the Inuit would have carried to a big circle for meat storage. One river hadn’t been disturbed and it was obvious where Inuit had stacked rocks and channeled them down to a cliff to scare the caribou over the cliff.”

Trips like these will continue for Joan and Bill as long as they can.

“It’s so unique to do a trip like this. The hope is you don’t see anybody else for 28 days. Where can you go that you can have a true wilderness experience and have to be completely self-reliant? There’s nothing there except Inuit artifacts and wildlife. It’s so wonderful and beautiful!” Joan exclaims.