Life on Plimoth Plantation

During stage 1 we will kayak 1,400 miles from Seattle, Washington to Skagway, Alaska. The Pacific Northwest is home to a wide range of aquatic and terrestrial animals. We will be studying whales and other marine mammals, kelp forests, salmon, and many other species.

The Pacific Northwest is home to a variety of large land mammals including Grizzly Bears, and Black Bears. Above and below the surface we are sure to find plenty of things to learn about. Many of these large mammals need large undeveloped spaces to thrive and the roadless sections of British Columbia and Alaska provide the perfect habitat.

From Skagway, Alaska we will hike over the Chilkoot Pass in the footsteps of thousands of gold seekers who struggled across the pass to reach the Klondike. Many of artifacts remain from those early days, and we will follow their path all the way to Dawson City along the mighty Yukon River.

From Bennet Lake on the eastern side of the Chilkoot Pass we will canoe through a chain of lakes that form the headwaters of the Yukon River past White Horse and down the swift flowing Yukon River to Dawson City.

From Dawson we will hike 100 miles through the mountains to the headwaters of the Blackstone River. The Blackstone flows into the Peel River, which flows in the McKenzie River, which will lead us to the Arctic Ocean. The rivers flowing through these rugged mountains as some of the most pristine wild rivers in North America, with hundreds of miles of flowing waterways between towns or roads.

After over 2,600 miles of paddling and hiking we hope to reach the Arctic Ocean before freeze up. We will spend the month of October,2010 training our dogs, and learning about native life in the Arctic. In November we will head south along the McKenzie River by dog team, crossing 1,800 miles of frozen wilderness. There are many remote native communities along our way and we are sure to learn a lot from the people we encounter.

When the ice melts in the Spring of 2011 we will transition from dogsled to canoe and paddle 2,300 miles along the historic travel and trade route pioneered by Alexander McKenzie, Samuel Hearne, and other Canadian Explorers in the 1700's. We will finish this stage of our journey in the fall of 2011 by completing the 8 1/2 mile Grand Portage which will lead us to the rock shore of Lake Superior.

After spending the winter giving presentations and making final preparations we will begin 4,800 mile kayak journey from Grand Portage, Minnesota to Key West, Florida. The first 2,200 miles will take us through the Great Lakes and out the Saint Lawrence Seaway. The Great Lakes contain 6 quadrillion gallons of fresh water, which is one-fifth of the world's fresh surface water. We plan to demonstrate the importance of properly managing and protecting this amazing resource.

During the final stage of our journey we will kayak the length of the Atlantic Coast from the Saint Lawrence Seaway to Key West, Florida. We will be following the seasonal whale migration from the Bay of Fundy in Maine to the warm clear waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Along the way we will visit cities large and small, and study a variety of ecosystems and environmental topics. We also plan to take side trips into the cyprus swamps and Everglades National Park looking for Alligators, birds, and other critters.

Wenonah Canoe and Current Designs Kayaks

GoMacro makes wonderful macrobiotic energy bars.

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Expedition Blog

Life on Plimoth Plantation

Saturday, 22 September 2012 10:22 Written by Administrator

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Amy and I love to travel, explore and learn about new places. People have been drawn to wild places and far off lands for a very long time. This week paddled into Plymouth, Massachusetts. In 1620, almost 400 years ago, a group of 102 settlers left England on a sailboat to start a new colony in the newly discovered land across the Atlantic Ocean. Their boat was called the Mayflower and they are known as the Pilgrims. The Pilgrims were planning to start a colony in Virginia, but a storm blew them off course. They first landed on Cape Cod and decided to start a new life and build a town about 25 miles away where they found fresh water and a good place to build their town.

North America was a new, wild land for the Pilgrims, but North America was already home to many groups of native people. The native people living around Cape Cod were the Wampanoag. It is estimated that there were between 50,000 and 100,000 Wampanoag people living in 67 villages in the early 1600s. The Wampanoag had been living there for thousands of years before the Pilgrims arrived and the food they ate, houses they lived in and tools they used were very different from the things the Pilgrims brought with them from England.

The Wampanoag and the Pilgrims were living in the same place, the same habitat, but they lived very differently. We were able to visit Plimoth Plantation and learn about what it was like to live in Massachusetts in the 1620s. It was very interesting to learn about how the Wampanoag and the Pilgrims lived.

This is the outside of a traditional Wampanoag house, called a wetuash. It is made out of a framework of cedar saplings and sheets of tree bark.

This is the inside of a Wampanoag house. There is a fire in the middle surrounded by beds covered in animal skins.

This is a typical house that the Pilgrims would have lived in. It is a timber frame structure with wooden shingles and a thatch roof.

This is the inside of a Pilgrim’s house. It includes several things that came from England. It is insulated with daub, which is a mixture of clay, earth and grass.

This is a Wampanoag garden, full of corn, squash, beans, pumpkin, sunflowers and melon. They would also hunt and fish.

This is a typical Pilgrim’s garden. Many of the plants were grown from seeds that were brought from England, like onion, lettuce, and wheat. Some of these plants didn’t grow well in the Massachusetts climate, so they grew some native plants like corn. They also raised cattle, goats and pigs.