Per the description, I feel my application would be incomplete if I did not include the following story.
After driving nearly forty-eight hours to Missinipe, we found ourselves on the bus again for another eight hours before our journey would truly begin. We had heard stories about the trip we would be undertaking, about a legendary leader who lost his maps but continued with a compass North until he hit saltwater, about the ruggedest of men using the distress beacon all trips are packed out with to summon help by helicopter and humvee, yet we still believed we were above the land and water below us. Compounding our task, the weather this close to the Arctic Circle was merciless; the most unforgivable being the rain. When it rains that far North, it seems to come in bursts, moving in oblong shapes, drawing its thoughts on the surface of a lake and flowing in this direction and that direction like the scribbling of a toddler. Occasionally blue will appear in the corners of the patched-quilt above, but the rain will rarely stop.…show more content… Our route started out going up river and then gradually downriver the remainder of the journey, but it did not matter which way the water moved underneath us: each day was brutally difficult and immensely exhausting. Nevertheless, we would continue.
One day we were crawling our way up whitewater on the Geikie River, and at the end we looked back over what we accomplished. We were stunned by enormous wave trains, cresting and descending like snow white stallions stampeding down the river; rocks the size of a Volkswagen; and the sight of a single route that didn’t lead to certain injury or death--the route we unknowingly