NORTHWEST TERRITORIES – Without hesitation Doug MacGregor of Quadeville described in one word the trip of a lifetime he took this summer with his father and grandfather. “Breathtaking,” Doug said. “That kind of sums up the trip by the views, the experience, the people, the wildlife, the history, it brings all the pieces together.” At 13, Doug was the youngest, while grandfather Dave Hamber at 76, was the oldest, to commercially paddle the Broken Skull River, a little-known tributary of the South Nahanni River in Canada’s Northwest Territories. Dad Scott MacGregor, 47, fell somewhere in the middle. Watching a documentary Noatak: Return to the Arctic at the Reel Film Festival was the inspiration for the three generations to take the canoe trip together. The film captures two men in their 70s, revisiting and recounting a canoe trip in Alaska they had taken 35 years earlier. In a quest to paddle and camp similar landscape, Scott contacted wilderness adventure company Black Feather to inquire further about river trips in the Canadian north. Planning their voyage for the second and third weeks of August 2018 would turn out to be a year in the making. “We didn’t really want to go on a trip just by ourselves and we wanted to go with big mountains and white water,” Doug said. The group would be made up of 14, including three guides from Black Feather, who would embark on an 11-day paddling journey that turned into 12. To read the full story, pick up a copy of the October 24, 2018 Valley Gazette.