Dr. David M. Plante returned in late summer from a packrafting trip in the Yukon minus a finger, but the sudden loss of a world-renowned outdoor guide, his best friend, has left additional scars — deep emotional wounds — for him and many others.
Part of the healing process relating to the death of that companion will happened next year when Dr. Plante plans to return to the Barrenlands, a sparsely populated territory of Northwest Territories, Canada.
There, he plans to sprinkle some of the ashes of Shawn Hodgins, 61, who died Aug. 22, a few weeks after being diagnosed with rapidly spreading pancreatic cancer.
Mr. Hodgins fell ill while guiding a canoe trip on the Pelly River in the Yukon. He was scheduled to meet up with Dr. Plante’s crew, totalling seven members, in another section of the Yukon — the Peel River watershed — in mid-August. The area is one of the only pristine watersheds left in North America.
Dr. Plante, Pillar Point, retired as a veterinarian in 2019. He and his wife, Dr. Teresa (Terri) K. Dewey, still donate their services to Zoo New York in Watertown. David is a guide for Wanapitei Canoe, based in Douro-Drummer, Ontario, Canada. Mr. Hodgins was owner and chief guide of the company, which has been paddling Canada’s less-traveled waterways for over 50 years. Now, Mr. Hodgins’s wife of 27 years, Elizabeth McCarney, has the task of plotting what’s next for the business, one of the oldest canoe tripping companies in Canada.
Ms. McCarney said it’s too soon to think about the future of Wanapitei Canoe.
“Shawn was basically the company,” she said in a phone interview from her home in Ontario. “It’s hard to think about it without him in it. People have said to me if there ever was a business that embodied a person, it was definitely Wanapitei Canoe. Everything that Shawn was about, he put into the business. That reflected in the trips he led and planned.”
Mr. McCarney said her husband revered remote areas, especially in Canada’s north.
“Shawn was kind of a unique guy in that he wasn’t trying to get anyone else to do what he ended up doing,” she said. “He just loved doing it. He had a great sense of adventure and liked the solitude that sometimes canoe trips will bring. And he loved living off the land.”
Shawn “wasn’t preachy” about his company’s trips.
“When he sold his trips, they were inspired to go on them because he was inspiring in a very understated way. That was a quiet inspiration to them.”
recovery and motivation
Dr. Plante called his recent trek to the Peel River watershed, “the adventure of a lifetime.” Mr. Hodgins helped him to plan it, and visited Dr. Plante at his Pillar Point home over the summer. That visit was a few months after the two were among a team involved in another adventure, to the Mexican state of Chiapas near the border of Guatemala to explore the jungle and mountain rivers of the ancient Maya. After getting a bad case of COVID-19, Dr. Plante wondered if he’d ever leave southern Mexico alive. He became stranded in Mexico City for several days.
Mr. Hodgins followed Dr. Plante’s recovery from the virus closely. The pair had formed a bond from planning and guiding trips at wilderness areas around the world.
In February, Dr. Plante received an email from Mr. Hodgins. “In a moment of idleness, I decided to jot down the trips we have done together over the past 18 years,” it read. “I came up with 21 trips. Amazing.”
The list ranged from the Coppermind River in the Northwest Territories and Nunavut in Canada and across the Atlantic to Greece.
“We’d just keep coming up with areas, and he’d then try to market it as a trip,” Dr. Plante said. “But he and I would go out and find out if it works and make connections and things like that. He had all the knowledge, but he loved to bounce ideas off people to get different views. Shawn was an introvert. He wasn’t outgoing. That’s why he hired guys like me. I wouldn’t take money from him for guiding. I did it as a friend and friendship.”
“Shawn was very quiet, but when he was in his element on a canoe trip, he was much more expressive and lively,” Ms. McCarney said. “He often had leaders who were much more extroverted than he was and they worked well together because of that.”
Dr. Plante said he finally felt better in his bout with covid in June, and Mr. Hodgins visited him at his Pillar Point home shortly after. They had been working out the logistics of the Yukon trip for a couple of years. Dr. Plante gained experience in packrafting the past few years with trips to Alaska, Iceland, Belize and Mexico. Packrafts can be packed down to a size small enough to carry in a backpack. The activity is a combination of backpacking and rafting.
“Shawn was reluctant to offer packrafting at first, since his background was in canoe tripping,” Dr. Plante said. “We did a ‘trial’ trip in Belize (February/March 2020) exploring several rivers. I had experience in organizing longer expeditions after Arctic Refuge and Iceland trips. Shawn tapped into that experience along with gear and food lists.’’
Wilderness adventures weren’t the only experiences that Dr. Plante and Mr. Hodgins shared. Every other year, Mr. Hodgins and his wife hosted an event where about 120 young doctors from Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, took part in hands-on training in wilderness medicine. Dr. Plante helped out in some years, teaching canoe courses and helping in the kitchen.
“At night everyone square danced,” Dr. Plante said. “Terri and I played guitar and fiddle with the band. Shawn was always the best dancer.”
a lost friend
For the summer adventure in the Yukon, Mr. Hodgins planned three segments, all based out of Whitehorse, the capital of northwest Canada’s Yukon territory. He planned to join Dr. Plante on the third leg, the packrafting section, in early August. It focused on the Peele River watershed, of which they had spent hours preparing for. The watershed, adjacent to Alaska, is about the size of Ireland. Dr. Plante was to be Mr. Hodgins’s co-guide. Dr. Plante’s group was dropped off by helicopter. Their route included the Rackla, Wind, Hart, Blackstone and Oglive rivers — hiking to them as the team snaked its way, carrying 75 pounds on their backs with total hiking distance of about 60 miles in areas populated by grizzly bears and moose. Dr. Plante called it the “epic adventure of a lifetime.”
Mr. Hodgins became ill on the first leg of the Yukon trip. He called Dr. Plante on a satellite phone from Whitehorse, where he was forced to return to, and told him joining his crew at the Peel River watershed, a three-week trip that began Aug. 1, was in doubt. It was a trip that Dr. Plante would end up cutting short by about 10 days due to an incident in which he loss a finger.
“He told me he couldn’t do his fair share of the work and had to go to the ER,” Dr. Plante said. “He didn’t know what he had at that point.”
But they would soon find out the cancer had already taken a deadly hold, advancing rapidly. Pancreatic cancer has few treatment options and limited survival rates.
“We pretty much braced ourselves for what was to come,” Dr. Plante said. “He literally passed away within an hour or so with our group landing at the (beginning) destination.”
Ms. McCarney was in Whitehorse when her husband returned, as she was scheduled to paddle the second leg of his trip (Liard River) with him.
“I was all packed,” Ms. McCarney said. “I flew up there on what happened to be the day before he went to the hospital.”
a lost finger
Dr. Plante’s injury occurred on the Wind River on Aug. 13.
“It was just a great day, a perfect day,” he recalled. “We were buzzing along on some nice, easy whitewater.”
At one point, the team saw a bright red “monolith” protruding from the river. As they got closer, they saw a kayak, filled with gear, stuck in a riverwide obstruction. The kayak was wedged underneath a tree.
You don’t want to get stuck in those things,” Dr. Plante said. “People can drown.”
(As it turned out, the kayak was owned by a Swiss couple, Dr. Plante explained. After the vessel overturned, it quickly darted downstream away from them. The couple had to call in an evacuation via helicopter. The kayak, once freed, was tied on the gravel bar with coordinates recorded for future chopper retrieval as team members collected the gear to bring back to base. Both kayak and gear were reunited with owners.)
James Sculthorpe, co-guide, and Dr. Plante waded into the current and tried to rock the kayak. It seemed to loosen only a bit. Determined to free it, Dr. Plante fastened a rope to the kayak and Mr. Sculthorpe created several butterfly knots for people to hold. Team member David Wilkie was closest to the kayak. The water was too deep for him, so he switched places with the taller Dr. Plante.
“Everybody pulled and the rope snapped,” Dr. Plante said. “It sounded like a gun shot. I looked down and saw my finger cut off. I never saw it in the rapids.”
He dropped to his knees and found his way closer to shore, while keeping his right hand, minus a pinky finger, in the ice cold water.
“I didn’t really have any significant bleeding,” Dr. Plante said.
Team member Mr. Wilkie, a veterinary ophthalmologist, bandaged the hand. Meanwhile, Ms. McCarney at Wanapitei Canoe was contacted by satellite phone with a request seeking a helicopter to airlift the patient out of the wilderness for treatment. After picking Dr. Plante up, it landed at a base in Dawson City. Dr. Plante said an off-duty EMS driver drove him to Dawson Health Centre, where he was met by “nurse Ava,” the only one in the building. She irrigated the wound and applied bandages, but Dr. Plante was still hours away from a doctor. His destination was Whitehorse. He said he received a medivac quote of $20,000 and a quote to charter a plane for $6,000.
But another offered arrived, at 500 Canadian dollars. “I could hop on a plane with some hunters. It would just take a little longer. I said, ‘That’s me!’” Dr. Plante said. “A couple minutes later, a guy came busting in, yelling, ‘I’m looking for Mr. Nine Fingers!’ And then he says, ‘We gotta go now!’ Meanwhile, nurse Ava is literally still trying to irrigate. She’s chasing me with a syringe out the door.”
The flight stopped at a handful of hunting camps in the three-hour trip to Whitehorse. After landing on the Yukon River, Dr. Plante got a ride to Whitehorse General Hospital, where in the emergency room, Dr. Plante realized the doctor, Ryan Warshawski, looked familiar. The two had chatted at the beginning of Dr. Plante’s expedition while at the Mayo floatplane base just outside of Whitehorse.
“He had a family trip with a raft he took down the Wind,” Dr. Plante said. “He was super interested in my (Hyperlite) tent. We talked about all kinds of stuff for about an hour.”
Dr. Warshawski’s first words to Dr. Plante were, “It’s you!’
“I didn’t even know he was a doctor,” Dr. Plante said. “It was another one of those chance things.”
What followed was a generous dose of Yukon hospitality. Realizing Dr. Plante hadn’t eaten in several hours, a nurse brought him a big bowl of moose chili. Dr. Warshawski hooked Dr. Plante up with two friends, both family doctors.
“I stayed at their house,” Dr. Plante said. “Ryan then showed up. We talked quite a bit. It was great. I made a couple of good friends there. They gave me rides when I needed them and this and that. I returned the favor with a bunch of stuff that I had for the trip that I knew they could use.”
Dr. Plante had two stay in Whitehorse for about four days before heading back home.
“I wanted it stabilized because I was on morphine and all this stuff,” he said. “I wasn’t sure about traveling quite yet.”
He recalled quirky incident while he was walking in downtown Whitehorse.
‘Some guy randomly yells, ‘Hey! Someone cut your finger off?’ I go, ‘Kind of, yea.’ He just starts laughing and walks away. I go, ‘What the hell?’”
He asked an acquaintance about the encounter later. “He said they had a lot of drug problems there at one point and people who didn’t pay their drug bills on time got a finger cut off.”
a return to the barrens
With the loss of his best friend, Dr. Plante, once back home, viewed his finger incident as a “sidebar” to the trip. But as a musician/guitar player and as a veterinary surgeon, he said he will see how it goes.
He has been in close contact with Mr. Hodgins’s wife. A celebration of the life of Shawn Hodgins will be 2 to 5 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 15 in the Great Hall at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario.
James Raffan, director of external relations at the Canadian Canoe Museum, in an online essay posted Sept. 2, recalled aspects of that life:
“In his sudden and premature leaving of this earth, he has, however, left for many of us an example of how to live life to the max, how to follow your dream, how to be true to yourself, how to be generous and gracious in service to others, and how to savor and protect the simple pleasures of wilderness travel.”
Dr. Plante and his wife will attend the Oct. 15 celebration. Meanwhile, Dr. Plante has planned another trek in Mr. Hodgins’s honor.
“Shawn wanted to go back to the Canadian Barrens,” Dr. Plante said.
He hopes to take some of his friend’s ashes there to scatter them next year. A team will join him.
The Barren Grounds is a large area of tundra in mainland Nunavut and stretching into the Northwest Territories in northern Canada. Northwest Territories Tourism calls it a lonesome realm, where “rivers flow clear, herds of caribou stretch to the far horizon, and wolves survey their empire from atop ancient outcrops, impervious to human visitors.”
“This one is going to take precedence. It’s something that’s important for me,” Dr. Plante said. “I want to leave a little bit of Shawn up there. I talked to his wife. She was hoping somebody would do that.”
“I am just thrilled about that,” Ms. McCarney said. “I wanted to make sure there were ashes sprinkled in an area that Shawn spent so much time and loved so much. He always loved traveling in remote areas. He often would be doing routes that people, as far as he knew, hadn’t done before.
“That was part of the allure of the north for Shawn.”
