Paddling the 'Dangerous River' Is a Deep Backcountry Adventure You'll Remember Forever

When people talk about the Nahanni River, someone will inevitably bring up the headless bodies. In 1908, a search party for a trio of missing prospectors along the waterway in Canada’s Northwest Territories discovered two of them, brothers Frank and Willie McLeod, decapitated by its banks, their heads—and whatever gold they had mined—nowhere in sight. The third member of their expedition, Robert Weir, had disappeared without a trace. Despite rumors of sightings as far afield as Vancouver, he was never seen again.

The Nahanni’s sinister reputation dates back a long time. The Dene people, who have fished and trapped along the Nahanni for thousands of years, tell stories about their ancestors’ clashes with the Naha, a since-disappeared tribe that lived in the mountains around the river. The story of the headless prospectors would repeat itself at least two more times as well, in 1917 and 1945, when missing miners who had traveled up the Nahanni turned up decapitated. When English-born adventurer and author R.M. Patterson released his book about the Nahanni, The Dangerous River, in 1957, the name stuck.

The Nahanni I saw when I visited this summer, however, was anything but foreboding. From my first glimpse of Náįlįcho, or Virginia Falls, the thundering 315-foot cascade that guards the put-in to the river, what I found was a super-sized northern landscape, a broad river that snaked through steep-sided granite canyons and past spruce and pine forests where we spotted bears and woodland caribou. With fewer than 1,000 people floating it every year, this is a spot that’s a privilege to see—and worth the three-day journey it took to get to the start. Get a glimpse of the Nahanni in this video.

Do it

Unless you’re an experienced expedition paddler and willing to spend a lot of time figuring out logistics, you’ll want to go with a guided group. I traveled with Nahanni River Adventures, which has been running it and other Canadian rivers since 1972 (the company invited me and covered the trip). From the continental U.S., plan on taking about a week and a half, including travel time. Weather delays are common—stormy conditions grounded our float plane on both our flight in and our flight out—and most tour operators build in flexibility to avoid scuppered trips. Pro tip: The horseflies and mosquitoes can be vicious in the summer, so bring a bug jacket.