Wilderness Committee staffers Andy Miller and Eric Reder just returned home from their biggest, most audacious wilderness expedition to date, an exploration by foot, 4x4 truck, canoe and by air of the proposed “East Shore Wilderness” area of eastern Manitoba and northwestern Ontario. Located 200 km north of Winnipeg, Kenora, Dryden and Thunder Bay, the Eastshore is North America’s largest remaining intact, mostly road-less forest. It is truly huge, a small floatplane flying @ 100km/hour takes 2 full hours to fly across this magnificent wilderness. And that is exactly what Andy and Eric did! They begged and pleaded with remote bush pilots to take them up in the air for free (as you may know, the Wilderness Committee operates on a very slim budget), and finally found some elder environmentalist pilots who just charged them for gas.

What a mind blowing experience it was to fly over such a wild and remote place of lakes, bogs and forest. One exceedingly special attribute of the Eastshore Wilderness is its southerly locale in Canada’s “Big Tree” boreal forest region. Each year new logging and mining roads penetrate deeper into this wilderness, harming its Amazon-like qualities. The Eastshore is home to 1 billion songbirds, dozens of caribou herds, and 62 traditional First Nation Communities, only 9 of which have road access. It is also a canoeists paradise with thousands of lakes linked together by rivers, streams and short portages. The Eastshore Wilderness is Canada’s last chance to protect a huge swath of southern boreal forest for future generations.