Building a birch bark canoe, collecting materials

Building a birch bark canoe is something very few folk in the world will ever get to do so I feel extremely fortunate to be helping my friend Jarrod Stone Dahl one of only a handful of folk left with the skills to make them. This and the next few blog posts will share some of the proceses involved. Here are some of Jarrods previous canoes.Our first job was looking for birch bark, at this time of year if you make a vertical slit down the tree the outer barl can be peeled away in a sheet. Here Jarrod’s wife April is showing my daughter Jojo how to peel bark. Bigger trees have thicker bark, this size is too thin and small for canoe bark but is ideal for baskets.

Here I am having my first go, no matter how many times you have seen this done on youtube or watched someone else do it there is nothing like doing it yourself to really feel what is happening.After making the slit we start to prise the bark away. I was tentative at first but you soon get a feel for how much strain you can apply.

And here is the result, gorgeous bark.

Sometimes it’s possible to get a second length of clean bark with the help of a ladder.
Here Jojo is peeling a beautiful tall section.
This is a tree that Jarrod peeled 2 years ago, the inner bark dries and braks away but a new layer of inner and outer bark has formed underneath, the tree remains healthy.This was our haul of basket making bark.

The next job was scouting for canoe bark. For this we needed much larger trees which have thicker bark. Birch is a short lived tree so trees of this size are unusual and coming toward the end of their natural life, it is still a big decision though so we spent a lot of time looking for the perfect tree. Each tree we found we cut a small section of bark, folded it and twisted it to see whether it delaminated or split easily.

This tree is definitely a possibility.

As we drove and walked we saw plenty of wildlife, this is a beaver dam, the lodge is on the left.

and beaver felled tree stumps.The next raw material to source was root for the stitching. Jarrod’s favourite stand of jack pine was being cleared so we had to find a new source. We found a dense stand of spruce with little understory or ground flors, perfect to alow us to dig root.

Having scraped the surface soil away the roots can be tugged and loosened then you follow allong pulling great lengths up.

And this is what we collected, bundles of flexible root. Note the small smouldering fire, that is to keep the mosquitos away, there were plenty of them.Back home we dropped the roots into boiling water for 30 minutes or so.The hot roots were fished out ready to be split and dressed.The first stage was splitting the root in half, this was surprisingly easy.
 Then the outer bark was peeled awayand the root cleft again down to a nice thin flexible fibre.This is me cleaving a root in half.

We bundled these roots up and tossed them in a bucket of water to keep them flexible untill we ready to use them.So we have a couple of weeks of work to go, tis was the first two days, it’s pretty exciting and at the end of the project we will be paddling a conoe out into the wilderness.