At first, the rapids seemed routine.
Rough water was nothing new for the paddlers, who were more than two months and 550 miles into a long-distance haul through remote rivers near the Arctic Circle. On this September day in 1955 a little froth wasn’t going to force the six-person crew to pull out their canoes and carry them instead.
But within hours expedition leader Arthur Moffatt ’41 was dead. Waves that looked small turned out to be enormous, swamping Moffatt’s canoe and sweeping the 36-year-old backcountry veteran into the Dubawnt River. He never had a chance once he hit the frigid water.
“In one moment, this grand adventure had become a nightmare beyond all comprehension,” expedition member Fred “Skip” Pessl ’55 later wrote. “It happened so quickly, seemingly so easily; no violence, nothing dramatic; a brief struggle and then an empty finality.”