Alison Croft

I was born to a long ancestry of Metis people of Tessier, Chevrefils and Roy. I am a trained ecologist, canoeist and an older sister. I have a younger brother and sister who are twins. I have 3 cats, 2 parents that have been together for over 35 years and I have one Harley Davidson.

This adventure allows me to retrace and honor my forefather's journey that they made for the Hudson's Bay Company. Through their hard work and dedication they traveled along the river systems to open up the vast unknown which is the Canada that we know today. I personally wanted to take this once in a lifetime opportunity to remind myself about how lucky I am to have the amenities that I have today and to honor those who originally did this journey. I want to be able to say that I was able to retrace the 18th century fur trading routes and travel from Thunder Bay, ON to Batoche, SK in the same fashion as 200 years ago.

My motivation for this trip is 2 fold. I had been working for York University sampling Canadian Shield lakes for 3 years and was excited to travel more in a canoe. Before this opportunity came up I had plans to complete my thesis in a different fashion. However, Dr. Norman Yan had suggested that I bring along some sampling equipment and sample some of these boundary waters that have never been done before. This brief process of sampling zooplankton is exciting for the scientific community as it has never been done before. Traveling along the boundary water's creates an international interest from the U.S. and Canada perspective. The equipment I am bringing to sample the lakes is a small zooplankton net with a metered tape, a temperature probe and a secchi disk. This project is very exciting because not only am traveling along the routes of 200 years past but I am using this experience in trying to develop environmental research 200 years later.