Free. Bilingual. Every province and territory.
901 canoe routes across Canada, on one map.
Traced river geometry, rapids, portages and campsites, plus 31 more routes in the northeastern United States. The map opens on a light basemap and brings in satellite terrain as you zoom in.
- Routes in Canada
- 901
- Provinces and territories
- 13
- Traced geometry
- 733 / 932
- Two languages
- EN / FR
Coverage
Every province. Every territory.
Quebec holds 402 routes, the product of decades of volunteer surveying. Ontario holds 226. The rest of the country fills in the map, from the Northwest Territories to Nova Scotia.
Twelve of these have a hub page of their own. Prince Edward Island has four routes and the northeastern United States has thirty-one, both too few to justify a hub, so they live on the map and in search. These fourteen counts add up to the 898 routes that have a page. The other 34 arrived from the source carrying a web address where a river name should be, so they stay on the map without one.
The data
What a route carries.
733 / 932
The line on the water
733 of the 932 routes carry geometry traced from the National Hydro Network. The other 199 have a mapped location and their sources but no line. Nothing here is sketched freehand, and those 733 traced lines are what every river plate on this page is drawn from.
144 / 123 / 116
Rapids, portages, campsites
Counts as the source maps recorded them, on 144, 123 and 116 routes. Positions are a separate question: a point appears on the map only where OpenStreetMap has it, so nothing you see plotted is a guess.
162
Section by section
162 routes carry a section-level breakdown taken from the source map: section names, river class, portage lengths. 546 routes link the source document itself, so you can go and read it.
Plates
Three of the 733.
Each of the 733 traced routes has a plate: its real geometry, nothing else on the page, at any size. These three are real links to real routes.
Provenance
Where the data comes from.
Published by Natural Resources Canada. Every traced river line on the site comes from it.
Used under the Open Database Licence. Every plotted rapid, waterfall, portage, campsite and access point is theirs.
Source maps from clubs, federations and parks
Route extents, section notes, and the counts of rapids, portages and campsites. 546 routes link the source document, and 464 of those are the original PDF.
A volunteer resource that has documented Quebec rivers for years, and the origin of most of the Quebec corpus. That work is theirs. We index it, map it and link back to it.
How the descriptions are made
Route descriptions and star ratings on this site are compiled from published sources by an automated research pass, and each record keeps the list of sources it consulted. They are not first-hand trip reports and we do not present them as such. 874 of the 898 route pages name the sources behind their own text. The other 24 have no source list to show, so they show none.
The same standard applies to difficulty. 146 routes carry a grade taken from a survey. 669 carry a grade estimated from published descriptions, and those are labelled approximate wherever they appear. 117 have no grade and stay unrated rather than get one invented for them. Read the sources, then scout on the water.
| Routes with coordinates | 932 |
|---|---|
| Of those, in Canada | 901 |
| Of those, in the northeastern United States | 31 |
| Routes with a page of their own | 898 |
| Pages that name their sources | 874 |
| Routes with traced geometry | 733 |
| Routes with section detail | 162 |
| Routes with a surveyed difficulty grade | 146 |
| Routes with an estimated difficulty grade | 669 |
A site that says what it does not know is believed about what it does. 34 entries arrived from the source carrying a web address where a river name should be. They keep their coordinates and their link, but they get no page, which is the gap between 932 and 898.
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Bilingual
The same route, in both languages.
Not a machine flip of an English page at request time. Both texts are stored, both are indexed, and the URL follows the switch.
EN
The Manigotagan River is a northeastern Manitoba canoe route of approximately 280 km flowing from Manigotagan Lake southeast through boreal forest and numerous lakes to the Winnipeg River. This intermediate-level route features gentle current, Class I rapids, abundant spruce and pine forest, and excellent fishing for walleye and pike, making it attractive to anglers and families seeking remote paddling without extreme technical difficulty.
FR
La rivière Manigotagan est une route de canoë du nord-est du Manitoba d'environ 280 km s'écoulant du lac Manigotagan vers le sud-est à travers la forêt boréale et de nombreux lacs jusqu'à la rivière Winnipeg. Cette route de niveau intermédiaire se distingue par un courant doux, des rapides classe I, une forêt abondante d'épinettes et de pins, et une excellente pêche du doré et du brochet, la rendant attrayante pour les pêcheurs et les familles recherchant un pagayage reculé sans difficulté technique extrême.
Manigotagan River, Manitoba. Compiled from manitoba.ca/parks, outfitters.ca and fishingmanitoba.ca, which is exactly what that route page says under its own description.