All these memories of Phil Cotton - who went by the name Voyageur on this forum - have me copying and pasting a brief section of one of my Wabakimi posts dealing with a return visit to Cliff Lake we made in 2018 after Phil had passed away.
A Toast To (Uncle) Phil Cotton (1940-2018)We also returned to Cliff Lake with the bittersweet knowledge that, of all the lakes in the Wabakimi area, it was the favourite spot of the legendary Phil Cotton. Phil was born in Hamilton but his family moved to Thunder Bay when he was fifteen; he would stay in the area, working as a music teacher for forty years at various schools including Port Arthur Collegiate Institute. Summers were for his other passion – canoe trips on the region’s many lakes and rivers, often as a YMCA guide and leader.
On retirement, Phil spent his remaining years advocating for the Wabakimi area. See the map above for the mammoth task he took on through his Wabakimi Project.
It promoted wilderness canoe tripping in the area, by re-establishing historical canoe routes with portage clearing done by volunteer work crews each summer and providing canoe trippers with the necessary up-to-date maps which covered the Park and the surrounding area.
We first got to know Phil by his Canadian Canoe Routes handle of Voyageur. Back in 2010, he had made our entry into Wabakimi canoe tripping very easy with his ready advice and still unpublished copies of the first volume of the five map sets that his Wabakimi Project has since put out. We had never even heard of Wabakimi and now we were driving 1600 kilometers to Armstrong Station and the slice of paddlers’ heaven that Phil had made his retirement project!
Three more Wabakimi trips in the summers that followed – and three more occasions where we got to benefit from the maps created by Project mapmaker Barry Simon and the portage clearing done by Phil and dozens of Wabakimi Project volunteer work crews. We joked that all we had to do was find out where Uncle Phil and his work gangs had been the summer before and make that our route!
With this trip we followed after him once more – this time to Cliff Lake with an offering of a shot or two of Canadian whisky that we poured into the lake he loved most of all. We miss his keen and precise vision and direct no b.s. manner. He was an original.
Googling his name will turn up some background info on his life and legacy. In this piece – My Turn: Phil Cotton – in On Nature magazine, Phil explains the motivation behind The Wabakimi Project back in 2004 and the Friends of Wabakimi that it has morphed into.
https://onnaturemagazine.com/my-turn-phil-cotton.html