In the summer of 1959, the 22-year old Hoyt and two friends set out across the Northwest Territories wilderness to paddle the South Nahanni River—a waterway so storied for disappearances that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police dubbed it a “Valley of No Return.”
Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Austin Hoyt (American Experience) returns to the river whose danger and mysteries beckoned him as a youth in the new memoir, “The Haunting Nahanni.” Buffalo native Hoyt served as a producer and executive producer at WGBH Boston from 1965 to 2003, and then as a freelancer until 2010, producing, directing and writing historical documentaries for PBS. In 1985, he received a Peabody Award for his role as executive producer of the Frontline special report Crisis in Central America, which examined U.S. history in the Caribbean and Central America. He lives with his wife in South Dartmouth, Mass.
In the early 20th century—decades before Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau created the Nahanni National Park reserve—westerners lured by potential riches from gold and fur found the area treacherous. Hoyt explores the stories told of numerous deaths and unsolved vanishings.
This is the environment Hoyt—a self-described “kid who never outgrew summer camp,” who slept with a map of Hudson Bay Company stores on his bedroom wall—decided he had to see.
“The Haunting Nahanni” is both a river journey and a quest to match the success of Hoyt’s hero, Raymond Patterson. Patterson wrote in The Dangerous River (1954) that he ascended the Nahanni in 1927 to Virginia Falls, 316 feet high.
It turns out that Patterson never made it to the falls by himself. The final heroic day he describes was a fantasy. Hoyt’s memoir is in part a lesson in grappling with a hero who lets you down.
Decades in the making
Hoyt penned the first three chapters of The Haunting Nahanni in 1967, as a young man who was already forging a career in storytelling. Eventually he would work for PBS’ American Experience series at WGBH in Boston, producing the Emmy Award-nominated Victory in the Pacific (2005), the Emmy-winning MacArthur (1995) and numerous other documentaries.
His television career prevented him from finishing the book in the 1960s, and the chapters were stashed in his file drawers. When he cleaned those files out during the pandemic, Hoyt discovered the faded papers and decided to finish the tale.
“The Haunting Nahanni” is a classic river adventure story, complete with a stalking bear whose meat would infect the boys with trichinosis. It’s peopled by the kind of characters you might expect to meet in foreboding territory, like the Yukon lushes who decided a summer in a danger-filled valley might help them dry out, and a fellow who offered to drive Hoyt’s car back down the Alaska Highway and left it 120 kilometers away in the wrong province.
And then there’s Charlie McCloud, whose brothers Willie and Frank found gold on the Nahanni in 1904. Their gruesome demise inspired modern place names like Deadmen Valley and Headless Creek. Hoyt met Charlie 50 years after his brothers’ deaths, still searching for gold and slipping into madness.
A tale of survival
Hoyt, whose exit from the South Nahanni valley was not what he anticipated, did of course make it out alive. “The Haunting Nahanni” marshals a lifetime of skills he amassed as a decorated storyteller to recount his adventures and the reflections they spawned. This is “a stirring tale of adventure on a death-stalked river,” says H.D.S. Greenway, former Boston Globe correspondent and current Foreign Affairs columnist. “I knew Austin Hoyt as a first-rate reporter in the TIME Boston bureau in the mid-1960s. He has not lost his touch.”
The Haunting Nahanni is available now from Amazon.