But at second glance, they do have something in common. Both shared the same fluid path for some 2,000 miles through Northern Canada. In June 1789, Mackenzie was hired by the Northwestern Fur Company to find a water passage leading to the Pacific Ocean. At the ripe age of 25, he and 12 others pushed off from the shores of Lake Athabasca in four birchbark canoes. Mackenzie's knowledge of the area would come from two sources: trial and error, and an Indian scout named English Chief, who accompanied the expedition group. Miller, on the other hand, would push off in June 1998, solo, from the shores of the Athabasca River with 50 topographical maps and knowledge gleaned from Mackenzie's journal. His put-in point was a couple hundred miles south of where Mackenzie put in.

Paddling in the wake of Mackenzie some 200 years later, Miller witnessed the same "first sights" as Mackenzie and more than once felt the quiet presence of the past lapping against the shores of the rivers they shared.

Miller successfully traced Mackenzie's paddle strokes from Fort McMurray in Alberta, Canada, to the Beaufort Sea, part of the Arctic Ocean. Miller was far more gratified with his journey than Mackenzie, who was searching for a water route across Canada to the Pacific, not to the Arctic Ocean. Mackenzie's

disappointment prompted him to name the river that finally deposited him into the sea, the River of Disappointment. Now named the Mackenzie River, this 1,300-mile waterway is the largest river in Canada, and the second largest in North America behind the Mississippi. It took Mackenzie until 1793, four years later, to discover a water route to the Pacific (11 years prior to the famed Lewis and Clark Expedition).

Miller began his journey in a 17-foot-long canoe, loaded down with 450 pounds of food and gear. He would spend the next 200 miles on this river until it pooled into Lake Athabasca. There, he branched off into the Slave River, following it 300 miles to Great Slave Lake, the fifth largest in the world. He skirted the south shore of the lake for 100 miles before veering off into the Mackenzie River. Some 1,300 miles later he was swept into the Beaufort Sea - part of the Arctic Ocean.

The Ocean: Both Destination and Disappointment

The memory of the day Miller reached the ocean is indelibly etched into his mind. "I heard trumpets and harps and angels and the sun parted to shine down on me," says Miller, who doesn't seem to care whether you believe it or not - because he does. "I could feel the wind and the taste of salt water and see wide open space unenclosed by land." After paddling for a month and a half, averaging 10- to 15-hour days, reaching the ocean was the pot of gold. "You go from day to day paddling and you don't really feel like you're getting anywhere," he says. "But when I saw the ocean, I knew I had done it."

For Mackenzie, reaching the ocean after nearly seven weeks of paddling was less climactic. At first he thought, or hoped, it was a large lake. The taste of salt in the water was subtle, as it is in northern oceans. Clouds curtained the horizon. It wasn't until the tide eased out that he realized it was the ocean, and then not the Pacific.

At the delta, where some hundred channels flow into the Beaufort Sea, Mackenzie suspected something was askew. "I am much at a loss here on how to act, being certain that my going further in this direction will not answer the purpose of which the voyage was intended," he wrote in his journal. "As it is evident that these waters must empty themselves into the Northern Ocean." His crew would spend four days there and then paddle back upstream - the route they had spent the past seven weeks floating with the current - to their origination point. They would accomplish this in about the same amount of time it took them to paddle downstream.

Miller put his oars to rest and explored the sea's coastline, including Kittigazuit, an abandoned Eskimo village he'd heard about on route. The Arctic beaches felt haunted. An old abandoned whaling station stood not far from a dilapidated Inuit cemetery. Crumbling tombstones blended in with the tundra grass, and moss grew on scattered bones. Because of the frozen tundra, the dead were buried under piles of driftwood, which had decayed over the years. "The only sound was the wind and the bushes rustling," says Miller. "I didn't touch anything."

Challenge in the Distance

Since Miller was a solo traveler, he had consciously chosen a route free of technically challenging rivers. Rather, the challenge was in the distance. "In the beginning I wouldn't let myself think about how far I had to paddle, because it would overwhelm me," he says. No wonder - the distance he traveled is equivalent to paddling from California to Maine. "I had to focus on the goal for each day. I kept saying just one stroke at a time and I will get to the ocean."

Distance was the goal, but weather called the shots in how far Miller would travel each day. "Wind could turn water from glass to 10- to 15-foot swells," he says. He planned for 40-mile days, but it varied. One day Miller covered 80 miles and put the paddle to bed at midnight. Another day, he crawled 25 miles in five hours into an unforgiving headwind. The width of the rivers varied from four miles to 100 feet across. Even on land, the wind ruled. "Waiting out one storm, I had 14 stakes pinning down my tent, all my gear and me inside, and I still thought it was going to blow away or be ripped to shreds - I knew if I got out of it, it would," he says.

The isolation Miller felt, however, was incomparable to that felt by the explorers. When Miller stopped in native towns, he was a curious novelty - adults stared and children ran up to take a closer look. The ancestors of these same natives may have seen Mackenzie float by or watched him from a distance as he set up camp. Mackenzie was the first white man they had seen, and many would run from him when he approached. Mackenzie would notice footprints in the sand or see natives following him from a distance. "The Indian that followed us yesterday arrived here some time before us. We found but few people, we suppose that they hid themselves upon the news of our approach," wrote Mackenzie at one stopping point. Aside from natives, Miller visited with fellow paddlers and even got to know the crewmen of one of the 300-foot barges that periodically use the waterway to bring supplies to the villages.

Mackenzie's scribbled thoughts and observations accompanied Miller down the river. At Peace Point, where the Peace River meets the Slave River, Miller sensed the weight of the decision Mackenzie had to make in trying to navigate his way to the Pacific. Mackenzie chose to follow the Slave River. Four years later he would return, on his way to the Pacific Ocean, to take the Peace River - a much more difficult route that would entail upstream paddling, narrow white water canyons and an eight-day portage through a mountain pass.

Miller recalls the stillness of the water at the confluence of these two rivers, and the kind of quiet that surrounds contemplation. It wasn't until he got out of his canoe and sunk up to his waist in mud that the delicate connection with this place's history was broken. "If I had not had my boat there to help pull myself up, I'd probably still be there," says Miller, who left his sandals encased in the quicksand-like mud.

Mackenzie may have grown suspicious as to whether he was heading in the right direction at Camsell Bend, some 250 miles into the Mackenzie River. At this mountain range, named after him, the river takes a sharp right angle, changing its direction from west to north, in the direction of the Arctic Ocean. That night, Miller camped at an island near the bend of the river, perhaps laying his sleeping bag down in the same place Mackenzie sat and wrote in his journal about this unexpected turn in the river. "Late at night, in the quiet, I listened hard and thought I heard paddle strokes," says Miller.

In his journal, Mackenzie provides textured detail of the mountains. His script reveals his leniency toward objective recording and concrete fact. He is more scientist than dreamer. "There appears to be a number of white stones, which glisten when the rays of the sun shine upon them. The Indians say they are Maneloe Aseniah (Spirit Stones), but I think that must be talk."

The Ubiquity of Bears

Writing was Miller's mode of expression - rarely did he talk out loud, except to keep bears at bay and once, to check his hearing. "One spot on the Mackenzie River was the quietest place I have ever been," says Miller, who couldn't hear the rustle of wind, the song and buzz of birds and mosquitoes, or the flapping of his tent cloth - nothing, just silence. "I felt like I had lost my hearing. That's when I had to talk out loud to make sure I could still hear."

A black bear encounter had Miller swearing, whistling and yelling. He had just set up his tent and was bathing when he heard tree limbs breaking and snapping 100 feet behind him. He threw stones in a colander and began shaking it to make noise, but every time Miller stopped making noise, the bear would edge closer until a mere 50 feet separated them. While making noise, Miller was simultaneously ripping down his tent and throwing gear into the canoe. His only weapon was mace, and his confidence in its effectiveness wavered. Miller resorted to throwing a rock at the bear, and it retreated. He threw the rest of his gear in his canoe and took off. "It was midnight and I'd already paddled 15 hours that day, but there was no way I was staying at that campsite." He paddled another hour to an island and set up camp.

Another bear encounter, of a different sort, was where the Great Bear River meets the Mackenzie River. Mackenzie had camped here and climbed to the top of a 1,500-foot mountain that resembles the shape of a bear, surrounded by three large red patches of rock. An ageless legend tells of a bear that woke up from hibernation one spring and was hungry. It wandered the edges of the river and caught and ate three beavers, leaving the pelts - these are the three red patches of rock along the hillside.

Some legends come in the form of warnings. When Mackenzie approached The Ramparts on the Mackenzie River, natives warned him of a serpent that lived where the river narrowed from 2.5 miles wide to 100 yards wide. This area is lined with spectacular, 150-foot limestone cliffs - so there are no beaches to make an escape from a wily serpent. Mackenzie rolled his eyes at this prospect, but he did expect some sort of danger in the form of whitewater in the narrow canyons. "The river appeared quite shut up with high perpendicular white rocks. This did not at all please us. We went ashore to try to visit the rapid, but there was no possibility of seeing anything," Mackenzie wrote. Miller expected rough water too and prepared for it, only to hardly meet a current. The only tricky part of the river was the illusion the cliff-lined horizon created. The cliffs on each side of the river appeared to connect, making Mackenzie think the river was coming to a dead end.

Sustenance on the River

One of Miller's goals was to go the entire distance without re-supplying. He wanted to be self-sufficient the entire 2,000 miles. He spent the months prior to his trip dehydrating fruits, vegetables, turkey and beef. Breakfasts consisted of multigrain pancakes and granola, dinner was either a pasta, rice and vegetables, or a Mexican dish with dried beans and veggies. Miller didn't want to cook meat, or even fish that he could catch, for fear of attracting bears. He worked up an appetite expending some 4,500 calories a day.

Mackenzie's crew succumbed to voracious appetites as well. In one six-day period, his crew ate two reindeer, four swans, 45 geese, one bird, and a "great many fish." "I always found North men blessed with good appetites, but nothing equal to what ours are and have been since we entered the river," he wrote. "I would have thought it gluttonous in any men, did I not find that my own appetite has augmented in proportion to theirs."

Gluttony on the river was nonexistent; feasting was simply the fuel for exertion. Mackenzie commends his own men's stamina. "No men in the world are more severely worked than these Canadian Voyagers," he wrote. "I have known them to work in a canoe 24 hours out of 24 and to go at that rate during a fortnight or three weeks without a day of rest or a diminution of labor."

Miller notes the same hardship. "Some nights, I would practically crawl into my tent exhausted from paddling," he says, amazed that Mackenzie put in more than a dozen 100-mile days on the river. Aside from exhaustion, the two shared other discomforts, including ravenous horse flies, sunburns and heat (Miller sometimes paddled at night to avoid it).

As for equipment, the breadth and agility of Miller's canoe was a comfort Mackenzie would have envied. The Sea Wind canoe is a one-of-a-kind solo expedition canoe made by Verlen Kruger, who holds the record for distance paddling. The 55-pound canoe is made from 12 layers of Kevlar, compared to the usual three. Miller knew he would need a lightweight canoe, but one that was rugged enough to stand the test of a long trip, and sturdy enough to hold all of his gear and supplies.

Navigating Through Smoking Hills

Sometimes danger was hidden by a smoke screen. Miller floated by more than seven forest fires, presumably started by lightning. Sometimes the air was so thick with smoke he could barely see the end of his boat. At one point, he used his compass to find shore so he could follow the shoreline - the only time he used his compass on the entire trip. One day a 300-foot barge plowed out of the smoke some 100 yards away. If Miller had been in the middle of the river, he would have been in its path.

But the forest fires did make impressive light shows. One evening, Miller camped not far from where a fire had raged; it was still crackling and smoldering. "I felt a bit absurd lighting my own little fire and adding to the smoke," he says. In the night, he awoke to newly fueled flames and watched trees fall as flames jumped 40 feet into the air. Mackenzie did not record any fires, but he did smell and see the smoke rising from the Smoking Hills where an exposed coal vein still burns. "We found a sulphurous smell and upon our coming to the first sound, the whole bank was on fire for a considerable distance," he wrote. The smoke was still rising when Miller floated by.

In the Wake of Self Discovery

Although Mackenzie and Miller paddled the same path, their reasons were far different. Mackenzie's ambitions were to discover a waterway to the Pacific. He keenly observed the external environment to help guide him on his journey. For Miller, the journey was an inward one, paralleling the days he spent on the water. The more distance and time put between him and the rush and demands of his daily life back home, the more centered and emotionally at peace Miller became. "I gained confidence in myself and it put me back into being myself," he says.

Solitude and self-reliance were integral to Miller's journey - elements he feels have practically been swallowed up by society. They have gone from being an inevitable part of life during Mackenzie's time to being almost nonexistant. "We need to escape these shackles that have a hold of us," he stresses. "It's as if society is creating us, instead of us creating the society we want to live in."