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The site of the Bromley-Calder tragedy was neither Wolf Rapids nor that given in The Polar Record (Vol 14, No 90, 1968, p361; reproduced in Canoeing North into the Unknown). The Polar Record article is incorrect also re their predecessors on the Back and the source of the Back.
A note kindly sent by Bob Bromley gives the coordinates as
66d 05' 44.69" N, 97d 04' 06.29" W
The location is on topo 66I3, between the mouth of the Meadowbank and Mount Meadowbank; it is the ledge at 872/322 (NAD83, plus/minus 50 m) on the river right side of the island.
Bob adds that a cairn in memory of Graham (Peter) Bromley was built on Bromley Lake in 1987. Bromley Lake and Ian Calder Lake to the WNW were named after the victims.
Many thanks to Hugh Westheuser, John Stephenson and most especially Bob Bromley.
Our of respect for Bromley and Calder, I quote the obituary published in The Polar Record:
Graham (Peter) Bromley and Ian David Calder died on 27 August 1967 in a canoe accident near the mouth of the Back River, Northwest Territories, Canada.
Bromley was born in Grande Prairie Alberta on 11 January, 1926 but moved to Yellowknife , NWT, where he owned a hardware business founded by his father. He keenly felt the pioneering spirit, and generously devoted much effort to community affairs and to improving social and economic conditions in northern Canada. Calder was born in Croydon, England, in 1935. He was educated at Mill Hill, qualified in dentistry at Edinburgh University, and in 1964 emigrated to Canada. His dental practice, based in Yellowknife, covered more than a million square miles. Under government contract, he gave dental care to Eskimo settlements throughout the Western and Central Canadian Arctic, as well as to Indian villages in the vicinity of Great Slave Lake.
Both Calder and Bromley were expert canoemen, with considerable experience of northern rivers. They had studied the works of earlier explorers and delighted in retracing their canoe routes. In 1966, they accomplished a difficult journey from Fort Rae on Great Slave Lake northward to Great Bear Lake. In 1967, following closely the journals of George Back (1834) and James Anderson (1855), their only predecessors along the entire Back River, they set out from its source in Muskox Lake. After twenty-seven days of travel, some 130 km above the river's estuary in Chantrey Inlet on the Arctic Ocean, their canoe capsized in rapids and both drowned. Ten days later, the third member of the party, Bromley's 16-year-old son Robert, was rescued by an air search party. He had survived with food and equipment washed ashore after the accident.
The Government of Canada, in recognition of the public services and adventurous spirit of these two men, has undertaken to name two lakes in the vicinity in their memory.
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