Neil Hartling
Neil Hartling grew up in Alberta. He graduated in the 1980s with a degree specializing in Outdoor Education and started a small outdoor skills school teaching canoeing, cross-country skiing, backpacking, and first aid. He turned his parents’ garage into a canoe factory.1) He was unemployed when he took a canoe trip on the Nahanni River in 1984. He saw an old boat with a broken motor carrying three passengers toward the Beaver Dam rapids. The falls would have capsized the boat throwing the people into the water, but Neil and a travelling companion were able to reach them and tow their boat about three km to safety before that happened. Later that winter, Neil applied for an outfitting license on the Nahanni, and he received it thanks to support from the family he had rescued. For more than ten years he worked with Indigenous groups to expand the Nahanni National Park boundary to protect the watershed. The Park is now one of the largest in the world.2)
Hartling and some other guides worked to develop the Nahanni River guiding company. They set a goal of adding a new destination to every year of the company’s existence but to also grow slowly in order to maintain high standards. Neil’s move to the Yukon expanded his horizons. He met Barry Beales who first guided for Northwest Expeditions and then bought the company and renamed it Whiteworld Adventures. Neil and Barry merged their two businesses in 1997 and in 2006 they acquired Canadian River Expeditions. They could offer canoeing, rafting, and hiking trips on twenty northern rivers across Canada and Alaska. Neil wrote a best-selling book about his adventures on the Nahanni River.3) Nahanni: River of Gold…River of Dreams was published in 1999.
In 2011, Neil Hartling became chair of the Tourism Industry Association of Yukon (TIAY) working with the board and its membership to promote Yukon’s tourism industry at local, national and international levels. The same year Hartling, founder and owner of Nahanni River Adventures and Canadian River Expeditions based out of Whitehorse, won the 2011 Parks Canada Sustainable Tourism Award. This prestigious award is given to an individual or company that has made an outstanding contribution to the practice and promotion of sustainable tourism in Canada. Canadian Tourism Awards were established in 2003 by the Tourism Industry Association of Canada to recognise success, leadership and innovation in Canada's tourism industry.4)