In a few days, they’ll push off in their canoe – three women in their 70s – from Norway House, Manitoba, and head north into the great unknown wilderness on the homestretch of their three-year journey from the source of the Red River at Lake Traverse to York Factory on Hudson Bay.

Two years ago about this time, these “Ladies from the River” – as they came to be known – paddled through Grand Forks on the first leg of their journey. They paddled as far as the Manitoba border that summer and resumed their journey in June 2023, paddling down the Manitoba portion of the Red River, north up massive Lake Winnipeg and arriving in Norway House on Sunday, July 2.

They left their 18-foot Alumacraft canoe in Norway House, where it will be waiting for them when they arrive Friday, June 21, said Deb White of Rosemount, Minnesota, who messaged earlier this week to say the final leg of the trip is fast approaching.

As in previous adventures, White will join Anne Sherve-Ose, a Jamestown, North Dakota, native who now lives in Williams, Iowa; and Deb Knutson of Owatonna, Minnesota. The women, who became friends while attending St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, will rendezvous in Winnipeg, where they’ll catch a flight to Norway House, White says.

From there, if all goes according to plan, they’ll arrive at York Factory on Hudson Bay “on or about July 19th or 18th or something like that,” White said in her message.

Getting there won’t be easy. Along the way, they’ll have to navigate or portage around dozens of treacherous whitewater rapids on rugged, wilderness rivers with names such as Nelson, Echimamish – Cree for “river that flows both ways” – and Hayes.

There’s also the threat of bears – especially polar bears, as they get closer to Hudson Bay.

“This is going to be the toughest one,” White said of the Norway House-to-York Factory stretch of the trip. “I’m sure (we’ll be) going through areas with bears and portages and isolation, but I made a commitment to finish and I’m going to give it my best.

“There will be a lot of challenges this year – way more than last year.”

Despite its reputation for wind and rough water, Lake Winnipeg – often referred to as “Big Windy” – treated them quite well last summer, Sherve-Ose wrote in a blog post at the end of the trip.

“The fabled violence of Lake Winnipeg never materialized,” she wrote. “I do not hesitate to claim that it is the most beautiful lake I have ever paddled on in 50 years of paddling. Located elsewhere in the world, Lake Winnipeg would be a prime tourist attraction. As it was, we saw a few fishermen but no other recreational boaters and no canoes or kayaks.”

Paddling veterans

The three women are no strangers to long-distance paddling. As part of a quest to paddle from the Gulf of Mexico to Hudson Bay, they canoed the Mississippi River over a period of 13 years beginning in 2004. Once they reach Hudson Bay, White says, they will complete the connection by paddling from Lake Traverse to the Mississippi River via the Minnesota River.

“We are officially done when we reach Fort Snelling in the Twin Cities – probably the summer of 2025,” White said.

As the trip from Norway House to Hudson Bay draws closer, no doubt tension and nervous anticipation are mounting for the three women.

Because visitors to Canada can’t bring bear spray – or pepper spray – across the border, the women will carry a milder wildlife deterrent, Sherve-Ose says. They’ll carry “Bear Bangers,” which make a loud noise, flash and smoke, and a portable electric fence they will set up each time they make camp.

As in previous years, Sherve-Ose also will carry a Garmin satellite communicator that will allow people to check on their progress and whereabouts. Anyone interested in following their journey can do so at Share.garmin.com/OurHudsonBayTrip or check out Sherve-Ose’s blog at annesherveose.com.

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“There were a lot of systems that weren’t working perfectly before COVID, and then during COVID really broke down and haven’t necessarily come back all the way,” Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park told City Limits in an interview Thursday.

The city’s annual estimate for its unsheltered homeless population—conducted each winter in an effort to track the number of New Yorkers sleeping on the streets and other public spaces—inched up to a near-record high this year, according to data released Thursday.

The 2024 Homeless Outreach Population Estimate (HOPE) Survey, carried out by volunteers and city outreach teams during a cold night in January, projected that there were 4,140 people experiencing unsheltered homelessness across the city, up slightly from 4,042 last year and the second highest number since the count began in 2005.

Advocates for the homeless stress that the survey is an imperfect tool, and say it’s almost certainly an undercount. This year’s uptick comes as New York City’s overall homeless population reached record highs, and more than doubled over the last two years. Around 147,000 people slept in the city’s sprawling shelter system in April—including nearly 66,000 migrants and asylums seekers, who began arriving in New York in larger numbers beginning in the spring of 2022.

But city officials said this year’s increase wasn’t driven by the new migrant population directly. While the HOPE Survey doesn’t seek or record information on people’s immigration status, the city paid close attention to counts around its migrant intake sites and emergency shelters, according to Department of Social Services (DSS) Commissioner Molly Wasow Park.

“We really haven’t gotten any sign of a systemic increase in asylum seekers experiencing unsheltered homelessness,” Wasow Park told City Limits in an interview Thursday.

This year’s numbers, she said, while up slightly, are fairly consistent what the city has seen in prior years (low counts during 2021 and 2022 should be considered anomalies, officials said, because of myriad factors associated with the COVID-19 crisis, including the state’s pandemic moratorium on evictions and federal funding at the time to place homeless New Yorkers in hotel rooms).

The population estimated by the HOPE Survey—which is required by federal law to take place at least every other year, though New York City does it annually—”have been failed by every level of government that there is, every form of the social safety net,” Wasow Park said.

“They’re not experiencing unsheltered homelessness in a vacuum. They’re there as a result of all of these systemic failures. And there were a lot of systems that weren’t working perfectly before COVID, and then during COVID really broke down and haven’t necessarily come back all the way,” she said, including New York’s networks of inpatient psychiatric beds.

The city noted that its street homeless population is low compared to other major cities across the country, accounting for roughly 5 percent of the homeless population overall (in Los Angeles, by comparison, more than 70 percent of residents experiencing homelessness are unsheltered, according to DSS).

Wasow Park attributed this to the city’s efforts to expand resources for street homeless New Yorkers, including increased outreach work conducted under Mayor Eric Adams’ “Subway Safety Plan,” and the opening of more than 1,100 Safe Haven and stabilization beds—which have fewer rules and barriers to entry than traditional shelters—since Adams took office. Another 500 such beds are expected to open by the end of the year.

She also pointed to the administration’s focus on placing street homeless residents in permanent housing, saying they’ve done so for about 2,000 people so far, most of whom were connected with subsidized apartments.

“We used to essentially declare victory for an individual when we got them off the street and into some form of shelter,” Wasow Park said. “Shelter is an important resource, but it’s not the goal, right? The goal is permanent housing.”

Advocates for homeless New Yorkers have long taken issue with the accuracy of the HOPE Survey. In a statement posted on social media Thursday, Coalition for the Homeless said the annual estimate “does not come close to representing the number of unsheltered people in our city, or the true scope of the homelessness crisis.”

“The number of people who are sleeping unsheltered in New York City can vary very much from night to night, because people do whatever they can to get by,” the group’s executive director Dave Giffen told City Limits. “They might be in a shelter for some nights. They might find the shelters not meeting their needs and end up on the streets; they might be couch surfing; they might have made enough money to stay in a room for a few days.”

He pointed to other numbers: the 9,231 people approached by city outreach teams at end-of-line subway stations from May 5, 2020 to Jan. 31, 2022, who accepted offers of transportation to shelters. Even that, he said, likely represents “a fraction of a fraction of a fraction,” of the actual need.

“That was only the people who agreed to talk to outreach workers, and of those, it was only those that accepted referrals,” he said.

Giffen attributed New York’s relatively low unsheltered population compared to other major cities to its longstanding right to shelter protections, which requires the city to grant a bed, at least temporarily, to anyone who needs it.

The city temporarily amended those protections this spring, citing the strain on the shelter system as tens of thousands newly arrived immigrants sought beds. Under the new rules—struck as part of a legal settlement that Coalition for the Homeless helped negotiate—adult migrants without children are now subject to stricter 30- and 60-day shelter limits, and can only earn an extension if they meet specific criteria.

This means more people are now being “effectively denied shelter by the practices that [the city has] been undertaking,” Giffen said.

Wasow Park countered that the administration is “absolutely not retreating from the right to shelter,” arguing that the settlement made “a relatively small number of very time limited, focused adjustments to to how the right to shelter is implemented for this particular population.”

“I’m not anticipating that we’re going to see a big uptick in in unsheltered homelessness as a result of the recent changes,” she said, noting that migrants in shelter had already been subject to shelter limits when this year’s HOPE Survey took place (though they faced fewer restrictions to extending their time then).

“But we will certainly monitor that closely,” she added.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org.

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST (Associated Press)

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Friday struck down a Trump-era ban on bump stocks, a gun accessory that allows semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns and was used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The high court’s conservative majority found that the Trump administration did not follow federal law when it reversed course and banned bump stocks after a gunman in Las Vegas attacked a country music festival with assault rifles in 2017. The gunman fired more than 1,000 rounds in the crowd in 11 minutes, leaving 60 people dead and injuring hundreds more.

The 6-3 majority opinion written by Justice Clarence Thomas said a semiautomatic rifle with a bump stock is not an illegal machine gun because it doesn’t make the weapon fire more than one shot with a single pull of the trigger.

“A bump stock merely reduces the amount of time that elapses between separate functions of the trigger,” Thomas wrote in an opinion that contained multiple drawings of guns’ firing mechanisms.

He was joined by fellow conservatives John Roberts, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Alito wrote a short separate opinion to stress that Congress can change the law to equate bump stocks with machine guns.

In a dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to the Las Vegas gunman. “In murdering so many people so quickly, he did not rely on a quick trigger finger. Instead, he relied on bump stocks,” she said, reading a summary of her dissent aloud in the courtroom.

Sotomayor said that it’s “deeply regrettable” Congress has to act but that she hopes it does.

The ruling came after a Texas gun shop owner challenged the ban, arguing the Justice Department wrongly classified the accessories as illegal machine guns.

The Biden administration said that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives made the right choice for the gun accessories, which can allow weapons to fire at a rate of hundreds of rounds a minute.

It marked the latest gun case to come before the high court. A conservative supermajority handed down a landmark decision expanding gun rights in 2022 and is weighing another gun case challenging a federal law intended to keep guns away from people under domestic violence restraining orders.

The arguments in the bump stock case, though, were more about whether the ATF had overstepped its authority than the Second Amendment.

Justices from the court’s liberal wing suggested it was “common sense” that anything capable of unleashing a “torrent of bullets” was a machine gun under federal law. Conservative justices, though, raised questions about why Congress had not acted to ban bump stocks, as well as the effects of the ATF changing its mind a decade after declaring the accessories legal.

The high court took up the case after a split among lower courts over bump stocks, which were invented in the early 2000s. Under Republican President George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama, the ATF decided that bump stocks didn’t transform semiautomatic weapons into machine guns. The agency reversed those decisions at Trump’s urging after the shooting in Las Vegas and another mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida, high school that left 17 dead.

Bump stocks are accessories that replace a rifle’s stock, the part that rests against the shoulder. They harness the gun’s recoil energy so that the trigger bumps against the shooter’s stationary finger, allowing the gun to fire at a rate comparable to a traditional machine gun. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have their own bans on bump stocks.

The plaintiff, Texas gun shop owner and military veteran Michael Cargill, was represented by the New Civil Liberties Alliance, a group funded by conservative donors like the Koch network. His attorneys acknowledged that bump stocks allow for rapid fire but argued that they are different because the shooter has to put in more effort to keep the gun firing.

Government lawyers countered the effort required from the shooter is small and doesn’t make a legal difference. The Justice Department said the ATF changed its mind on bump stocks after doing a more in-depth examination spurred by the Las Vegas shooting and came to the right conclusion.

There were about 520,000 bump stocks in circulation when the ban went into effect in 2019, requiring people to either surrender or destroy them, at a combined estimated loss of $100 million, the plaintiffs said in court documents.

___

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Supreme Court at https://apnews.com/hub/us-supreme-court.

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