The sun came out!!! It was still mostly cloudy for the bulk of the morning, which wasn’t a terrible situation to be hauling a canoe through dense woods in. I dragged from the “front” (we hauled the canoe backwards to prevent further damage to the nose), Steve shoved, and he got some pretty spectacular photos of me struggling through hip-deep snow with the boat
To give you an idea of how miserable this was: the portage of the canoe took about two hours… and the walk back to camp took all of fifteen minutes.
BUT the sky cleared by the time we got back, and we made the call that instead of spending the afternoon moving camp we should hang out our gear and get everything back to “as dry as fucking possible” status.
WORTH IT. It was warm enough that we could leave the tent door open and lie around in our long underwear listening to music while our socks, pants, rain jackets, and soggy odds and ends dried out on the line. If we’re moving at a crawl, we might as well be comfortable.
Once the sun started to go down it began to drizzle again, and we had some collective anxiety about the water level rising and flooding us out in the middle of the night. We opted for “calculated risk”, not moving, and checking on the waterline periodically during the night.