Against all odds, it was damned nice outside when we woke up, so we were up and about early hauling the boat down to the portage route we’d scouted out yesterday. It became clear pretty quickly that we wouldn’t be able to get as far as our original intended put-in; the snow was rotting away underfoot and the terrain was much too varied to safely waddle through with portage packs and a boat.
By the time we got the gear loaded we had gone back and forth a few times about the merits of putting in directly and IMMEDIATELY negotiating some class I+ rapids at high speed vs. lining the boat a hundred yards downriver first.
We lined it. (Sorry, Steve. I know you wanted to hit that run.)
And then, believe it or not, WE GOT IN THE CANOE. AND WE PADDLED. And the SUN was SHINING, and we saw a DUCK, and EVERYTHING WAS GLORIOUS. (Ducks have always been good omens for us. Refer to the Delaware paddling journals for proof.)
…And that lasted all of ten minutes. We made it maybe a mile, then heard fast water.
LOUD fast water.
We couldn’t see anything; the river looked like it continued straight forward and then just… disappeared.
Then we saw a splash of water shoot six or seven feet into the air, and Steve pulled us over so fast my face got rammed into a whole series of overhanging trees.
We tied off the canoe in a chest-deep cedar swamp (in normal water levels, it’d probably have been a lovely dry stroll) and carefully waded to a point where we could climb ashore, then bushwhacked down to check out what turned out to be a hundred yards or so of some of the gnarliest boat-eating rapids I’ve ever seen in person.
The river dropped over a six-foot ledge at the top, then boiled over and around boulders bigger than my car to create massive standing waves. There wasn’t a calm eddy as far as we could see; the entire surface of the river was whitewater. Underlying the unceasing roar of the water was the low grinding of rocks along the river bottom, and periodically a piece of lumber dislodged by the ice floe sailed through at a speed most trees can only dream of.
Honestly, it looked like the kind of thing that might be sort of fun (albeit terrifying) with a rubber raft and a paid professional doing the steering; unfortunately that’s just not the kind of water you take on with seven weeks’ worth of gear and a kevlar canoe.
Despite the soul-crushing discovery that we were going to have to take out and portage AGAIN, we miraculously stumbled through the dense underbrush onto a moose track… which led us to a logging slash… which dumped us onto a very much out-of-use but perfect-for-our-purposes LOGGING ROAD. It paralleled the river and spit us out at an AMAZING campsite on DRY GROUND (not solid snow, not ice, not downed trees, but actual honest-to-God dry ground and pine needles), and after wandering around in the woods for a bit we found a nearly completely clear path between the campsite and our pull-out that allowed us to hike our gear a mile downriver to set up basecamp without either of us getting punched in the face by a tree. (At this point we’ll take even the smallest of things as a victory.)
The goal for tomorrow is to haul the canoe to this new, dry campsite from its safe haven upriver at the edge of the cedar swamp. It’s significantly easier walking than any of our portages so far, but the canoe is still 18.5’ long and wasn’t designed to be threaded between the dense evergreens of the Maine wilderness, so what takes us half an hour in backpacks will probably take us most of the day with the boat.
We’ve got a week’s worth of food remaining if we plan to maintain a respectable caloric intake, and we know the confluence to Allagash could potentially take us four days. This means we’ve got about two days to reach the confluence with the South Branch of the St John before we’re floating down to our resupply on fumes.
BUT. For right now, we’re camped on level dry ground on a ledge overlooking the river. Our stuff is dry, the gentle sound of water against the shoreline is louder than the rapids in the background, and I’m going to sleep like the dead next to my best friend in a spot that probably hasn’t seen humans in over a decade. Things aren’t all bad today.
Plus, you know, I saw a duck, so that’s cool.