Don’t get me wrong, I am ALL FOR wilderness and extremely remote untouched natural beauty. I love the idea of it existing; I love occasionally stumbling across bits of it; I love fighting for its preservation and always will and continue to believe in having to do things “the hard way” if you want to witness some of the wonders that exist in nature.
HOWEVER. I’ll be damned if this logging road wasn’t the most beautiful things I’ve ever laid eyes on. Thank you, International Paper or whoever manages this stretch, for the small amount of misery you have lifted from our shoulders.
That said, our portage from the swamp above the boat-eating rapids was anything but a walk in the park. The water has gone down about a foot (which was disappointing, since we failed to get any photos yesterday to showcase the true horror of the situation) so retrieving the canoe was a little easier, but getting the boat to camp still meant several hours of brutal physical labor hauling it out of the swamp, up moose tracks to the logging slash, and over a mile down a road that hasn’t seen use as a road in at least ten years and as such had quite a number of small trees growing in the middle of it.
If you’re not intimately familiar with a wilderness portage, it goes a little something like this: Drag. Stop. Lift. Carry. Lose sensation in your fingers. Stop. Lift over a log. Stop. Climb over the log. Lift. Carry. Stop. Put wheels on. Drag while partner lifts back end over substantial debris. Stop. Encounter snow. Remove wheels. Drag. Encounter swamp. Climb into swamp, pull canoe in. Float for ten blissful (frigid) yards while partner scouts exit strategy. Repeat, ad infinitum.
Canoeing is a hell of a lot harder when you can’t just keep the boat in the river.
The good: beautiful, clear sunny day with a nice breeze- even though it’s COLD. The bad: we still don’t reeeeeeally know how much farther we have to go/what the river conditions look like between here and the main confluence. The ugly: if we don’t get to at least the Daaquam junction tomorrow and/or make good miles from that point on, we could stand a legitimate chance of running out of food. (Our original plan was that our starting resources would carry us well into New Brunswick. Ice and flooding has thrown a bit of a wrench into that plan.)
As I write this, I’m babysitting our camp. All the gear is out on a line in the sun, including the sleeping bags, which is AWESOME because we smell BAD. Steve is legging his way down the logging road to see if he can figure out where we’re at and/or how far we can portage, or if we should put in where we’re at now. I’m bitterly resentful of the fact that my short legs and slow pace make me pretty well useless in the scouting regard, but as long as I keep doing all the cooking Steve doesn’t seem too bothered.
One last unfortunate note on an otherwise lovely (cold) afternoon: we’ve started seeing bugs. Specifically mosquitoes. Given that we’re still in long underwear and puffies (not to mention still periodically post-holing) this development seems like a real dick move on nature’s part.