Bob and Terry’s group was packed and on the water well before we were (understandable, since they’ve got 40 years of practice on us) but we did join them for breakfast of hot coffee and pancakes. Since they were a day shy of being back in the frontcountry they unloaded a good bit of excess food on us- specifically a Mainard marvel called “macaroni loaf” which sounded gross but turned out to be just about my favorite meal of the entire trip. Someone also left a bar of dark chocolate in my hat as they departed, sealing their reputation as some of the greatest people we’d interact with for the entire trip.
The river was quick and made up for our ponderous start, and the weather was clear, sunny, and warm. I have already begun the laborious process of the thrice-daily sunscreen application in the hopes of saving my flesh from the giant fireball in the sky.
The only rapids we had to worry about were the aptly-named three-mile-long Big Rapids just before Allagash. We figured we might not want to run it, and knew that if we missed the last pullout we were pretty much screwed. Three miles is a LONG swim if you dump.
We stopped around 1pm just above what we were pretty sure was the last turn before Big Rapids. Since it was super windy and the canoe kept trying to depart on its own, I stayed with the boat on a sandy shoal and Steve took a walk to see what he could see. An hour later (I threw a lot of rocks in the river while waiting) he returned with mediocre news: we’d missed the actual pullout, we WERE just above Big Rapids, and we could technically get out a quarter mile on but it would very much be on someone’s private (and posted) land. He could see the first tiny bit of Big Rapids and it didn’t look THAT bad, but it still left 2+ miles of gnar that we knew nothing about.
We ended up opting to backtrack the quarter mile upriver to the official launch to keep our karma balance intact. It was a miserable slog lining the boat along steep, slippery, thorny terrain and we were both a little cranky by the time we got there. It wasn’t helped by a shitty uphill portage of multiple miles that required wearing our 115L portage packs while dragging the canoe.
Via sheer dumb luck we ran into two guys with a truck who were dropping a rig off for their kids’ canoe trip, and the pair (Dean and Don from Fort Kent) offered us a lift into Allagash. HELL YES.
We loaded the boat (and Steve) into the bed of the truck and bounced down the road into Allagash. Even though the road was high above the level of the river, we still got a decent look at the rapids and felt pretty good about our decision not to run them. Since we’d already given up on the Bay of Fundy, we gave up on our “purist” tendencies and accepted a lift that skipped a couple miles of river and put us directly in the parking lot of the Kelly family camp in Allagash.
The aforementioned restaurant was closed for the afternoon, but we ended up renting a cabin for the night. Hot showers! TV! Wifi! A BED!!!
Sadly, a lot of the overwhelming joy at being back in civilization was sucked out when we discovered that an apparent mass panic among our friends and families had been directly responsible for the border patrol helicopter fly-by of the previous day, in addition to initiating the spread of a rumor among the locals that we were either a) fugitives from the law or b) complete moron tourists with no backcountry experience who “probably saw some movie with a canoe in it and thought this seemed like a cute idea”. To our credit, all the locals who ran into us had the same opinion of “wait, that’s YOU guys? But… you actually look like you know what you’re doing.”
It’s also worth noting that we stressed multiple times before we left that we were bringing several weeks’ worth of supplies, that there is ZERO CELL SERVICE in this entire area, and that the “you can start to worry” date was TOMORROW.
We recognize it was well-intentioned panic, but we’ve now eliminated a lot of folks from the list of who gets our float plans. It’s a lot harder to be sneaky about camping when literally everyone in a two hundred mile radius is trying to find your drowned corpse.