No joke, we’re getting almost as much hiking in as paddling on this trip.
Steve made the first gear run from the campground to the put-in below the dam while I stayed with the canoe and eyeballed the bemused spring cleaning crew of the park. I joined him for the second load with the boat, and after everything was safely stashed by the river we made a quick Subway/wifi/Giant Tiger/library run and then repacked the boat. We pushed off in a light drizzle from a field of flood debris into a stiff current.
Everything that had gone over Great Falls had been stripped bare and/or mangled, so the chunks of things we were seeing on the banks and in the water were sobering. Entire trees had had their bark ripped clean and were polished smooth. The remnants of dozens of dam safety boom floats that had been ripped from their moorings littered the banks, and there was a wide swath on either side of the river that had been cleaned of all brush. The changing bottom depths below the dam created what looked like a rolling boil of eddies in the center of the river, so we hugged the banks to stay in the quickest part of the current.
By our calculations we were clocking about eight miles an hour and we hit Aroostook in no time. The rain began to pick up, so we battened down the spray deck and our rain gear and began looking for a campsite. We alternated getting out of the boat to scout locations, and unfortunately for Steve he was the one on foot when we got nailed by a solid wall of rainstorm. We opted for a patch of dry ground in a weird no-man’s-land by the railway just below the dam at Tobique Narrows.
The campsite wasn’t much and we spent the whole night on high alert in case the release alarm sounded at the dam, but the sun came out and we managed to dry off a bit while having some pretty awesome burritos for dinner.