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
Pictures like this are why nobody ever wants to vacation with us.
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.
Taken out of context, that would look like the face of someone having a delightful day.
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.
Not quite sunny, but not quite rainy- and while we didn’t even come close to getting flooded out (phew!) the water had come up another foot. We both slept terribly as we kept waking up to logs and large ice chunks grinding on the rocks along the river bank ten yards from the tent. Time to go!
We packed the gear, donned the dry suits, and began the arduous slog along yesterday’s path. Between the sun yesterday and the rain last night, it was a hideous mix of slush, water over ice, and half-rotten snow. This wasn’t what dry suits were designed for (or rocks paddles) but every time I took a step and cracked through into icy water of unknown depth while carrying 50+ pounds of gear, I was pretty damned glad to have one on.
The first trip was our portage packs, and the second was the food and loose odds and ends; this was a “smaller” load but just as heavy and more wobbly. This was AWESOME on snow that continued to deteriorate as the day went on. It’s a real bitch to crawl through a nest of scrubby trees, see a big open patch, think “oh yay, I can take five easy strides” and punch through up to your waist on the second step because the sun melted the path.
Right before the next rapids is a sharp bend in the river with a big eddy, and over the last few days it’d been a series of thick ice shelves suspended among the trees with a few feet of space underneath. It’d been creepy/beautiful then, but now that the water rose the space between ground and ice shelf is full of river and the ice had turned to slush on top of what solid parts remained. Debris from the river was grinding against the edge. We gave it as wide a berth as we could, but even that meant skirting the inland edge.
My terrible mapping skills provided very little in terms of functional navigation.
New camp is on a bluff of evergreens over the bend in the river. We’re well out of flood range (which is good, since the water has now come up about five feet since we pulled out) and close to a stream for easy water. It’s more open here, we have a good tarp/tent setup, and we should be able to bear bag well and hang out comfortably for a few days while the water recedes.
All told we’ve still only done MAYBE four miles of paddling. The water continues to rise and is going WAY too fast to safely shove off, and there’s a good chance we’ll be here for several days waiting for things to settle down. It’s frustrating watching the days tick by and knowing that with each one our chances of making Halifax are that much slimmer; we both wanted to make it there SO badly, but with this particular set of conditions we can’t risk it. We’d be putting our lives (and the canoe) in danger for no reason other than pride and stubbornness.
Bear bagging was undoubtedly the highlight of the day. We may actually have hit the “12’ up, 6’ from trunks” prerequisites, but it’s still a little close to camp for comfort. There’s only so many options in terms of large trees near here that aren’t currently surrounded by water.
The weather today is more intermittent rain (big surprise there) so we alternated between being in the tent and kind of bored and standing under the tarp and kind of bored. I filtered some water. We discussed our options in terms of mileage once we hit the confluence. I finished my second Steve Berry mystery. (Verdict: “Venetian Betrayal” is better than “The Alexandria Link”, but not by much.) We played an interminably long round of the “squares game”, which Steve seemed to enjoy but mostly just made me feel stupid.
Eventually we decided that tomorrow Steve will put on his dry suit, take a go-bag, and hike downriver as far as he can to see if he can figure out both where we are and what our paddling options are. (We thought about doing this today, but my knee hurts and the water is high and the weather is shit.) I don’t like the idea of him going alone AT ALL, but he can cover more distance solo and we can’t leave all our stuff unattended.
The low point of the day was when I attempted to practice good dental hygiene and the floss ripped in half and left a tiny chunk wedged between two of my teeth. I got progressively more frantic about it and eventually Steve grabbed the tweezers and dug it out like a champion. If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.
Steve took off around ten to see what he could find. I was left to worry, filter water, take stock of our food supply, and sing all the show tunes I know as loud as I could in hopes of keeping bears away. (It worked, as far as I could tell.)
Steve returned around four looking absolutely haggard, dragging himself up from the stream at a near crawl. All the color was gone from his face and it was immediately obvious that he’d sweated/dehydrated himself borderline not-okay hypothermic. He got out of his drysuit and sweat-soaked long johns and into dry gear and a sleeping bag, and while I mercilessly forced him full of hot soup and tea and snacks he relayed what he’d found.
Basically, we’re fucked. After our current set of rapids there’s a brief respite, followed by more that go on for about twice as long. He followed the river to that point, then cut inland/east on a logging road that looked like it might lead downstream… but didn’t. There’s no good portage route, the rapids continue, and there isn’t even a decent spot to pull out.
Since the water level is still super high and Steve is wiped out, we’re zeroing tomorrow and hopefully coming up with a plan. This sucks, but we’re surprisingly well-equipped to be this miserable; we still have plenty of food, our gear is (mostly) dry, we have a four-season tent and a zero-degree down quilt in addition to our own sleeping bags, we can travel in the drysuits, and our fuel/TP supply is strong. All we really need to worry about is the scotch. (And, you know, our parents eventually freaking out.)
Steve woke up feeling weak and sore from yesterday’s adventure but felt progressively better as the day wore on; I woke up feeling a little queasy and felt progressively worse.
There’s nothing quite like pooping liquid into a thigh-deep posthole and then collapsing into the tent only to find that the smell of your partner’s mashed potatoes makes you so nauseous you openly weep while scrambling to get your head out of the tent. And then barfing while hanging the bear bag. I feel like absolute shit; the small saving grace is that it probably isn’t giardia because we’ve both been drinking the same heavily-filtered water.
The only thing we can think of to do moving-wise is load the boat, get on the water, and try to get as far as we can. Steve’s confident that if we rig to flip and can navigate from eddy to eddy, we ought to be able to find a line and make it through. We have intel from our pre-trip research saying that the paddling’s easy from the confluence with the Daaquam on (in normal weather, anyways, according to a guy who’s paddled it many times… in summer) so we’re just trying to reach that point. We also know there’s a road that crosses the river there, so if we had to we could pull out to portage.
We’re really hit the perfect storm of shitty weather, shitty snow, shitty river, and literal shit. Our bar for misery is at an entirely new level, and this is turning out to be the longest 14 miles of our lives. Both of us are oddly resigned to it; as much as this sucks, freaking out won’t do us any good and we’re sure as shit not quitting.
Feeling a bit better and waking up to sun and warm temperatures gave us the cojones to pack up camp and brave the river. We figured if we’re lucky, we’d be able to run it (rigged to flip, obviously) and maybe even get as far as Ledge Rapids Camp; if we were only a little lucky, we’d make a little headway, pull out to portage, and potentially find a campsite with some more sun exposure.
We were decidedly NOT lucky.
We got the boat packed (which was a huge pain in the ass, waist-deep in a stream with a stiff current while simultaneously fighting the backwash from the eddy on the edge of the rapids) and pushed off… except we didn’t. It took everything we had to get into the main river, and we immediately discovered we couldn’t paddle hard enough to get out of the damned eddy. Blocks of ice the size of small sedans cruised past us, caught in the swirl of the backwash. It was all we could do not to get sucked backwards and recycled into the rapids.
Forcing our way to the bank (about fifty yards from where we put in), we hopped out and lined the boat downstream through a waist-deep UPRIVER current for another 200 yards until we hit a swampy stream outlet that we could pull into. We admitted defeat for the day, and almost immediately it began to rain because WHY FUCKING NOT.
After slogging around in a charming mix of thigh-deep snow over downed trees and swamp water for about an hour trying to find a straightforward portage/campsite/literally any appealing option whatsoever, we gave up and ended up pitching the tent on the only dry ground we could find within feasible walking distance. “Dry ground” is a relative term, since it was actually a snowbank on top of a downed tree in the middle of a swamp, which meant we both had a moat and were about a foot and a half of river rise away from getting flooded out.
The increase in profanity should be a good indication of how we felt about this stretch.
“Exhausted” doesn’t even begin to describe it. I still feel like lukewarm dog poop. Steve’s back has started bothering him, and it’s bad enough that he’s actively pretending to be fine. We were so tired we didn’t even cook dinner; we just ate fistfuls of gummies from our sleeping bags.
That said, we’re still doing surprisingly okay. Our gear is dry. We have plenty of food and fuel. We have clean water and the ability to filter more. This sucks a whole bag of fake-cherry-flavored gummy dicks, but we’re still nowhere near dire straights or dangerous conditions.
At some point Maine needs to make up its mind if it wants us gone or to stay here forever. We can’t leave while it’s super shitty, so if this place hates us so much it needs to cut us a little bit of a break so we can GTFO safely because otherwise we’re not moving.
I was still pretty wrecked, so Steve left to go start plotting a portage route while I stayed in camp to hang the bear bag and filter water before heading out to meet him.
Long story short, even that amount of activity was about as much as I could handle and by the time I met him at a logging slash about a mile downriver that afternoon I was completely exhausted. Getting back to the tent was one of the hardest things I’ve ever physically had to do.
I spent the rest of the afternoon passed out cold while poor Steve played Minecraft on his phone.
Dinner was a sad affair- Steve cooked (which should really drive home how wiped out I am, because there’s a lot of things I’ll do before willingly eating his camp food) and then goaded me through about half a portion of rice before I was convinced I might barf again.
Everything about this makes me miserable. I can’t eat; I can barely move around; my partner is stuck literally carrying my load around while I lie here like a useless lump. I still can’t say I regret coming out here (the bar for “better than being at work” is JUST. THAT. LOW) but the misery level has really hit a new record.
I’m desperately hoping I wake up tomorrow feeling close to normal. And that maybe it won’t be raining.
Steve immediately began running laps with small items while I broke down camp. I’m still touch and go but feel significantly more human, and since the water is somehow STILL RISING we have no choice but to keep moving.
We got the essentials to the logging slash and I stayed there to rebuild camp while Steve and his obnoxiously long legs kept shuttling gear.
Putting up our loaned 4-season tent by myself in the snow made me understand why my parents never go camping together any more. There are two kinds of people in this world: those you can assemble a tent with without anyone getting stabbed, and those who you will forever want to slit the throats of before systematically hunting down every member of their family. Also, this tent sucks and there’s a good chance I’m going to set it on fire when we get out of this.
The last order of the day was to move the boat. Dry suits on, waist-deep in swamp, dry-heaving the canoe over logs and through piles of brush and moose shit… and we’re at the slash above the next set of rapids.
The difference between “dragging a canoe through this in sunlight” and “dragging a canoe through this in the rain” CANNOT. BE. OVERSTATED.
We have a rock-solid base camp, a textbook bear bag, and our stuff is still dry. Tomorrow we’re going to find a portage route, and hopefully it’ll be smoother sailing. Or walking. Whatever. Hell, if we have to walk to the confluence from here we will- at least we’re moving forward again.
It was sunny when we woke up, and we had a goal: plot a portage route as far as we fucking could. All six (or seven? three? who knows) miles to the Daaquam if we had to, depending on what the water looked like. It finally felt like we had a plan underway and might be able to make some headway.
It was not to be. About a mile from our camp in the logging slash we ran into impassable swampland. We couldn’t even WALK through, much less get the canoe through over waist-deep water and miserable nests of downed trees. The only upside was that there are a few decent spots to put in after the current set of rapids, and we can’t see or hear more after that point, so theoretically if we can get the canoe to there we can at least get a mile or so down the river before potentially having to pull out again.
Even though it was only about 2:30 in the afternoon when we admitted defeat, we dragged ourselves out of the swamp and back to camp and crawled into the tent completely dejected.
Every time we think we’re going to catch a break and make some decent headway, we run into a wall. We knew going into this that this trip would probably be the hardest thing either one of us had ever done, but I think we both thought the tough part would be the Bay of Fundy… which at this point, we’ve had to accept that we’ll never make. This is some Lewis and Clark level shit and we’re both pretty disheartened at the moment.
On top of everything else, the roar of the rapids has been increasing since we began. At the headwaters, it was the rush of the dam. Every site after that, it’s been the rapids we’re currently struggling to get past. I wake up to it and fall asleep to it every. Damned. Day. There’s no escaping the constant reminder of water we can’t paddle and it is MADDENING.
In addition to making you feel like you have TV-static tinnitis, having this in the background 24/7 means you CONSTANTLY have to pee.
We came out here looking for this type of challenge, so even now I’m not really complaining; there is nobody I can think of that I’ve ever known (save MAYBE my batshit nuts aunt Laurie, who once dump-tackled a drugged-out stranger who tried to steal her backpack in South America) who has done something quite like this. People start the St John and Baker Lake because it’s easier, and they get out around Allagash because that’s an easier end than doing the rest of it. This way makes the St John still feel wild and powerful, not like a sporadically-runnable guidebook attraction. If we had wanted easy, there are a hundred paddling trips we could have done instead that would have involved WAY less effort and misery.
Note to self: find and read more journals of explorers and see if I can read between the lines to find the days where their true feelings are “fuck this, fuck nature, fuck the map, fuck the boat, fuck all of it, we should have brought more alcohol”.
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.
DAMN IT, NORTH WEST BRANCH.
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.
The horizon is level in this photo. That’s just how hard the river is losing elevation here.
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.
You know what you DON’T see in this photo? A fucking SNOWBANK.
