Tuesday 5/23/06
I woke up sick today – all the classic symptoms of Giardia. Not fun. I referred to this campsite as “Camp Misery” in my journal. Not only was I miserable, but the site was what one might classify as a “one star”, being in the middle of a giant former burn. I stayed in camp while Ryan, Gil and Phil went ahead to start on this new portage. By lunchtime they returned exhausted. This trail could not be opened with the hand tools that we had. The dead falls were so deep on the trail that they couldn’t even walk without any gear to the River on the other end. Ryan was the only one to completely cross the trail, and he did so by balancing across fallen trees for the final 150m.

We rested under the shade of the tarp, contemplating our situation and our possible choices from there. We also continued to break Phil’s gear. Gil had broken a shovel the previous day, and I had broken a saw blade. Today I broke the other shovel, and Ryan and Gil teamed up to fell a tree onto one of the tents. They were tying a ridgeline for a tarp between two dead trees – remember, we were camped in a burn – when the weaker of the two gave way. I had no sooner thought to myself, “gee, that rope looks awful taught”, when – snap! Phil’s face was priceless. He didn’t even look; he knew full well what had just happened. The tree went right through the rain fly and the tent wall, leaving an 18” tear down the side. Gladly no one was inside at the time. Some duct tape held it together until the end of the trip. Fortunately, that was also the last of the damage done for the trip.

I was miserable all day with the stomach bug. Ryan and Gil paddled across the River for a brief fishing outing in the evening. The good news was that they spotted two people on the portage that we had just cut. We assumed it was the MNR team on our trail. Later that evening Gil and Phil paddled over to conference with them. They had lost two days travel due to the snow, but were planning to press forward into Kenoji Lake the next day.

Wednesday 5/24/06
I woke feeling better today. Whatever the bug was, it passed in 24 hours. Thank God. We had camp broke down by 9:30am and the MNR team arrived at 9:45am. The portage crew was a Native couple, Jonathon and Donna. Work started at 10am and the pace was good out of the gate. Jonathon led the way with the chainsaw. Ryan, Gil or I were always just behind him ready to move the logs he cut. The other guys were next with the brush axes opening the trail. Donna’s role was apparently “juice maker”, as she generally hung around waiting on Jonathon during breaks. As the heat of the day wore on, the pace withered. We all had headaches from the sun and dehydration. Plus the damn black flies and mosquitoes were thick.

We pressed on exhausted through the afternoon. The group was getting more than we bargained for in terms of portage work. The blow down was especially dense as we neared the end of the portage. The trees were laying five to six deep, forming a sprawling log jam that extended in every direction. Finally by 6:30pm we reached the River at the end of the trail. It took us 8.5 hours of constant working to clear a 434m portage. That’s a pace of roughly 51m an hour. Now we had to double carry our gear across.

Once loaded and on the River, it was agreed that we would track up any remaining portages, and return to cut them another day. However shortly after shoving off we ran into problems. I was under the impression that Phil knew what lay ahead, but this was not the case. We reached the first rapid after only a few hundred meters paddling. Phil and Gil followed the MNR team and chanced paddling up the center of the rapid to eddy out behind a mid-channel island. Ryan and I ferried to the inside bend, hoping to shorten our tracking distance. However, a sweeper extending out over the River made tracking impossible, and the shoreline was too overgrown to portage. The MNR team paddled into our eddy and warned us not to try to proceed upstream “it’s too dangerous!” They then turned and paddled back downstream to their campsite from the night before. I don’t think I’ll ever forget yelling across the River to Gil on the other side, waving my hand around my waist, inquiring how deep the water was on that side. He waved his hand above his head! Only mere feet from shore the River was about six feet deep. Phil and Gil soon paddled over to us and we discussed our options. We were all very tired from the days work, and the River gave us no options for passage. We had to paddle back to the portage we just left, and portage our gear back across to make camp again. Back to Camp Misery, which was by now the official name for the site. Dinner dishes weren’t done until after 11:30pm that night.