Yes, going thru the upper Wanipigow on the way out in a tandem was a tough haul, as KF surmised (he was ahead of us by at least a couple hours leaving Crystal and more than that by the time we hit Siderock.

Tim and I were expecting a pretty quick trip thru.  Figured the water levels were down a little but probably not much.  The workign theory was that we'd more than make up any time lost to lower water levels due to greatly increased portaging speed at the end of the trip.  The last few days of the trip we'd been much faster on the portages than on the first day, when we were actually pretty tired going in and much more heavily laden with food.

My tandem took a real beating.  Fortunately it is already well-used and I'm long past worrying about cosmetics.  I even told Tim not to worry if we ended up cracking a rib or something as any such damage is easily repaired. 

Water levels had dropped so far that at one point nothing looked familiar and I had to pull out the map and double-check to see that we didn't make a wrong turn at Albaquerque, as Bugs would say.  The map said there was no chance of that.

Getting thru the rock gardens was a real issue in the tandem.  Twice we had to unload packs and carry the canoe a short ways to get past tangles of rocks that we'd easily slipped thru (with some scraping) on the way in.  As KF noted, there was lots of walking and dragging/towing of the canoe over shallow stretches.  Frustrating because you'd walk/drag for 10 yards, the water would deepen enough to make it somewhat impractical, ho;p back in, canoe 10 yards, bottom out again, get out, walk, back in, paddle, wash/rinse/repeat about 15 or 20 times (or so it seemed, anyway).

Partway down the river, Tim found a rock with my red paint on top of it sitting about 3" out of the water.  I'd guess the river had dropped a good 8" during our trip based on that.

I would most likely NOT repeat this route in low water conditions again and certainly not if I had any vanity at all about the appearance of my canoe.

We left Crystal Lake about 3:00 and I think we pulled into our campsite on Siderock about 8:30.  I'd estimated it would take 4 hours, tops, on the return and I entertained hopes it might be less.