Magicpaddler wrote on Oct 17^th, 2011 at 9:14pm:

There have been a couple of times I was concerned on a portage.  One was with bear tracks and blueberry bushes recently stripped of berries another was the long Cache lake portages.  I don’t like leaving my pack for a long time and on short portages that is not a problem on the other portages I leapfrog my gear across.

I thought of that too after posting yesterday. I already use that method on longer portages. It keeps you close to your gear for other good reasons too, water, rain gear, snacks...and I like spacing of the breaks.