suko pete-

forgot to mention that we found the portage from the misehkow to the greenmantle that you inquired about. the portage was relatively open on the misehkow end but didn't look to have been used for a long time. old blazes. the portage must be over 1200m, so we didn't walk it through to see if the greenmantle was open or choked with sweepers. i don't know why people say they can't find it-we marked about a 2km stretch of the river to look for it, but it was right where we thought it should be.

we also found a piece of your gear. chuck has a photo.

Nice Dave, but I could not find Chucks trip report.

trip report not quite finished-chuck is tied up with other stuff.

we did a little unscheduled swimming, and other interesting activities we didn't fully anticipate, mostly related to high fast water. that's travel in the boreal, ya take what ya get. made it through some pretty fantastic canoe country. nobody out there. portages closed in or closing in.

the water level we saw this year would have had a big impact on last year's trip. lot's of water and it was rippin'. all our river travel would have been affected.

So is the Greenmantle rated as near impossible as Rick suggested?

reports on travel in that area are rare as you know. people went in there years ago, but not now. rick never even found the portage and i can't say i understand why. he intended to go in there, but most likely better he didn't. he bailed out after cutting his way up petawa creek, and i think he might have found similar conditions on parts of the greenmantle earlier in his trip if he had gone in there. we spent 14 hours cutting our way up that creek ourselves.

i think that as the first nation travel into these areas declined to almost zero, the smaller rivers and creeks close with sweepers, or bank-to-bank deadfalls. recreational travel is so infrequent that everything just closes in. we might have made over a thousand cuts just to get squeeze through the way we went. cotton and crew could spend a week cleaning up a single portage in there. chuck was wishing you were there with your saw. that's big saw country in there, leave the little toy saws at home. we were in places we wouldn't have been able to move very well without a pair of big coronas. chuck will have some photos of the bushwhack conditions. i have some photos of the boat sitting in the middle of the portage and you can't tell that anyone has been through there in 100 years.

so to answer your question, i'm betting it's pretty clogged up. not impossible by any means, but much work involved. water level is another joker in the deck.

...on the other hand, it's high adventure in great canoe country.

We paddled part of the Greenmantle in 1994 during a 22-day trip up there. The portage from the Misehkow to the Greenmantle is actually two portages via a pond. Pretty brushy, but not a killer, by northern standards. We didn't know where the portage was, but knew by logic that one HAD to exist in one of two places. The Greenmantle itself had many areas where logjams had to be portaged, along with rapids.

I remember thinking that you definately don't want to have any kind of accident or serious injury along there, because a rescue would be TOUGH. Great solitude, though.

if you look at the topo, the portage is really the only place it could be. we had about a km of river marked to watch for the portage because an early report said it was hard to find, but we found it where we thought it was. old blazes.

i would say that most of these out of the way portages in that area are closing in. first nation use kept them open to an extent, but the native people just don't go into the bush like they used to. forget recreational use-ain't none. we couldn't see where anyone had been on the misehkow in 09, almost unheard of.

i've seen no recent reports on the greenmantle, so if it was closed up in '94, it's most likely a real mess now.

what was your 22 day route in '94? i would be interested in your trip notes if available.