Woke this morning to a gloomy, cloudy day with skies that look like they might develop into something more unfavorable. Breakfast this morning was a huge pot of mashed potatoes with onions, cheese and butter! Yum! These onions are about the last of our fresh food so we’re looking for any opportunity to use them up!

We were pretty lazy on the river today. The wind was anything but lazy however! It started out of the southwest, then changed and blew out of the northeast and intensified. It actually grew quite strong and blew hard out of the northeast for probably about 20 minutes or so. Then, it died down, and switched back to the southwest! Strange!

We stopped for TL at a nice little beach on Charcoal Lake. Some of the dirt ridges surrounding the lake were a very dark color, undoubtedly giving the lake its name.

We did not linger at TL today and we were back out on the water soon after finishing eating, but not before I had time for a quick swim off the beach! Might as well enjoy the water while it’s still relatively warm!

We didn’t paddle much after lunch today, maybe only another three miles or so before we decided to make camp up on an esker. The tent sites are actually up on top of the esker that is rather large. The top of the esker where we picked out our tent sites is almost perfectly level and totally flat.

Being in camp early, I went fishing and Chris came along. I caught 3 northern pike with a 4 pounder being the smallest. Fortunately my reel didn’t give me any problems. Chris and I decided to head back to camp when we saw what looked like it could be a rain cloud approaching. We paddled back to camp in a brisk headwind.

Back at camp I started helping Dave prepare a stir-fry dinner while Scott baked a white cake and Matt baked a coffee cake for tomorrow’s breakfast. The rain arrived so we retreated to the tents. The steady rain lasted an hour or two after which we emerged to finish up the dinner. It was huge! In fact, it was so big, that after the 9 of us had eaten our fill, we still had 2/3rds of a #10 can of stir-fry! But it was a worthwhile dinner as the stir-fry used up just about the last of our fresh food and substantially cut down on the weight of our food packs. That is important with our first watershed crossing looming on the horizon!

There is a nice beach at our campsite here that will provide a nice morning swim tomorrow. Tomorrow should be a fun day. There could be a few rapids that we could shoot.

Today was the second day of the trip we have not seen anyone. We also reached the 100 mile point of our trip, only about 600 more miles to go!

Day 7

Woke this morning to a low layer of clouds pissing rain on us. Nobody was motivated to move in the dreary weather so we decided to hang out for a while in the tents to see if it would let up a bit. I started reading The Monkey Wrench Gang.

A couple of hours later the rain let up just a bit and we broke down camp. We “big spooned” the remainder of last night’s dinner for breakfast, cold. It was tough! To “big spoon” food is the process of dealing with leftovers where we take the big serving spoon that is part of the cooking kit, take a big spoonful of the food, eat it, and pass the spoon and food on to the next person. We spoon and eat in a circle until the leftover food is, well, for lack of a better term, disposed of!

Let’s just say that cold, leftover stir-fry does not make the best breakfast! But it was sure better than packing the stuff out and we’re not just going to throw the stuff out in the woods.

On the bright side, after we had muscled down the cold stir-fry, we got to eat the white cake and coffee cake that were baked last night! Yum!

After breakfast, such as it was, we set off in a light, but steady rain. We saw blue sky approaching from behind, but we seemed to stay just ahead of it!

We paddled about 15 miles or so until we reached Caribou Rapids. The rapids consisted of 5 individual sets. The first, third and fifth set we could run, while it was necessary to portage the second and fourth set. After portaging the fourth set, we stopped for TL. It was probably around 9pm at this point due to our late start and also the fact that this morning’s breakfast of champions had been sitting in our bellies like some sort of slow-burning nuclear reaction!

The fifth set of Caribou Rapids was an incredible piece of white water. It was a lot of fun; it made you work to control your canoe, but would have been pretty forgiving if you made a mistake.

A little ways beyond the rapids we found a meager campsite and set up the tents. We did not even bother with dinner tonight, instead going straight into the tents! The mosquitoes are horrible here, being attracted to us in the tents. The mosquitoes can’t get to us in the tents, but they get stuck between the tents and the rain fly so that when you take the rain fly off the tent in the morning, the escaping mosquitoes look like a rising cloud of smoke there are so many!

Before we left Manito-Wish, my sister Jean gave me a letter that she told me to open once we were a week into the trip. So today I opened it. It was great reading the letter and her words made it seem as though she was here.

Tomorrow we start our first watershed crossing. It is about 15 miles away and consists of 8 or 9 portages, but a couple of the portages may be simple lifts.

A watershed crossing is what is called when you travel between two drainage systems. The most famous example of a watershed crossing would be climbing over the continental divide. A watershed crossing involves crossing a high point of land that separates drainage systems flowing in different directions. What these means to the canoe voyageur is an overland trip, preferable at a point where the two drainage systems are as close as possible. If the voyageur is lucky, there are other bodies of water along the overland route, such as small lakes. Usually, at the tops of watersheds (drainage systems), the streams that become the rivers are quite small, and typically, one has to travel upstream on one system, make the watershed crossing and then downstream on the new system, with the exiting system becoming smaller and smaller.

This watershed crossing will be a little different in that we’ve been traveling downstream on the Cochrane River. It’s actually quite an abnormal situation because the Cochrane River flows out of the northeast end of Wollaston Lake. After traveling northeast for a time, the river makes a slow bend to the east and then to the southeast eventually heading almost back southwest as it flows down to Reindeer Lake. We will be making our watershed crossing where the river turns southeast, as this is where it comes closest to our next drainage system, that of the Thielewiaza River.

The reason the river makes this long bend to the south is that the glaciers of the last ice age left high ground here forcing the Cochrane to find an alternate route to sea level and interrupting the general east to northeast flow of the rivers in this region. To the east, the rivers resume a general east-northeast flow to Hudson Bay. To the north, the rivers flow in a northeast direction to the Bay. But in this small area, the Cochrane flows south, down through Reindeer Lake and then into the Churchill River, which flows northeast up to Hudson Bay.

It is an irregular area geologically, but for our purposes, it’s great as we are able to make a watershed crossing without having to travel upstream, which is slow, tiring work.

So the plan for the watershed crossing is to tackle the first four, maybe five portages, make camp, and then complete the remaining portages to the Thlewiaza drainage system the next day. Once we complete the crossing, we have our first scheduled “duff day,” or rest day where we will not travel.

This evening, the rain has finally stopped and the clouds look as though they are going to clear out a bit. Hopefully tomorrow will bring sunshine to dry things out.

Today was the third day we have not seen any other people.

Day 8

Last night’s hoped-for clearing did not come to pass and awoke this morning to a rainy and cold day. We had granola and milk powder for breakfast. The granola is quite good, and the milk powder with water actually tastes good when you’re in the wilderness and hungry!

It’s my turn to duff this morning so I’m wearing extra layers of clothes to keep warm. We were underway with a cold wind out of the north. As navigator I faced some very challenging section of river with numerous bays and false channels, but I managed to guide our group without error.

We stopped for TL on top of an esker along the river. We debated on which route we would take for the watershed crossing. The first option was to take the route on the map as marked by a previous group. The second option was to cut 4 miles of paddling and a little distance off the first portage. The third option was to cut about 10 miles of paddling and 5 of the portages. The risk with the unknown options is the portages could be what we call “crashes,” where there is no path through the woods. A crashed portage is incredibly difficult because we would be forcing our way through dense forest with canoes and heavy packs on our shoulders. Due to the climate this far north, there are no tall trees to block the light to the forest floor and inhibit the undergrowth. A portage through the thick undergrowth is slow and incredibly difficult.

So the decision was made that we would look for the second option, but if no viable portage path were found, we would stick with the known portage route as marked on the map.

After breaking for TL, we set back out on the Cochrane River as the clouds began to break up and the rain came to an end. We shot two straightforward sets of rapids. The second set consisted of a long tongue (smooth section where the speed of the water accelerates) and some standing (stationary) waves that were both perpendicular and at angles to our direction of travel. It was a lot of fun!

It turned out the beginning of the watershed crossing was farther away than we thought, and by the time we hit the 20mile mark for the day, we decided to make camp while there was still plenty of light left. We camped on a rock outcropping above the river and my tent tonight look out directly over the river. Nice spot!

We over did it again with dinner with a huge rice casserole, we’ve got leftovers for breakfast in the morning. Ugh.

Tomorrow we will complete the entire watershed crossing to the Thlewiaze River system. As a crow flies, the Thlewiaze River is only about 16 miles away, but they will be a hard 16 miles. We are heading to bed early tonight in hopes of getting an early start tomorrow.

The clouds have almost totally dissipated as we head to bed. Looks like it is going to be a pretty chilly night. Hopefully that will mellow out the mosquitoes a bit!

Today’s travel took us across the 59degrees north in latitude. This is the farthest north I have ever been.

Day 9

Took a while for me to fall asleep last night. Instead I watched the fog develop as the temperature dropped, and dropped well below the temperature of the river. The fog became so thick that I could not see the water not far below the rock outcropping where the tent was!

I still woke fairly early this morning, but could not bring myself to get out of my sleeping bag! This was in part due to being tired from lack of sleep, but also to it being so cold out this morning.

The group did get up earlier than we have been the last several days so we still have a good bit of morning sun left overhead. With the daylight hours being so long this far north, we’d gotten into a habit of sleeping in later than we should be.

For breakfast we big spooned the remainder of last night’s rice and then had some oatmeal. We broke camp quickly this morning; we had a big day ahead of us.

The morning’s paddle started out with a great set of rapids early on. It was probably a hard class II, maybe an easy class III. The set started out with a large, fast tongue that angled off to river left. The tongue tried to take you into a good-sized rock garden. You had to exit right out of the tongue before it took you into the rocks.

Matt and Scott shot the rapid first. They let the tongue of water carry them into the rock garden. They got tossed around a bit, but managed to make it through despite shipping a bit of water into the canoe.

Jim and I followed and we hit the rapid just right. We went into the tongue and then slipped out of it to the right into the slower water there. Then we rode the medium sized standing waves all the way to the bottom. Our boat stayed nice and dry!

After the big set of rapids, we shot a couple smaller sets and then began to look for the first portage. The second option for the watershed crossing did not pan out. So we looked for the portage as marked on the map but just could not find it. We shot three more small riffles/rapids and still did not find the portage. We paused to regroup and review the maps. As we discussed our options, we drifted under a bald eagle’s nest. Both adults were perched on the nest and squawked rather loudly at us. I peered over the side of the canoe down into the pristine water of the river and saw plenty of northern pike and grayling swimming about. Some of the grayling were of true world-class size. Oh, how I wish we had the time for a little fishing!

Ultimately, we decided we must have passed the portage. So we started to paddle back up stream. Jim and I lined our canoe back up one of the rapids, and were able to paddle up the other two using eddies and the slower water towards shore.

We finally found the portage, a ways upstream from where it was marked on the map. We unloaded the canoes and set out on the first portage. With the amount of gear on this trip, and being relatively early in the trip, we all would be needed to make two trips on each portage. I took one of the food packs across on the first trip and came back and took one of the canoes on my second trip. This first portage ended up being the third longest of the day which consisted of 8 portages and an additional 4 lifts.

The penultimate portage was the longest, but also the most enjoyable. The portage traveled through numerous glacial till mounds. Some were actually quite large. The trees were sparser as a result of the rocky deposits left by the glaciers, and this gave a hint of what was to come as we make our way north into the tundra.

Most of the portages today consisted of steep ascents and descents over eskers. With the heavy packs and awkward canoes, this took a toll and the legs were beginning to hurt by the end of the day! Except for the first portage out of the Cochrane River, all portages were found as marked on the map. The portage paths were obvious and often quite wide.

The lakes in the watershed crossing were also interesting. The first lake we portaged to reminded me of a narrow inlet found in a Appalachian mountain reservoir. Many of the lakes had sandy bottoms and glacial eskers were everywhere. The last portage of the day put us on Blue Lake, and after a bit of confusion reading the map, we made it into Fort Hall Lake, part of the Thlewiaze River and our destination for the day and home for tomorrow’s duff day.

We set up our camp on the only section of rocky shoreline we could find on the entire lake. The sun was sitting just on the horizon when arrived and began to dip below as we set up the tents. It was a very long day. For dinner we had summer sausage, cheese, GORP and dried apples. The group is exhausted.

The mosquitoes are bad, but hopefully the wind will blow tomorrow to keep them at bay. Even as I write by flashlight, the wind has picked up a bit in the last thirty minutes. I expect the temperature to drop again tonight as the day’s clouds have dissipated, that too could mellow the mosquitoes for tomorrow.

We covered 16 or 17 miles today with 12 land crossings. Every stroke of the paddle now takes me further north than I have ever been.

Today was the fourth day we have not seen any other people.

Day 10

I woke this morning relatively early. Sometimes it seems for me that after a hard day, I feel rested and ready to move early. As today was a duff day, I got up and fished instead! I fished from time to time during the day from our campsite. I was a bit limited in where I could go, the rocky area that serves as our campsite is surrounded by low, brush covered land, and I did not really have any desire to take a canoe out today! I did manage to catch 21 northern pike today though. The fish here are so aggressive in a high competitive environment. As I was down by the shore, I watch in the crystal clear water as one northern come towards where I was standing. So, I made a quick cast of my spoon toward it. He hit it instantly and I had him hooked for a few seconds before he managed to come free. But rather than swim off, he turned right around and hit my spoon again before I had even finished retrieving it! Crazy!

This morning before breakfast, a bush plane landed on the lake for a few minutes and then took off.

Being the first duff day of the trip, tradition holds that the day’s breakfast was to be doughnuts! We fried up 188 of the little dough-bombs! Scott ate 30 by himself! I managed only 16.

The float plane returned twice more during the day, and on the second trip, dropped off a group of people and gear of some sort. Might have been a remote fishing party or even another canoe group. They landed too far away to really see.

Today was very hot and sunny with little wind. Occasionally there was a bit of a breeze to blow away the mosquitoes, but would never last for more than 10 or 15 minutes.

After the morning’s doughnuts, lunch was a rather sparse meal of some cheese and beef jerky. Dinner was great though with rice on bannock bread with onions, spicy tomato sauce and more cheese. For desert we had pudding and then John made up a batch of cinnamon rolls that were incredible.

Tomorrow we start our northeast journey downstream on the Thlewiaza River. Nueltin Lake and our re-supply is only 5 or 6 days away. It’s a bit early for a re-supply, but the fishing lodge at Nueltin was our only safe option as it is the last outpost we will come across until we reach Eskimo Point. We could have arranged to have our food dropped farther north along our route, but we would have no recourse should our food not be there. Fortunately, we’ll have several days of paddling after re-supply to try and trim some weight from the food packs prior to much portaging.

The sky is clear tonight, so the temperature will likely drop again overnight. Today was a real summer-like day (for northern Canada) and I figure tomorrow looks to be more of the same.