Monday, June 11, 2018 Considering how warm the day was, Sunday night got fairly cool, so we stayed in our hammocks until the sun had things warmed up a bit. We made a pancake and coffee for Monday’s breakfast, and prepared for tackling some rapids today. Although we have put on a few hundred miles of lake and calm river paddling together, this would be our first time on classified rapids in a canoe. This time of year the Steel consists of mainly class 1 rapids with a couple of class 2s thrown in, and many miles of swifts and ‘fast water’. If you were experienced in paddling rapids, and/or paddling a heavier royalex canoe, you wouldn’t really have anything to worry about. We quickly approached our first class 1 of the day and tried to quickly access the best route through its boulders and sweeping cedar trees reaching in through the sides. We picked a route down the fast moving water and road it down between a few boulders, just missing being hit by a tree, but more or less following our intended route. The rapid ended with a sudden 16” drop, which was rather fun to ride down. Nonetheless, I couldn’t help but imagine what would happen if we capsized. At the very least our gear would wash quite a ways downstream and be very difficult to recover. At the worst our boat would turn sideways, fill with water, wrap around a rock and bend in half (a not uncommon conclusion to a canoe turning sideways in moving water). If the latter occurred, it would take many days to bushwhack down to Dead Horse Bridge, leaving us 40km from anywhere we could hope to see a vehicle. Frankly, bushwhacking through this country seemed almost impossible, likely taking several hours for every mile of progress. It took a few swifts and rapids for me to let my guard down a bit and enjoy it, but once I did it was a lot of fun. After several days of paddling hard down long lakes, it was awesome making 7 or 8km of progress an hour with little paddling aside from steering and correction strokes. There was a stiff breeze from the south this day as well (figures, since we are now heading south) which kept us cool. It was enough of a breeze however to make paddling difficult down the slower sections of river. One particular rapid that had us worried was labelled on our map as follows: “The rapid at the bottom of the map can be problematic. (They are incorrectly labeled C2) It is difficult to run, unless the water is very high, and there is no port. Best approach is to line down RR until you can hop in and shoot the haystacks at the end.” There is no portage for this rapid for some reason, so your options are limited. I had made some amsteel ropes with closed loops just for lining the canoe through rapids, so we decided to give it a shot. In the end it worked out just as described, with us hopping in the canoe at the end and riding the last bit of the rapid out.  As we were coming around a hairpin turn along one of the calmer portions of the river, I heard Bobs make a comment about moose tracks in the sand, a few feet away from the canoe. Once we completed the corner I heard him start to shout, and I looked up to see a cow moose and a calf a few feet in front of him. They both jumped into the river and headed downstream. I noticed that one of the cow’s ears seemed to be permanently flattened to its head, which somehow made it look angry. Our destination for the day was the highlight of the river portion of the trip, Rainbow Falls. It is a large, multi-tiered waterfall with a huge volume of water gushing through it. The portage around it (don’t miss this portage or you’re sure to wind up dead) contains a campsite near the southern end, which was where we would setup for the evening. Overall it was a nice campsite, with lots of room to spread out, and the constant noise of the waterfall in the background. It was, however the buggiest campsite of the trip. This site also had several firegrates and various odd camp ‘amenities’ cached on site. There was even a strange osb thunderbox 10m or so in the woods.  Bobs went and fished the river below the falls while I was doing a few things around camp, and quickly returned with another blue walleye, and a brook trout! We weren’t expecting there to be trout along this section of river, so this was a nice surprise. I quickly joined him and we got enough fish for a late evening fish fry with too many rehydrated mashed potatoes.