Saturday, August 29, 2020
Crap, I brought nine eggs. Why'd I bring nine eggs? Three per breakfast sounded reasonable, and I didn't want to bring a half-empty egg container, but, crap. This was part of the joy of solo tripping as with two people, two packs, it's easier to handle distribution of gear but when it's just me, I need to get all my gear -- tent, sleeping bag, clothes, whisperlite, food, all the miscellany like foldable camp saw, boat tape, first aid kit, water filter, etc -- all into one bag. Add a second person, they just need their personal items. So food space was at a premium. I bring an Ursack and Bearvault when I go so I don't end up with food inside the pack in camp, and can have my pack inside the tent at night, but actual volume of food starts to become a consideration. Not an insurmountable one, but it means no bagels, that sort of thing. I put some less-than-serious thought into a trip where I'd scale that down even more and go with a jar of soy butter, that's 3200 calories right there, now that's calorie-dense. But that'd fit more for a trip where a morning routine is "break camp at dawn, eat a couple spoonfuls of soy butter, be off site less than fifteen minutes after waking up." Someday I'll do that trip, and that was supposed to be 2020, but ... someday.
Still. The rest of the eggs for breakfast, wrapped up in the rest of the toasted flour tortillas, and set off west to try to head up to Two, portage to Rifle, portage to Bridge, portage to Four, and paddle all the way back to Three ... but the Prism, unladen, no rocker, in the wind, meant I was buffeted to hell and back. Sixty strokes on one side just to try to stay angled where I wanted to go, then two on the other. The wind was coming from the NW which meant I was heading straight into it trying to get north into Two, and I gave up, landed at the side, and sat on some rocks for half an hour waiting for things to die down before giving up and heading back to camp.
Ofc seeing two more cairns on the side of my island, which were promptly returned to the wilderness.
Well - hell - if I can't go west, I can probably go east, right? But Three is so large that even that was too unsteady, so I made my way back ... and found three more cairns on the east side of my island, making eight in total. After the seventh I got tired of getting out of the canoe and scattering the rocks one by one, so for the eighth I decided I'd just push it over and call that good.
What's that they say about accidents? That carelessness is the primary cause of them? That I even tell myself before each solo to take it slow, take it easy, don't be stupid and careless, because I'm the only one in my group?
Yeah, I overturned myself in the wind, on the shoreline, reaching out and unbalancing myself, and dunked in chest deep water and swamped the canoe. See above about getting pissed off about stupid accidents? Multiply that when it's your own fault and you know it's your own fault. So those rocks got scattered with extra vigor, the canoe was carefully drained and set upright, and I made my way drenched back to camp.
The upside of that site is the landing is south-facing and gets sun all day long, so I spread out those clothes on the rocks, took a camp shower a few hundred feet back in the woods, and then realized I used my hand towel for scrubbing and had no way of drying off. Well, other than wind and sun, and I was meaning to get some reading done, and downloading an ebook on one bar of signal isn't all that impossible... so I bought a kindle copy of T.M. Scanlon's What We Owe To Each Other and read moral philosophy naked in the woods. It's not quite Thoreau but it was pretty close. The only paper I brought with me was a $1 notebook and a pen, which I used for a few hours of introspective thoughts that I have not told anyone else, nor will tell anyone else, ever.
I used the last bits of cell phone charge to try to look at the hourly weather forecast for Ely for Sunday, specifically the wind, because if I had to make it out on a day like Saturday ... it would not have been great. It called for a calm morning up until 8 or 9 am, so I decided my last day would necessitate an early departure. Another freezedried meal, chicken molé, which also worked out much better than expected.
I stayed up past sunset this evening, watching the sun go down to the west and the moon rise in the east. Jupiter appeared in the southeast sky, and Saturn was supposed to be close behind it here in late August, so I snapped photos every ten minutes of the moon and Jupiter's progress and then could faintly make out Saturn coming behind. I have photos, from an old iPhone 6, and I'd have to circle the blur that's Saturn, but it's there.