Wednesday, August 27, 2025: Plough, Ottertrack, Jasper. 7.6 miles (6.8 canoe, 0.8 portage). Three portages (810, 40, and 600 meters).

We had light rain overnight, but the rain had stopped and we saw patches of blue when we exited the tent at 6:45. We packed up a mostly-dry camp and paddled to the long portage between Plough and Ottertrack, another border lake. Like yesterday's portage into Plough, the portage appeared to have more moose than paddler traffic. The portage repeatedly climbed small hills, then dropped into drainages. About halfway through the portage we encountered a tree across the path that was too high to step over, too low to go under with a load, and too big for our saw. We unshouldered our loads and passed them under the tree before moving on.

We paused on Ottertrack to get a shot of a border monument, and a short time later we had to pull out rain gear. We stopped to check out the campsite we had originally planned for last night's stay, and were happy we'd stopped on Plough. As the light rain grew heavier, we donned rain pants and left the border portion of Ottertrack. We stopped for lunch at another campsite we'd marked on our maps, and considered stopping for the day rather than paddling on in the rain. But the site's landing was blocked by a fallen tree and it was a long walk up a hill to a tired and worn site, so we had a standing lunch in the rain and moved on.

The portage into Jasper wasn't far from our lunch stop, but its landing was tough to spot because of downed trees. We shouldered our loads and set off on what we thought was a 600 meter portage, but it ended after only about 40 meters—beavers at work! We put the canoe in the creek, loaded it, and paddled up the creek to another landing for the 'real' portage into Jasper. On Jasper we aimed our canoe toward an island site marked on our map. The site met our approval, and as we started unloading gear the rain stopped. After hot tea/coffee while setting up camp followed by a good meal and cheesecake dessert, we were warm, dry, and happy!

But the 'dry' became an issue: all through dinner thunder rumbled to the north, but the skies over our camp site were beautiful. We retired to the tent for Farkle competition, and the thunder came closer. As we started to read a couple stories from a Patrick McManus book it began to rain. Soon the rain and thunder were so loud we couldn't hear the reader, then the hard rain started spraying a fine mist through our aging tent's fly. The fine mist turned into some serious dripping from seams in the fly. Fortunately, the storm moved out after only 15 minutes, and we had been able to catch most drips with our bandanas, so we didn't get soaked inside the tent, and by 12:30 the sky was clear and beautiful. We'll put the dining fly over the tent for the rest of this trip!