Northern Tier Canoe Base Expedition

July 10 - July 20, 2002

Thursday, July 11, 2002
The Adventure Begins

We got up, walked again down to Wynne's Place for breakfast, then returned to base camp where we again packed all of our gear. We also got our food and kitchen packs, filled our fuel bottles, and stowed all of our personal gear that was staying behind into storage lockers at base camp. We were going to need very few if any accoutrements of civilization for the next nine days. After a few last minute photographs, we hiked wearing our life vests and carrying our paddles the mile or so down to the floatplane base with all of our gear and food. That was our first real taste of what it was going to be like carrying those packs all week, and it wasn't terribly appealing. When our floatplanes arrived, a 1000 horsepower 10 passenger DeHavilland DHC-3 Otter and a 230 horsepower 4 passenger Cessna 182 Skylane, we loaded ourselves and our gear and took off for Scout Lake. The flight was fun, and the view was breathtaking. We landed on the lake, taxied to the dock, unloaded everything and watched as the two planes departed. We picked out four likely candidates from the cache of 17 foot aluminum canoes near the dock, loaded the gear and ourselves into them, and set out for the southern end of Scout Lake about two miles away. We started to understand just how isolated and alone we were. If some critical piece of information or equipment had been forgotten, it was too late. We couldn't hop into the car and drive down to the nearest store. There were no cars, no roads, and no stores. For good or ill, we would be surviving for the next nine days using only the contents of the packs, our own skills, and our own guts. We'd been calling ourselves a crew but we weren't yet, not really. At the end of Scout Lake we were faced with our first portage. A well executed portage is accomplished sequentially by canoe. It involves the members of each canoe exiting into the shallow water near the shore, unloading the packs onto dry ground, helping each other shoulder them, then the last member shoulders the canoe and the group hits the portage trail as a team while clearing room for the next canoe. Collectively, we were the poster children for "How Not to Portage". All four canoes landed at the same time, and the ensuing "Keystone Cops"-like melee all but guaranteed a repeat performance at the end of the trail when it would be time to reload and get back onto the water. The trail itself seemed all but nonexistent and would have been a little difficult to negotiate unladen and on foot. Trying to navigate while carrying a 17 foot aluminum banana through the trees and dense foliage proved to be somewhat challenging. Then there were the mosquitoes. Thank goodness I'd heeded the advice to acquire mosquito netting headgear. With both hands busy balancing the U.S.S. Jezebel on my shoulders and therefore unavailable for swatting duty, the inverted canoe would have installed my face as the target at the end of a perfect bombing run for mosquitoes. They guys carrying the packs didn't have it any easier. Lack of attention to balance for even a moment resulted in falling over backwards onto the ground, looking for all the world like some sort of large insane inverted turtle. Just as my shoulders and knees were screaming their unwillingness to go further, we came to the end of portage trail and it was time to get back onto the water. It was interesting, to say the least. The remaining portages for the first day were mercifully brief, but what they lacked in length they made up for in frequency. We were negotiating a small waterway about two miles long that connected Scout Lake to the Bloodvein river, and it seemed like every hundred feet there was another obstacle that we had to portage around. There were beaver lodges, small rapids, fallen trees, and just generally swampy muck in abundance. At least we got lots of practice unloading and loading the canoes, but navigating the waterway was also a challenge. Having an intellectual concept of paddling and steering a canoe was one thing, but accomplishing this feat was quite another. Of course, being inexperienced canoe pilots we hadn't really done any better on Scout Lake, but at least there we had lots of room for correction. As if we weren't making it difficult enough for ourselves by offering sometimes sharp verbal "help" to the paddlers in our own canoes, we started trying to "help" everyone else in the other boats steer theirs as well. It's a wonder the resulting cacophony didn't scare off every wild creature within twenty miles. Through it all, Ryan was very patient with us. When we finally reached the Bloodvein he simply asked, "Well! What did you think of Death Swamp?". Once onto the main part of the river we still had about five miles to paddle before reaching our campsite for the night. We finally arrived about 10:30 that night, tired and hungry, but mostly tired after travelling for over ten hours. It had been a hard and demanding day, but we still had to set up camp, cook dinner, and clean up afterwards before retiring. Though we were proud of having made it through our first day, there was also a degree of doubt and uncertainty that came from the realization of just how hard it had been. Our campsite was on a rocky elevation a scant 30 to 40 yards away from a small waterfall and it was here that we began to understand the definition of "bad" as it applied to mosquitoes. It was as if we were in a great cloud of them. Those of us who elected to eat dinner instead of going directly to bed did so in darkness. At least that way we could avoid seeing the critters and to a degree avoid thinking about the number of them we were probably ingesting as we hurriedly raised our headgear netting, took a bite of our hastily prepared meal, and lowered the netting again. Our understanding of "bad" deepened when, after retiring to our tents, we discovered that though there was a waterfall a short stone's throw away the only sound we could hear was the buzzing that was coming from all directions at once. Back at base camp we had planned to have later in the trip one whole day to rest, relax, and have fun with no travelling on that day. For us to have that day meant that on our second day we would have to not only paddle a distance of about eight miles but we also would have to negotiate the hardest portage we would encounter on the whole trip. Generally, we learned, whenever a portage had earned itself a name it was not a good thing. This one had a name: "The Four-Thirty", because it usually took an experienced crew four hours and thirty minutes to traverse. We found out later that it had a second name: "The Beast".