Temagami 2007

Prior to heading for China, I managed to get in one last canoe trip with Marcus, Emily and new paddlist Fil. It was quite the ordeal. Planned over a dozen beers on a friday evening at Marcus' place in waterloo, we set an arduous route through a sea of red (which on a canoe map equals portages). Had we taken the time to add up the portage distances (42 Km) or barring that long process even to count them (21) we would most certainly have chosen a different route. However, our slightly innebriated and thereby faulty reasoning was as follows: we wanted to do a river route in the spring, we were up for a challenge, portages weren't that hard. Perhaps this reasoning would have held up had.
1) There not been snow at the start of the trip.
2) That's a bit of a red herring, as we did have beautiful weather on the remainder of the trip. Unfortunately, the hot weather hatched the first of the four horseman of the apocalypse, pestilence. Which feasted upon our flesh, and nearly drove us to madness in their incessant quest to burrow into orifices. In the ears, up the nose, in your eyes and down your throat. Our best efforts to defeat the critters, through bug spray (child's play, these bugs think it's dressing), bandanas, early rising, late camping, exposed rock faces, were all for naught.
3) And finally the portages would have been manageable were it naught for the number, their distance, the weight of the piece of shit abs rental canoe with a crappy yoke, and their poor condition. Below is a fine example. I'll offer a reward to those who can spot the trail. For us portages it was a process of following the path of least resistance, whilst being feasted upon for the above feature critteres.
Yet, with some time to recover the trip was a good one. The whitewater was fun, and the final two days of the trip were fantastic. We got to relax on florence lake (after several dusk til dawn hike/paddles) one of the prettiest lakes I've ever visited. The final night on smoothwater lake was fantastic. We camped on a gorgeous sand beach overlooking a beautiful bay and savoured the final two cans of 50, that had been laboriously carried all that way. How sweet it was. It was definitely the longest and hardest trip we've ever done, but the high points were great. Probably made more so by the incredible effort we went through to get there. Such as a 1.5 km portage through a bog on a trail which consisted of a series of pairs of cut little tree trunks laid end to end, upon which you were intended to balance whilst carrying a canoe over your head. Venture off this path and you sunk delicious filthy muck up to your hip, which then proceeed to swallow your sandal. Fantastic. Fond memories.