October 23: Portage key

I have been feasting on my can goods to try to make the portages lighter, since I am sure to hit a town at least once a week, and assuming I can resolve my banking situation I can buy a week's worth of food in each.  What I do is grab cans from the bottom of the bag: stuff I don't like as much or has lost its label.  Cook up a couple cans and if by the third I haven't hit my regimen of carbs and protein, make some mac and cheese, adding tuna if necessary.

Today's marked portage was at the end of Cass Lake, a recreational lake, and its Knutson's Dam a recreational dam.  It turned out to be open and safe to shoot, saving me a 300 yard portage!  This inspired a code for my portage page, OOO, for Open, 0 foot drop, and 0 issues.

What's a portage page?  There are a lot of portages and to keep my spirits up I made a list of them in the back of my notebook, writing little codes next to each one; the final key becoming as follows:

• xT: x number of Trips
• xE: x number of Eggs
• xP: x number of People seen
• SG: Slid canoe on Grass
• DF: saw a Dead Fish
• OOO: Open 0 foot drop 0 issues
• S: Scouted ahead
• BP: lifted boat with Bungeed Paddles
• FLH: Felt Like Hell
• FC: Found Crack
• GP: Gouged Pavement?
• RR: Rest Room
• RN: ReNamed?
• xH: x # people Helped

Day 124 ended: a little spot of sand half covered in snail shells on the shore of Winnibigoshish, a mile north of the river.

I am betting strongly on no significant rain or wind tonight.  All my stuff is close together very close to the shore, with the intent that I can get going very early in the morning.  I hope this bet pays off.

Day 30: Rivers burn, and then run backwards

I heard voices. A father, and two young children, perhaps. I am found, caught. When the voices pass I quietly begin packing my things. All of my tent and bedding collapses down into two 20L, waterproof bags, while a smaller bag carries my maps and reading material. As I pack the canoe the father casually walks over. "Hello," I offer first, but he either doesn't hear, or isn't ready to talk yet.

As it turns out, the man is Tim, the dierctor of educational assessmentin Saskatchewan, if I remember the title correctly. He has come with his daughter and her friend to this place where he himself has camped many times before. The girls are now catching the descendants of frogs he caught in the nearby pond, when he was a child. The beaver lodge has been there thirty years. He names some of the stones he has found.

When the water is this high, it erodes the shore. When they will recede again, the erosion will reveal all manner of Indian artifacts on the beach. There are teepee rings on the hills, and in one of the woods up there, a flock of feral goats. But he has never seen a boat here before.

"I was thinking of going that way," I said, "but I guess I'm heading north instead."

"You could take the Qu'Appelle river just over that dam," he says. "It will take you past Last Mountain Lake, Regina..."

"That's the way I want to go. I looked last night, but there was nothing there."

"Oh, there's definitely a river system over there," he insisted, "that's the pumphouse over there." I promised I would ride over to the dam again to check it out before heading out.

When I reached the top of the dam again, I looked down, and once again saw nothing. But perhaps my line was wrong. I went over to the pumphouse, and saw nothing under it, either.

Look up, Kevin, look up.

Looking a little higher I see patches of blue just barely revealed through the greenery. The river is thin, its banks are steep, and you can only view it from the correct angles.

The portage was difficult. My wheels work very well on a slow, paved incline, but this was sand and they just wanted to dig in. I emptied half the boat, dragging the stuff over to the road that goes down to the river's source, and continue shioving and yanking the boat up over the sand, and through the brush to the road. The roadis grassy and it is relatively slow progress to push the canoe over it, even when well-balanced on its wheels. But I am finally able to let the thing slide into the water just after the portal of rushing water that is the modern source of the Qu'Appelle.

The Qu'Appelle here is very small, and on the first day it seems that every little creek that joins it doubles its size. There is a weir with several feet of drop, water at its base violently rerising and thashing about to find its right way forward. I have to portage around it, dragging the boat over rocks, yanking it up on its wheels, pulling it over to the pool, sliding it down off the wheels in.

The river became channelized, a straight line between two banks of curious cattle, and the wind pumped up from the wrong direction. It was so strong I had to fight with all my strength just to maintain forward progress, my bones screaming out against the abuse they had already taken all day. I had to pull over several times to rest. I almost cried.

I have complained much here and elsewhere, but the hatred I had for the wind that day was very real. If any of my curses have any effect then you can be sure hell is a drafty place. There I was, on the Qu'Appelle River. I should have been celebrating to be on this river I wasn't sure would be there for me, indeed believed could not even exist the night before. But instead the wind threw up foot high waves against me in the channel. There ould be no rest or victory, the river was running backwards.

Day 30 ended: 50*58.392N, 106*21.446W

Day 5: What are you going to do about... Food?

In the morning on day 5 I paddled to the dam, and it took some time to portage around it because a two-foot stone wall extending at least a mile before the dam on the right. So I could not just use my wheels. Slowly, since my things were not packed well for this, I had to take everything out, over the wall and to the road. Then I pretty much dragged the canoe up, put it on its wheels, repacked everything, and took it to the river below the dam. Some men in pickup trucks who passed by on the road seemed to find my wheeled canoe both impressive and humorous.

I had been warned that the water level below the dam was often too low to paddle, but it was very high for me, never shallow enough that I could feel the bottom of the main current with my paddle. The next river in my rough plan that could set me back is the Qu'Appelle, which one guidebook suggests is only consistently runnable in early spring.

In any case, I did not go too far before stopping to break my long fast. My guidelines during physical activity are:

Eat before you're hungry

Drink before you're thirsty

Pee before you can*

And I was clearly in violation of at least one of these. My breakfast was oatmeal - to me then, the best I'd ever had. I simply cooked it as normal, with a bit of extra water, added some milk powder and a huge dollop of honey.

Okay, if Sesame Street taught me anything, it is that oatmeal is boring, so I won't go into any details here, but I will take some time now to answer the question of what and how I eat. This is only a general pattern - every day is obviously different due to the course of the day and what is available to me.

Any cooking is done with a small alcohol stove. This does not put out much heat and essentially requires a small ring of rocks around it to more efficiently direct the heat to the pot. Its primary advantage is that the operation is foolproof - just pour in the fuel and light it. It cannot break and if you lose it, you can easily construct a new one with available tools and materials. This is important to me because my biking trip to Banff in the fall was cut short largely by a stove that I could not get to work. A disadvantage is that the cheap, denatured alcohol is harder to find than white gas, but I suppose if you are willing to pay there is strong enough liquor at any corner store to cook your food.

Breakfast is generally oatmeal, which I "shanghai" -- I put in the oats and water, and cover it with a lid to conserve heat. Lunch, if any, is usually snack food like crackers, peanuts, and granola bars. I also bought some of those packages of apple sauce or chocolate pudding which make for a good desert during lunch or dinner. The main course for dinner is usually some kind of canned soup. For this, Chef Boyardee is clearly superior to other possibilities, like Campbell's soup or Safeway baked beans. I sometimes have a container of cold canned meat on the side as well - think tuna or flaked ham.

And that's about it! My diet may change as I adapt to this new environment. I have some rough, perhaps contradictory categories of food to inform what I should eat, when:

Carbs: medium term energy, for both muscles and brain

Protein: long term muscle building and repair

Sugar: good for one short term boost in energy per day

Water: absolutely essential at all times for both brain and body

Fat: irrelevant (neither good nor bad) to an active individual

Day 5 ended: 50*40.115N, 112*28.831W

* - This is clearly not to be taken literally, but just to emphasize to myself that there are certain activities not to be put off.

Day 2: Le portage de mud

I had ended day 1 just short of the Carseland weir, glad to have found a nice campsite, and not to worry about the weir until the morning. There was a portage route clearly marked on my map, and by signs on the river depicting a stick figure powerfully hoisting a canoe over its head. My plan for short portages was to load the canoe onto the trailer that I made. This consists roughly of a couple 16 inch wheels from a bicycle trailer built for children, attached to two lengths of electrical conduit reinforced by a simple frame of wood. Two foam blocks rest on top of this contraption, and holding it down in the water I can position the canoe over it, attach it securely by means of straps, and then roll the canoe out of the water.

With some effort I was able to pull the boat out over the ramp, and just keep it under control as it descended the other side. The water on the other side, far from being the relatively clear and clean water from above the weir, was here still, overgrown with algae and a fetid stench. In little pools of mud around the water could be seen tiny, writhing worms, as red as blood and surely blindly groping about for some host to parasitize. I was a little too late in grabbing the bug spray, and had a swarm of mosquitos securing first meals for their equally evil offspring. Having to wade in this water to remove the wheels was not pleasant, but I eventually got back in the boat and hoped to leave this area behind.

Slowly paddling over the currentless water, I could see no clear channel out, and then checking my map, realized that the exit must have silted over with mud from the recent flooding. My wheels would be useless there, so there was nothing for it but to shove and pull the canoe through a useless forty foot, winding ditch in the mud. I would push until it would not push any more, shove one side to re-align it, pull until I could not pull any more, and repeat, until I was at last out into the clear, moving water.

I decided to stay at the Wyndham-Carseland campground that night, since I was told I would need permission from the Siksika to go through the next section of river. I figured this would be easier if I had some kind of "official" place to put my boat. But even then, I could find no place suitable by the water, so invented my own campsite on the rocks by the walk-in campsites. The ranger, arriving late, told me I must move - that there were proper sites near enough to the water further down. Well, these were surely taken, and the best place I could find was a gap in the mud bank where I could leave the canoe in the water, tied to trees, as I could only load and unload my things by precariously standing on the wet mud and reaching into the boat.

This mud I found throughout the lower Bow. I got mud on my clothes, on my feet, my hands, all around inside the canoe, everywhere. The river was unnaturally high here, and while some other Bow River adventurers had said that during another high year, the water was still only just high enough for floating, as long as I was in the center of the river, I could not even feel the bed by sticking in my paddle as far as I could. The high water was good for paddling, but bad for camping since it left only this mud, mud, mud, everywhere in its wake.

Day 2 ended: 50*49.948N, 113*25.739W