Day 7. Tues., July 19. (57°03’02” N, 76°27’38” W)

On which the maze phase begins.

10PM    57°05’17” N, 76°15’29” W

Portaging is a slog. Have I used that word before? Let me use it again.

I’m making my way through the ponds, but every haul takes it out of me. Did four today. Paddled from 8:30AM-7:30PM and I’m still feeling way behind, and not just because of my route mistake while climbing the valley. This is all taking longer than I’d planned. Hope I can pull this trip off.

Navigation decisions require focus and deliberation on this section of the route. I’ve dubbed it “the maze phase”. From the first pond, a sinuous route of 73 additional kilometers winds its way through additional ponds and streams, requiring another twenty or so portages. Many of them are comparatively short, stretching a few hundred meters or less, but the remoteness of the route means one thing: These portages usually require cutting straight through the vegetation of bushes and scrub trees that wilderness travelers describe with a single word, brush. Heavy brush can be all but impenetrable, turning a few hundred meters into hours of work.

Trip reports had encouraged me, though. Roughly a quarter-century previously, two different teams followed this route on different occasions, and their reports both described the pond series as the high point of the trip. The writers complimented the landscape as magical and the paddling as meditative, even idyllic, filled with evidence of the Inuit’s presence and eliciting awe and reverence. I am no aficionado of portaging, especially with an unwieldy sea kayak, but these past descriptions made me feel it would be worth the effort.

A lot of the challenge here is that I not only have to carry, but I have to figure out the best route on the fly. What’s the path with the fewest obstacles? Where can I best put my kayak back in the water at the far end? Am I starting in the best place to get there? Another slope to climb; can I get the boat up it without dropping or damaging it? Can I do all this without losing any gear?

My strategy of bringing along a large, compressible drybag-backpack seems to have been a good one (fitting my smaller bags into the pack, leaving only my two large food drybags to hand-carry). I feel nearly encumbered with this load, especially breaking trail through brush or wetland, and it takes time to unpack and repack the fore and aft dry compartments every portage. So far, though, I have been able to keep the boat mostly empty on carries, which makes it reasonably manageable.

The rocky hills are imposing and majestic; the water is clear and clean. After paddling the first pond this morning, the first portage took me up and around a falls that would be inspiring at full flow. Just a trickle now but still lovely. I’m trying to take photos and video as I can, and I hope yesterday’s shots of Elon and his clan came out.

The weather has been mostly cooperative too. Frequently sunny and warm, not at all like the blustery and forbidding Richmond Gulf I’d paddled four years ago. I spent most of that trip trying to ward off hypothermia. Today I broke for lunch at the third portage, and it was so pleasant I actually stripped naked to dry out my clothes and drysuit a bit while I ate the last of the ham and cheese.

I knock on wood whenever I think of this fine weather because it can’t last. Tonight, it’s raining off and on for the first time since I set out.