Exploring the Pontax River in the Winter 2013

Do you know if there's a portage trail? No. The Pontiacs, you wouldn't be able to find the portages. Yeah? Yeah. So most people run the rapids. Yeah. So I'll translate in Cree. We appreciate for choosing Waskegnash as your destination, and I hope that the best. Have a safe trip on your travels by snowshoe to Waskegnash. I'm really excited to be out right now, and it's New Year's Eve day. It's definitely a much more northern feel than what we're used to for our trips around Sudbury. The forest is wide open here in places, and it just feels a lot more exposed. And yeah, I think in some ways that might be helpful for getting around rapids. We won't have perhaps as thick a forest. As you can see, there's open water behind me. We wanted to just scoot around on the left side, but we're unable to, so we're headed into the thick brush to try and go around it, essentially portaging. So it's pretty hairy in there, and it's going to be a tough slog, but I think that with persistence we're going to get through it, and hopefully we won't have to do too much more of it. Crispy night tonight. It was 26 below by three in the afternoon, and that felt like just about the warmest time of the day. And by sunset it was 30 below, it's continued to drop, and now here at 7pm we are somewhere well south of 30. Beautiful clear morning this morning. Very still. We do have the sound of the upcoming rapid in the background, and it is very cold. It's 40 below, and this is uncharted territory for us. Really have no idea how the toboggans are going to pull at this temperature. You want to go for a walk? See? So we just had a minor catastrophe here. We were crossing this section of ice right above the open rapid here, and I had been probing all along, obviously knew it was going to be pretty thin ice here, and had probed across the area where I assumed the main flow of water was, and just had a moment of overconfidence, was preparing to make the jump up onto this broken shelf ice, and right at that moment the next couple of steps that I didn't probe, I broke through and then pitched forward when I broke through the ice, and so my whole upper body went in as well, and now everything, my anorak and my sleeves and my pants are all frozen up, my moccasins and my bindings are all frozen. So this is probably the worst dunking I've ever had, and I find it a pretty rude coincidence that it also occurs on the coldest morning we've ever had, at 40 below when we checked the thermometer just an hour ago. We're starting now, a couple days in, to get a better sense of scale for this particular river, and not too hopeful after seeing this little rapid and the previous rapid that we're going to have much luck with the dozen or so rapids further downstream. So that means we'll have to backtrack and take a look at the north shore. Alright, so now we're on the ground, unless we want to spend time crashing through the bush, but at this point, we've got a small rapid on the map, and so likely the next rapid, which is listed as quite a bit larger, is going to be quite a bit more open than this. And so I don't think that we're going to be making it this time skaggish, but hopefully we'll have a nice adventure further up on the river, and we'll enjoy some cold country and boreal forests for the next six or seven days. It seems now, after seeing this rapid, that maybe if we wanted to come back in the future and tackle this, that we would really need to rethink our travel distances and our tracks, and maybe we spend more time and travel slower in the swamps, but at least we're able to travel somewhere, because it looks like the river shoreline is pretty much not navigable. So, great learning for us, and thus far, I've loved the area, I think there's a fantastic opportunity here, and it just needs some more exploring, perhaps in future years, and learn some of the secrets of the contacts we might be able to make it down. And here we are, just entering the bog now. Today is Kai's birthday, so I raced ahead, and at the exit of this bog system, out on the river, I wrote, Happy 27th Birthday. So, we're going to catch her as she comes out here. Doing our final exploration of the trip, we've made a few probes from base camp, but there's definitely, we're out of time, there's no way base camp's moving any further west on this particular trip, but we still want to see if there's possibilities in the future, so I'm going to head out and explore the bog, and see if there's a route through the bog around this next rapid, and see how far I can get with a light, just an overnight load, so I'll be going out and making one cold camp, and seeing how far I can get. It's a piss away, the waking hours, but no, it's pleading, now your robot is bleeding. Try to be bells that still can ring, and sing your stupid head off to the woods. On a night like tonight, this fire is beauty incarnate. I feel pretty good now, where I am, it's 7 o'clock, time to start digging out that Quinzee, and the water's already starting to heat for supper, so. A successful night in the Quinzee, at negative 35. It was late last night, after I had all my water bottles filled, and my supper was on, and the Quinzee was well underway, I started to, some of the stress was off, and I was able to take some time to think, and I realized, what was really missing from a great night was Kylan. It was about an hour round trip to go fetch Kylan, and bring her out here, and she helped me finish up. The last ceremonial part of a Quinzee, is crawling up top, and making sure it would survive a polar bear attack. What we've been striving for almost this whole trip, the bottom of the rapid. It is still daylight, and it's already negative 35. And dropping. Get in the tent, get in the tent. Now the moment we've all been waiting for. Kylan throws boiling water into the air. Ready? We're ready for ya. No! So, the sun has just set. It's already 40 below. So we're getting a little bit nervous, as to what we'll wake up to in the morning. But this wind-crusted snow is about the consistency of styrofoam. That should make pretty good insulating blocks. We're going to put up double walls inside as well. So we're going to have a triple insulated. Yeah, so it's making it a bit of a dark cave in here. Not as dark as last night. But with the snow and this inner wall, we've actually been able to turn the stove down a little bit, after running it full blast for hours, and not getting it warm in here. And we just brought in the thermometer, and at head level, recorded a temperature of 32 degrees. That's 72 degrees warmer than the outside temperature. It's pretty impressive. Yeah. So I was really nervous we weren't going to be able to fully enjoy our ice cream tonight. Me too. I'm very pleased right now. It certainly wasn't the trip we were hoping for. And certainly I'm quite disappointed to not be able to make it right down to the sea ice and walk on the sea to the Skagenish. Our other major goal out here was to prepare mentally and physically for a busy upcoming winter season. And I certainly think we've done that.