Day 6 - Rice Lake to Pebonishewi Lake (14 km)

Distance: 14 km

Number of Portages: 1 (This is a difficult portage on a trail that has not seen much use. It requires solid navigational skills, grit, and determination!)

Total Portage Distance: 1600 m

This route is on the traditional territory of the Anishinabewaki and Cree. 

The next five hours were quite an ordeal. Yes, you read that correctly --  five hours. That was how long it took to complete this portage in two trips. Looking back on it now, we realized we made some errors that cost us a lot of time. 

First, a little history on this portage. It was created in 2015 and 2016 by Scott and Kathy, a couple from southern Ontario who spent most of their summers between 2008 and 2020 in the Sakatawi area clearing portages and establishing campsites. Anyone who paddles this area has them to thank for making the routes viable. However, the old blazes I saw on some trees along the portage suggest that a trail probably existed long before Scott and Kathy arrived on the scene. In the eight years since they cleared it, I don't believe the portage has seen much use other than Brad and Cam in 2022. 

The trail was marked with flagging tape for the first 150 meters or so. We could follow it, but the tape markers were quite a distance apart and the dense forest caused the trail to twist and turn around the trees.  Eventually, we arrived at a spot where we could not find the next tape marker or the trail. We circled for about 10 minutes and I was able to follow a couple of very old blazes on trees that helped mark the way, but we eventually lost sight of those, as well.

At that point, we decided to leave our gear where it was, go back for our second load and bring it up to that point. It was at that moment that we made the erroneous decision to approach the portage in that fashion -- doing it in short stages and bringing our second load up to the first. Normally, this would be fine on a longer portage where the trail is discernible, but the problem was that we had completely lost the trail and were bushwhacking for the first part of this carry. It took a lot of time to mark our gear location on our GPS and then using the GPS to find our second load on the return trip and the first load on the last trip.

From that first 150 meters, we proceeded through the forest but were completely off the trail. We bushwhacked through dense forest for approximately 400 meters, climbing over fallen trees and trying to avoid thick impassable bush. There was nothing that even closely resembled a trail. On the bright side, although there was a slight increase in elevation in that distance, it wasn't too bad and we eventually crested and began descending. In that distance, we completed two more leapfrog trips in this manner, but as mentioned, each time we stopped to drop our gear, mark a GPS point, and then search for our load, much time was consumed. 

After three legs of doing this and nearly 90 minutes into the portage, we wisely decided to scrap that approach and take our first load the entire way to Pebonishewi Lake. We still had nearly a thousand meters to go! In our quest to take the path of least resistance through the forest, I realized that we were too far to the north and that the trail must be further south. We grabbed our first load and bushwhacked south in an attempt to meet up with the marked trail. As luck would have it, there were some very large trees that we had to climb over on our way, but imagine our delight when I eventually spotted some flagging tape on a tree about 150 meters south of our load! Momentary euphoria! 

From there, we were able to follow the portage trail for a good 500 meters or so until the trail dipped into a small depression. Upon emerging on the far side of the gulley, a large fallen tree blocked the path. We bushwhacked around the impasse but could not pick up the trail again on the other side of the tree. Again, we found ourselves bushwhacking. We did this for about 150 meters or so when I spotted some more flagging tape. This tape, however, was of a different colour and the trail there was very faint. We followed it anyway. Any trail was better than no trail. 

After a couple of hundred meters, the trail led us into an impenetrable wall of alder. We obviously had found a trail, it just wasn't the trail. It was disheartening, to say the least. Our GPS showed that we were only about 250 meters from the lake, so the thought of backtracking all the way back to the fallen tree where we lost the original path was not appealing. We dropped our gear, and I went off alone to see if I could find a way through the alder. By heading north, I found a less dense spot where we could make it through. It would work with our canoe packs, but there was no way we could get the canoe through there with our second load. I returned to Dad and our gear, and we loaded up yet again. We hacked our way north through the alder, ripping our bug shirts a bit. (Oh yeah. Have I yet mentioned that we were doing all of this with full bug shirts on?  The mosquitos were horrendous!) The alder eventually gave way to 'normal' forest, but we were too far to the north to have any hope of picking up the trail again, so we just bushwhacked down a hill to the lake.  

Upon dropping our first load at the lake, we immediately realized another major mistake that we had made. Bushwhacking full canoe packs in a humid forest in early July with bug shirts on is sweat-inducing work, indeed! Both of us had nearly depleted our water bottle contents, and our water filter was in the food barrel a thousand meters back in the middle of the forest nowhere near a water source. Had we left the second load back at Wenekoshi Lake, we would have been able to filter water again prior to doing the second trip. However, now we were in a position where we had to walk 1000 meters back to our load and return the difficult carry with only a few mouthfuls of water each. 

At the shoreline, we bushwhacked directly south again to see if we could find the portage. After about 200 meters or so, we found it. Going in the return direction, we were ecstatic to follow it the entire way back to the vicinity of our second load without losing the trail again. It did exist, after all! We saw where we made the mistake at the fallen tree and made a note of where to go so we wouldn't make the same mistake again. Using our GPS, we bushwhacked the 150 meters or so north to the second cached load that was waiting for us off-trail in the forest. 

Carrying the canoe over those large fallen trees to meet up with the portage again was difficult. I was getting very tired by that time and was completely out of water. I was forced to drop and hoist the canoe on my shoulders about 8 times in that 150-meter bushwhack back to the portage. By the time I got to the trail, my legs began to cramp up from the depletion of electrolytes. It was fairly painful. Dad was carrying the food barrel, so we took a break. I opened the food barrel and squirted honey into my mouth. Miraculously, it worked! The cramps subsided for the time being. 

The following 500 meters was clear sailing along the trail compared to what we had endured thus far. That ended when we went through a wet bit in a depression where we were nearly up to our knees in squishy muck. It was only about 20 meters of muck but the effort it took for me to lift my legs out of the muck with a 75-pound canoe on my shoulders was enough to send both of my legs into uncontrollable cramps and spasms once again. I'm sure that I had come close to depleting every molecule of potassium, calcium and magnesium in my body by that point because my quads completely seized. I threw the canoe off my shoulders, hollered out in pain, and dropped to the ground holding my legs. I had never experienced muscle cramps to that degree before. In addition to the pain, I think I was also incredibly surprised at how fast the cramps had set in. It was immediately excruciating! Poor Dad! I'm sure he was scouting the trees for a sniper based on my reaction. He dropped the barrel, opened it and handed me the honey again. I, then, prodigiously squirted it into my open mouth. There I was, laying on my back on mucky wet ground waiting for the cramps to subside in a cloud of mosquitos, periodically holding a plastic jar in the shape of a teddy bear over my agape mouth and squeezing. If it weren't so damn painful, it would have been funny! Later that evening at the campfire, we did have a good laugh about it. Dad did mention that he was doing his best not to chuckle at the time. 

The cramps eventually eased and we completed the rest of the portage on the actual trail. Dad had his moment along this stretch, as well. Obviously tired and energy-depleted, Dad lost his balance and fell backward with the weight of the barrel pulling him down. There, he lay struggling to get up much like a turtle that had fallen on its back. From the words escaping Dad's lips, I dared not laugh at the time while I helped him to his feet, but it was another comical moment that we enjoyed rehashing by the campfire that night. 

Looking back, it was the bushwhacking in heat and humidity that got us so tired and depleted. The parts where we were actually on the trail were fairly easygoing. Banging a 16' canoe through thick bush and hoisting it over deadfall is another story. 

The trail emerged at a swampy area on Penobishewi Lake. Thankfully, we had one paddle with us in that load, so we were able to load the canoe and paddle the 200 meters north around a point to find the gear that we had deposited there on our first load. By the time we pulled ashore, filtered water, and eaten a poop-ton of snacks, 5 hours had elapsed since we started the portage. Wow!  

What did we learn about completing a rarely-used portage from days of yore? 

1. Do the portage in one go! Don't waste time traipsing about in the bush using GPS to locate your cached loads. (Thank goodness we had a working GPS!) By leaving your loads at either end of the portage, not only will you save time, but it also will allow you to filter more water before completing the second trip if needed. 

2. If there is an old or faint trail and you lose it, take the extra time and effort to relocate it before blindly bushwhacking. It will definitely save time in the end. A faint trail is still much easier and quicker than no trail. We lost the trail twice on the first leg. In the end, that set us back hours. All told, this portage wouldn't have been so difficult if we had managed to stay on the trail the entire way.  

3. Squirting honey into your mouth makes you more thirsty but helps with leg cramps! Who knew?!

4. Emotions can run high on a difficult portage. No matter how comical someone's reaction to misfortune may be, save any outward displays of hilarity for whiskey time next to the campfire after everyone has emerged unscathed. 

Needless to say, we were more than pleased to be back on the water paddling south through the lily pads of northern Pebonishewi Lake quenched and cramp-free.