The Tichegami Odyssey

Summary of Week One



It's been an exciting week but not without some downsides. It's been cool for mid-July, overnight temps were down to single digits (celcius) for the first few nights. During the day we had comfortable temps for paddling.

Winds which were almost always from the west and in out face were strong, this negated the river current somewhat, made rapids a bit more of an adventure but on the positive side did a great job keeping the black flies at bay while on the water.

Rain, lots of it, the bulk of it after sunset with some relatively brief periods during the day and at some point

Bugs? Yes we had a few, mostly black flies during the day, mosquitos pretty much only at camp in the evening and overnight. The Pod is a floorless shelter, hard to keep it 100% bug free so pic coils were used some nights.

The flood outs were not a totally new experience for me, I've had some issues in the past but they were all related to tides. On rivers 2000ft above sea level and hundreds of KM's from the nearest salt water maybe a dam release could generate a rapid change in flow, but no dams on the Tichegami. I've often seen river rise due to rainfall but a few inches at most not the 2 - 3ft we had over the course of three days. On the positive side all that extra water has changed the rapids in a good way

We do have one nagging concern, our progress has been pitiful, about 54km so far. At this rate it would take 6 weeks to finish, we were planning for 16 days with 2 extra is required. To get a little behind in the early days often happens, always time to pull out the "we will make it up later" or "we'll get going earlier" or "some long easy stretches coming up"...........

Monday, July 20 - Day 8:
We have neglected to speak of the pie since its introduction some days ago. "Pie fixes everything" is the mantra of Moody's Diner here in midcoast Maine - well, this pie didn't fix everything, but it did make things a bit more bearable - especially since our morale officer, 2nd mate Fuddle, was really neglecting his duty and rarely to be seen - lest it was off sulking and dripping in a corner. Wet lions are moody. Anyway... it was a good pie and served on various occasions as desert, breakfast, and snackage. It's a bit of a testament to Ben's packing that the thing survived as long as it did in the small soft-sided cooler (that went for a swim). I'm afraid it was on this morning - day 8 - perhaps 10 days post-purchase (??) - that the moldy remains in the pie pan were washed out in the river and added to the trash bag. We left very little for the fishies.

I did the dishes that morning, and surprise, surprise - it was another chilly, grey morning spitting rain and threatening more. We were ready to go a bit before noon (getting better at departure...!!). From our island campsite, we could see the top of the next ledge, and we hopped over to river right to give it a closer look. Lining was possible on the extreme left and we quickly managed that and shot down through the class 3 runout. That was followed in quick succession by a small rapid, and then by nearly a kilometer of nonstop C2+ stuff that swept around a big right bend.



This long set ended at a distinct 90* left hand turn where the river's banks became steep cliff walls on either side. There was good current leading into the turn and a small eddy on the right. Ben was leading and I was sure he would catch the eddy to bail water or chat or check-in or something, but he went right through the eddy focused on what was ahead.

When I got into the eddy 10 seconds later, I could see what was below. The river necked way down between tall stone walls, and became a raging foaming splashing maelstrom. Ben was already into it and his boat was alternately disappearing entirely, and then shooting up out of holes. I could see a calm pool beyond the 150m or so of nasty and didn't see much in the way of BFRs I would wrap my boat around. Can't scout it, line it, or portage it - so eff it, I thought - let's go.


Big stuff!
But it looked a lot worse from upstream than it wound up being. Big holes to dodge and there was no getting through it without taking a few big hits. The pics don't really do it justice, though. You'll have to wait for the movie. The canyon section continued with good current for several kms but only had one more rapid of any note (C2ish).

The canyon came to an end and our next known obstacle was a series of three falls (?) ledges (?) big rapids (?) in quick succession. Brad's maps had them marked 'F' for falls - but there was no other commentary on the map - no portage line, direction, or distance. So we had sorta convinced ourselves they would be ledges and that we'd be able to line around them and make it a 25 or 30 km day. I have a buddy who used to tell me that I live in a world of optimistic denial. He was proved correct, again.

What we came to call "triple falls" were, in fact, all falls. And they got progressively bigger. But we weren't aware of that then. First falls split 90%/10% around an island - we paddled up to the precipice and found an easy path down/across the island to the pool below. Quick and easy - we knocked it out in 45 minutes. Then a quick paddle across the pool and we found the second falls - bigger, steeper, taller - but there was a shallow side channel on the extreme right that we were able to line/wade through. *Note to future paddlers: the correct decision here is to portage the 2nd and 3rd set of falls in one trip by getting out on river left and walking down the fairly open hillsides of the left bank. Couldn't see that at the time, though.* Our side-channel lining on river right eventually came back to the main channel and I really thought we had snuck around the worst, until I came to the third falls, which drop much further and rather abruptly. On this side of the river there was a large stone parapet that looked over the falls and we were able to climb it and take a look at the scene below.



Once the site-seeing was over, we had to get to portaging - it was quite an ordeal. First there were about 30m of 12' high alders to lopper a trail through. Then there was a dry, stony, creek bed to cross and up the opposite 6' bank. From there it was up and down through 200m of dense labrador tea thicket. It took us about 4 hours to complete the portage (right about dark) and at the end, we loppered out a space for the pod and crashed. Meal-in-a-bag for supper.