Twilight Portage

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Saturday, September 15th. Jackman, Maine. It was raining early in the morning, so it was late - about 10am - when Darrin left Jackman and headed down the Moose, a slow, meandering, remote little river.

A few miles from Jackman, the Moose empties into Long Pond, where Darrin found himself surrounded by wild rice and lowland banks of old, eroded bedrock. The scene reminded him of a section of the Sasaginnigak, a river we’d paddled together in Manitoba. (The river, in fact, where’d we’d gotten our canoe inextricably wedged in a rapid, and subsequently used a signal mirror to flag a rescue plane. But that’s a different story for a different day.)

Darrin continued on Long Pond. Eventually the rain stopped and the wind picked up, creating long tailwinds that pushed Darrin across the Pond. Long Pond was full of rocky shoals, much like Flagstaff Lake, so he had to stay alert to avoid beaching. He completed his crossing of Long Pond and ventured back onto the Moose River, to a stretch of nice class one rapids, plus a couple of three-foot surprise ledges.

Next he encountered the Demo Dam portage, where he took out at the bridge over the dam. Measurements painted on a boulder beside the water acted as a water gauge. A water level between zero and one and a half feet makes the dam runnable. When Darrin encountered this gauge, the water was so low that the boulder was perched high and dry, several feet above the river.

From the dam, Darrin embarked on what would be his most frustrating portage of the NFCT. The portage began from Demo Road, and it went fine until he started following the map instead of the directions (the NFCT organization publishes directions for every section of the Trail). Based on his interpretation of the map, he ended up going down a wrong logging trail. The trail dead-ended in a bog, where he stomped through water and muskeg in search of where the portage trail continued. After 30 minutes, he gave up and trudged back to where he’d started on Demo Road. From there, he found a marked road that corresponded to his map. That road took him to a wooded logging road that turned out to be the portage trail. By that time, it was twilight, and Darrin was exhausted. He spent the night along the logging trail.

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