Our third day of work, was a brutally long day for Ryan and I. I guess I bit off more than I could chew, because we finished the day around 5:00p.m. and still had to walk out 3 kilometres. We arrived at the river in the middle of a torrent of rain. I sent Ryan to get the canoe while I did the last post.
Partway up the river he was trying to yell something to me. Of course, I couldn't hear through the downpour of rain. Every five minutes I would hear more questions yelled in desperation. Finally, he sounded like he was in trouble and I set off towards him, wading through a mucky mass of weeds and mud up to my chest. It was at this point he rounded the bend in the river, intact in the canoe. He said he was fine, it was just his voice was gone from the long day of work.
It was now 6:30p.m. and we still had a long ways to paddle and portage. I was so exhausted that things started to hit me funny and despite the circumstances, we were both laughing and making the best of it.
We arrived back at camp at 8:30p.m. utterly exhausted. Katarina chided me for working so long, telling me I should know better. She was right of course, I paid for that long day, as the next day I was in no shape to work hard.
Our last day, Katarina and Jeremy started to pack up camp while Ryan and I finished off the last few lengths close to camp.
Meanwhile, Ruth and Veronique had the longest day imaginable. They had to walk seven kilometres up a powerline, just to start work. When they got there, the tie-on lines were hard to find and not as shown on the map. Veronique's GPS quit working, so they had to do everything together.
In order to go completely around the claim, they had to swim a 200 metre section of the lake. They built a makeshift raft to put their cruiser vests and axes on. Even so, by the time they reached the other shore, the raft fell apart, Veronique lost one of her boots, and both girls were exhausted, coughing and swallowing some water.
Katarina, Jeremy, Ryan, and I packed up camp and portaged everything into our pick-up lake. Even with a lighter load the portage was still a pain. Paddling down the lake seemed to take forever in the boat. It took twice the effort to keep up with the canoe. Before we reached our pick-up spot, the plane flew over us, dipping his wings to say hello. He checked for Ruth and Veronique, but they weren't done yet. When the plane landed, we realized it was Bernie, the owner of Northstar Air. He greeted us with a big smile and soon we had the plane loaded, minus the canoes. We left the canoes as we had too much weight to pick up Ruth and Veronique.
