You Can Always Live on Rice and Potatoes

Missinaibi Days 7 and 8 - Where we've been all this time

• Posted on June 28, 2009 at 6:18 PM
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We have taken yet another rest day and are not apologizing to anybody.

Our residence (and I think we've been here long enough to call it that) is an island in Brunswick Lake. Its granite shores slope steeply up to a flat campsite bristling with Red Pines. The height allows the lake breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay and affords a magnificent panoram of the waters and neighboring islands.

To get here, though, we had to walk the Brunswick Lake Portage, or rather, the 1.5 km muddy creek posing as the Brunswick Lake Portage. By the time we'd finished that shoe and soul sucking quagmire, we were questioning our sanity in leaving the river in the first place. But the camping, the fishing (20 in 2 hours) and the prospect of shooting the Brunswick river to its confluence with the Missinaibi make it all worth it.

So today we relaxed, played a boardgame, drank silly amounts of tea, jumped in the lake, read, baked bannock over an open fire, fished and talked about how great life was. About how we think we like these trips almost as much for the camping as anything else. We said that while pushing on might have got us home a day earlier, 10 years from now we wouldn't remember that extra day at home. But we'd sure remember an extra day in a place like this.

JM

Postscript: Just how muddy is the Brunswick Portage? We met a group of paddlers from Texas today who had just finished doing the trail themselves. One of them told us that, near the trail's end, he fell hip deep in slimy bog hole and came out without a shoe. On the other side of the hole, he put down his load and then went back to try and retrieve his footwear. He reached into the peaty mess and pulled out a sneaker. It wasn't his.