Summer Journal Day 11
Tuesday, August 11
2:15 PM
We were up at 6 am this morning and the sky looked like more rain. We skipped breakfast and broke camp before the rains came. The bugs were again relentless. They were swarming and in our eyes and ears. We did have a few mosquitoes for breakfast.
With the truck loaded Chris took us on a last run down the runway and then out to the Realty Road. It is a weekday and the logging trucks are running, so I took the wheel after a while.
I remembered that I had left our saw hanging on the canoe rack and it was gone. We turned back to Red Pine and found it lying on the runway. I guess you could say that that wasn’t the first time I’ve been a hazard to aviation.
Just before reaching Clayton Lake we came across a young moose standing in the road. We stopped and she stopped. It was a stare down. I let the truck roll forward and she turned and trotted down the road. After a while she found a break in the brush and jumped into the woods.
Young moose on the American Realty Road.
Chris navigated. We crossed the Allagash Wilderness Waterway on John’s Bridge which runs between Eagle and Churchill Lakes. We passed through a very active logging area and ended up weaving between trucks, skidders and loaders. Those guys must really hate the tourists getting in the way. Luckily for them there aren’t many of us out here.
The logging truck traffic was heavy today and we found ourselves spending a lot of time sitting in ditches eating clouds of dust. The sky looks threatening. Maybe it will rain.
We saw a pair of good size moose on a side road off the Telos Road bringing our moose total to six. We’ve also seen three bears, two deer, a mink, a partridge (without the pear tree) and a nasty jack rabbit. To quote Monty Python, this was not “but a bunny.”
We turned in our paperwork at the Telos Checkpoint, had a nice chat with the guy at the gate and continued down to the Golden Road. Once on the Golden Road we had completed a loop that took us up the east side of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway to Fort Kent and back down the west side. Of course we were crossing back and forth covering 657 miles of the 3.5 million acres of the North Maine Woods.
We stopped at a place off the Golden Road where we had picked blueberries last year, but there weren’t very many. We picked what we could and then drove further up the Golden Road to another spot we knew. Here we found plenty. Chris filled half of one of our water bottles with blueberries that he planned to bring back for his girlfriend’s family. They were nice enough to give him a bag of goodies when we left.
Picking blueberries
We stopped at the store at Abol Bridge for a cold drink. We also stopped at the Trading Post across from Katahdin Air and I bought a book on the origin of Maine names.
We were looking for a place for the night that was mosquito-free and that didn’t leak. The sky is dark and Mt. Katahdin is wrapped in angry black clouds, but no rain yet.
Chris struckout on the St. John. He says there are no muskies in the river anyway. Tomorrow we head for Little Lyford where he can fish the ponds and the Pleasant River. Hopefully the weather will cooperate.
The views and opinions in the Enterprise blogs are those of the author and are not neccessarily shared by Falmouth Publishing.
