Day 33 – Umbazooksus Stream, ME, to Chamberlain Lake, ME

R-2016-9-22

Start: North Woods campsite, which, it turns out, IS an official NFCT spot.

End: Lock Dam Campsite on Chamberlain Lake (part of the Allagash Waterway!)

On the Way:  Umbazooksus Stream, Umbazooksus Lake, Mud Pond Carry, Mud Pond, Mud Stream, Chamberlain Lake, Lock Dam

Miles: 12.  Bah.  Another measly day, but with good reason.

Weather:  Clear and sunny, then cloudy with a bit of rain.  Chilly in evening.  More rain, please!  Every drop we get now is a scratch that won’t be on my boat after later rivers.

Map: 12

Map 12 (I took the branch on the right)

Trail Overview

Ungh, today.  I’m so glad it’s over.  I never want to come across a body of water with “Mud” as part of its name again.

Mud Pond Carry was just as muddy and difficult as all the books and maps portended.  The woods themselves were lovely, with lots of moss and shafts of light and signs of moose.  What the books didn’t mention, however, was how much you’ll ignore the gorgeous scenery because of the long, monotonous periods where you’ll be stuck inside a boat, watching your feet to stay on the trail and praying your prow didn’t get caught in the branches overhead.  The distance is 1.8 miles, right on the cusp of a distance I can accurately gauge off the cuff while walking it, and this being private land, there were no markers, no milestones, no way to know how close you were to the end except how thick the alders were getting.  The water wasn’t that bad, everything being low and dry, but there were still some spots of considerable loam and moose poo.  I was made more grumpy than usual not because of the mud, or getting banged up by fallen trees, but by the facts that:

1. I was going solo, which means doing the damn portage actually three times (once with the gear, scouting for low branches and the best path through the mud, second time backtracking, then third time blind with an empty boat on my head).
2.  My shoulder had really started to complain.

It probably took me four hours, at least: it was sunny and lovely to start out with, but then rather gray at the end.  I ate my last Clif Bar, a chocolatey minty mess, to make myself feel better.

BUT THEN, as I’m sure any decent guidebooks would have told me, I had to cross Mud Pond, a nasty little weed-choked puddle with not so much of a shallow bottom as a miasma of hard-to-paddle pudding, just under the boat.  Then, you exit to Mud Brook,  “I’ve been carrying all day!” says I.  “I haven’t come across a stream yet that I could line up if I wanted to.”  Today, I found that stream.  It was a rocky, buggy trickle—pretty in its own way, so that I didn’t want to ruin it by dredging it with my giant hunk of ABS plastic.  Fortunately, true to what my innkeeper pal said, there was a snowmobiling trail off to the side that I could scramble onto, although not nearly as wheelable as the book said.  So it was back to hoisting it overhead and carrying, and an extra-grumpy Rosser.  With no Clif bars, to boot.

No surprises, then, that that little track spit out onto a nasty, dank mudflat.  It is the place where, along the Trail so far, I would most expect Orcs to live.  As I paddled through the congealed gravy bottom and the eff out of there, I passed the Mud Brook campsite.  For a flash I considered stopping there, then I laughed.  Never again, Mud X.  Never again…

That said, Chamberlain Lake is lovely, but that might have just been from the side-by-side comparison.  I had a choppy, stormy crossing of Eagle Lake as the rain that had been threatening all through the Mud Stream Carry finally hit.  Once I reached Lock Dam, I decided to stay.  The campsite’s pretty swank, and after doing some research tonight, it looks like I can do a 0.1 mi portage in the morning from here, rather than humping it to the end of this windy lake to do a mudstrewn 0.75 mi carry.  This is the famous Tramway Carry, which I’m jazzed to see, but I can always come at it from the other side and spook around tomorrow, no boat in tow.  But I am DONE with boggy, non-wheelable portages for now.  The idea of a muddy carry right now is, to quote A Bit of Fry and Laurie, “limp-making, in a sexual sense.”

I really ought to get in touch with Hannah and Zach, my rides out from Ft. Kent, soon.  My last email was kind of frantic and vague, since I was scrambling to get back on the water.  They deserve a more committed, concrete answer.  I’m definitely going to be on to the Allagash no later than Saturday morning, done with Map 12 by Saturday night, and blazing through Map 13 by next week.  I’ll for sure be done and having my library vacation by the 1^st.  It’s all pretty certain—now I just have to relay that.

Things Learned: 

+ Nothing beats a Lake bath.  At the end of the day, at least at this time of year, the lakes have soaked up the sun and are good and warm, at least up to a couple feet deep.  Chamberlain was like a tub this evening, and the rocks were smooth and warm.

+ I have a “smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” approach to rations.  This might not be a good thing.

Trail Magic: 

+ I did that infamous Carry, just like Thoreau back in teh day.  Everyone along this Trail segment is enamoured with Thoreau because he passed through here that one time a hundred years ago.  I guess I'm spoiled with my Thoreau exposure, living down the street from Harvard and within biking distance to Walden.  Also, the romance is kind of lost when you're thigh-deep in a moose-tracks sundae made literal.

+ I'm into the very charming Allagash Wilderness Waterway campsites, which are each equipped with privvy, spacious picnic table, fire ring, and over-table hang bar for easy tarp pitching.  It's a very Maine setup, and I like it a lot.

An Allagash site.  Courtesy of a previous NFCT paddler, Laurie Chandler, whose excellent blog is lauriesadventures.files.wordpress.com .

+ I had a solid poop today!  Go me and my revised fiber intake!

+ Just as I was hopeless and sad at the end of the Mud Brook psych-out snowmobile track, out in the mudflats and thinking I was about to be set upon by Uruk-hai, I spotted some motion about 10 meters away.  Fortunately I had my deckbag handy and could dig out my binos: turned out to be a family of three river otters.  I found a rock to perch on and got to watch them for about half an hour, sliding between the rocks, rolling in the mud, play fighting, and having a grand time.  It was just the pick-me-up I needed, and it was good to see that someone was enjoying that cesspool.