It’s been a few months since I written or recorded anything. Life at the field school has been busy with the spring Wilderness Bushcraft Semester followed immediately by the Professional Canoe Guide Training Course. I found that my day to day life and work took up all my time, and I was feeling like a break from writing, recording and posting was warranted. When it starts to feel like something I have to do rather than something I get to do, I know I need to step away for a bit.
We’ve got a few days left in the canoe course and we’ve just returned from an 11-day Allagash trip. We had some cool weather and some rain, but overall the weather and water levels were great. We put in at Chamberlain Bridge and paddled south into Telos Lake for our first night, then turned north and paddled the 96 miles to Allagash Village. I have spent the first night of the trip on Telos lake numerous times, and although it adds a few miles to the trip, will likely do it again. For people who have or are planning to canoe the Allagash, you should do the entire waterway at least once. Doing so gives you a sense of scale that paddling sections doesn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve paddled sections and utilized every legal putin for the waterway at one point or another, but the experience of doing the entire thing is just different, and something I highly recommend doing at least once.
Our focus now is getting people through their practical exams with both paddling and poling, and we’ve got some beautiful summer weather for it. In an hour we’re headed out poling on the Big Machias river to work on poling maneuvers in fast water. We had a big rain two days ago that brought the rivers up quite a bit, and we’re going to take advantage of it.
