Back from Maine

Back from Maine!

Sorry for the delay in posting. I'll bring you all up to date over the next few days.

The trip was quite good. Here's the stretch of river we were on: http://tinyurl.com/4jx24c (zoom in, zoom out, change maps types to get oriented as desired) As you can see, we were right next to the Quebec border; in fact, the trail signs on the logging roads there were as often in French as in English.

I've attached a few of the better pix from the trip (below), and will post more soon, with annotations so you'll know what you're seeing.

We saw a variety of animals, including three moose, many loons and other waterfowl, and a couple bald eagles.

But mostly, the weather was the star. Each morning started with dense fog that burned off to a brilliantly clear, cool day followed by a very frosty night. One day, we had a front roll through at sunset, and the interaction of the wind with the rolling, hilly terrain produced some spectacular cloud formations. We were in lower areas of northern Maine, and the color wasn't quite at peak, but it was visibly intensifying day to day.

We had one snafu in positioning our second vehicle at the take-out point. We had to leave one guy with the gear at the put-in point and drive both vehicles to the take out, where we'd leave one vehicle and drive back. The maps correctly show the woods there criscrossed with gravel roads (in aerial shots, the logging roads alomost look like housing developments, even though the area is almost deserted), but most logging roads are in various stages of returning to forest--- they're left to regrow, and then will be re-logged in 25-50 years. Because of this, the roads you can actually drive on and that also lead to likely and legal take-out points along the river are few and far between.

This being Maine, there's also a fair bit of "cahn't get theah from heah" in that you may have to drive a zig zag course for four or five miles to make one linear mile of progress towards your destination. In short: We were unable to place the second vehicle as far north as we'd hoped. As it was, the guy we left at the put-in point had to sit with the packed canoes for three hours; he would have be there for 5 hours if we'd gone all the way to the intended take-out.

But even the shortened river trip had a silver lining because we beat the past weekend's heavy rains (from a warm front followed by a hurricane!), which started about 6 hours after I got home.

More later. But in short: a good trip! But first, here's a small sample of photos. As usual, you can click on the smallish photos below to get somewhat larger versions. (The Blogger software limits the max resolution allowed on the photos it hosts. Later, I'll provide links to some externally-hosted hi-res versions, too.)