The “Petite” Chochocuane River Trip
La Verendrye Provincial Reserve, Quebec, Canada
August 14-21, 1999
By Greg Pozerski and comments by Dave Sanford
Day One - The trip started interestingly; circling through
Suncook and Pembroke at 2:30 AM, in a thunderstorm; unable to read even
those few street signs I saw. I found Fred Laing and Alice Murphy waiting
in a rain-sheeted parking lot, and together we waited for the others to
arrive and begin packing in the rain.
It was rainy and humid on Route 89. Northern Vermont surprised me;
Burlington was a mess of suburban sprawl and Vermont beyond was flat and
undistinguished. Quebec had cornfields, flat as a pancake all the way to
Montreal, which was huge. It is far larger than Metro Boston. I was
disappointed at the St. Lawrence, which seemed more like the Connecticut
River than a river draining the entire center of the continent... until I
saw the real St. Lawrence. The first river had been the Richelieu, which
drains only Lake Champlain.
Suncook to Burlington is about 160 miles and Burlington to northern La
Verendrye is 400. We were twelve hours on the road with stops for food,
rest and fresh corn for dinner from a roadside farm stand. Surprisingly,
no one fell asleep – for which they'll probably pay tonight. The heavy
overcast gradually broke up north of Montreal and the skies turned blue.
La Verendrye is about 120 kilometers, or 80 miles, across on the
Trans-Canada Highway. After signing in at the park HQ at La Domaine we
drove up lumber roads to the northern extremity of the park, arriving at
the put in on Lac Elbow by 4:30. Attila made goulash for supper with
crepes suzettes soaked in cognac for dessert.
By 7:00 the temperature was down to 64°F (or 61°F depending on which
thermometer I checked – I'll use the higher one). As soon as someone
commented on how quiet it was, there came the sound of a chain saw from a
nearby cabin. Dave said it's probably Native Americans as they have some
sort of squatter's rights in Canadian parks. I stepped outside at night
and the stars were big as pie plates. It was too cold and I was too tired
for stargazing.
Day Two - Breakfast today, and most days, is unflavored oatmeal
and LOTS of freshly brewed Colombian coffee, which my fellow paddlers must
drink like an army. I never saw any thrown away of course. At seven AM the
temperature is 42°F... This morning I was introduced to the thrice-daily
chore of water filtration.
Attila and Dave did the shuttle. By ten, under misty skies, we ground
over the sandbar through the outlet into the Canamiti River and turned our
canoes upstream…
The trip was intended to be an easy one, maybe ten miles and a half
dozen hours a day. The paddling partners are; Fred Laing paddling with
Alice Murphy; Attila Farkas paddling with Dennis Belliveau, and trip
Leader Dave Sanford paddling with me.
The sky turned blue and it got hot. Through the quiet morning we wound
our way up a marshy stream, perhaps thirty or forty feet wide, not unlike
many at home except that the trees are scraggly evergreens and the forest,
if you look closely, is thick brush over mounded with sphagnum moss. At
the end of Lac Reche, a wide spot in the river, the Canamiti narrows to a
creek and Dave got out to explore a straight gap in the trees he thought
is the portage trail.
What a terrible place to portage! The trail, if it is the trail, is
filled with yard high brush and a bed of sphagnum moss concealing deep
holes every few feet. Dennis found some cabins up the creek with another
trail, and after a heavy-duty map discussion (a frequent feature of this
trip) we decided to ascend the stream instead. This meant a haulage (not a
portage) up 250 meters of shallow rapids, dragging the boats around and
over boulders. It was a first for me. Dave says I'm obviously not a canoe
tripper because of the way I jump from rock to rock. I'm still trying to
keep my feet dry! That didn't last long, and soon I was hauling the boat
thigh-deep in water with Dave. Coordinating a haulage is difficult with
two people. The boat is always moving too fast for one person and too slow
for the other, and with both slipping on wet rocks. On the other hand, a
haulage is a nice way to cool off on a hot day.
Next was a 500m portage to our campsite on Lac Rivard. Though part of
the trail was through the kind of quagmire a backpacker would avoid (and I
did, proving again I'm a rookie), I learned that with a half decent trail
and a decent yoke, portaging is much easier than I had expected. I carried
the canoe first, then did two trips for equipment, while Dave carried the
heaviest packs - the food and the kitchen. (Dave, at this point, was not
feeling well, and for a few days was really pretty sick, but he didn't
much let on. Later that week we considered a change of partners but
decided our partnership wasn't broken so we shouldn't fix it.)
To the lessons of not trying to stay dry, and the ease of portaging,
add a third; the difficulty of finding a campsite in the north woods.
The trees are so scraggly and thick that you can't camp between them –
there is no "between." And there was little topsoil, just deep pine
needles at best. The woods are thick in brush and hummocks of sphagnum
moss several feet high. Nothing is dry. Nothing is flat. Our campsite
officially fits three tents but we only found room for two and a half, and
then only by careful arrangement and by abandoning New England notions of
what constitutes "flat". I had made a lucky last-minute decision to bring
my one-man tent rather than count on sleeping in Attila's. Several nights
Attila's had to take three people.
"Leave no trace" camping doesn't apply here. If you can flatten, or
extend, the campsite, you do it. They are cared for infrequently, if at
all. Another problem with the wet is disposal of human waste. I quickly
found out that Canadians are nasty on the subject. All campsites were to
some degree spotted with toilet paper. Dig a latrine? Where? There's no
solid ground.
There's a lovely slip and slide nearby, where the Canimiti drains out
of the lake, but no one took advantage of it right away. People split up.
Dennis drifted down to the lake pumping water. Others started setting up
camp. Fred and I were sent on a futile search for a supposed portage trail
where Dave had once camped many years before. I did find a moose's
graveyard, a mossy floor littered with bones and a half-dozen mounds which
I thought were hair shedding where the moose slept. Dave later told me not
to step on them. They were decaying carcasses, probably winterkill or
killed by Native Americans.
We had demolished the old fire ring to make way for tents. Dave set me
to find rectangular stones to build a fireplace to his specifications.
People tend to make fireplaces for bonfires, he said, but he wanted a
small square one for cooking.
Next came the Saw Test. Dave plopped a disassembled saw before me and
told me to assemble it. I thought it unfair as I had never seen this kind
before and had no idea how it should look. That was just the point to
Dave. He called it a test of how I could react in an emergency. It took me
ten and a half minutes (nine and a half really, I was a being
perfectionist). Not bad as Dennis had tried it last year and given up, so
I don't feel incompetent.
Finally we waded the hundred yards to where the Canimiti flows out of
the lake over a rock ledge. It is interesting geology, with rectangular
rock fractures and deep pools filled with foot-wide rounded "pebbles" too
heavy for the spring flood to wash downstream. The water is pleasantly
cold.
Dave and I took the boat out and checked for the old portage trail (no
luck, its overgrown) and fetched firewood. He talked about the proper wood
to use, most of which went over my head. Without pictures in a book I
can't tell one tree from another, never mind bare fallen logs.
The sky was blue with some undeveloped cumulus strands, all of them
gone by six. After supper Attila and I cruised this corner of the lake.
Day Three - It rained several times last night, drizzling and
dripping. I dressed for autumn sleeping, but our second night was warmer
than the first and it's a gray 50°F at 6:30.
We paddled 3 km east to the 300m portage at the end of Lac Rivard. I
suffered our only mishap when a root caught in my rapidly decaying old
hiking boats, the ones I use for slogging through water and mud. Well, I
had thought they'd last the trip! I landed flat on my face with the canoe
on top, but luckily with no injury whatever. A lesson learned, cheap at
the price.
No one has trouble with the portages. Dennis goes for weight over
distance, carrying his canoe and a full pack in one trip. Ugh. Fred gets
winded on the longer ones, but nothing more.
The portage ended in a beaver flowage leading to a barrage castor
(beaver dam), but we found only another haulage leading over the stone
ledge holding back Lac Gladu, and a few yards' carry over the boulder
field. I compared the horse-sized beavers of prehistory (true!) to their
degenerate descendants of today, who build mud-and-wattle dams rather than
ones like this, with stones you couldn't fit a knife between. I looked
around for prehistoric turbine fossils.
The clouds were now solid and a breeze was starting to tickle the
water. We discussed the map and where the island with the campsite was. We
found one island site early on but it was pretty trashy and uneven; Dave
thought it was for fishermen flown in from the camps. By then we were
plowing ahead with a tailwind raising a bit of a swell beneath us, and I
was growing uneasy. I've never been on a lake in a storm.
Another km brought us to a second island of about 10 acres in size, but
we failed initially to find the campsite the map showed on its southern
tip. Dennis and Attila headed north-northeast around the right side of the
island so Dave and I went north-northwest on the left. Dennis then did an
about-face and followed us, thereby barely missing the campsite.. After
circumnavigating 50% of the island and finding nothing even remotely
usable, we hauled up on the lee shore on the north end of the island and
took a break for lunch and to think.
Dave at this point was not feeling well, and for the next few days was
really pretty sick, but he didn't much let on. He later found out he had
given himself a hernia when he slipped on the first portage with the heavy
packs. He had been bleeding internally causing the flu-like symptoms with
a fever.
Paddling back a km to the first site into a now-heavy headwind and
possible rain would be difficult and unpleasant, but we decided we had
little choice. And as we rounded the first corner on the east side of the
island, into the teeth of a real wind... we found the campsite. By turning
back to follow us, Dennis and Attila had missed it by a hundred feet.
We had the tarp up before noon just as it started to sprinkle. The
clouds grew smoother and higher and Dave is predicting heavy rain and cold
tomorrow. It certainly doesn't bother the loons, off in the distance.
Dave tried teaching me a foolproof way to start a fire using the tiny
dead standing twigs of black spruce livened with gum from the tree's
blisters. I got the point, but I had trouble telling the dead twigs from
the live ones, and I also didn't realize the sap has to dry and harden
into gum.
In the evening Attila and I visited the point to listen to the loons
calling from lake to lake.
Day Four - Woke, at 5 to break camp, but during our 5:30
breakfast the deluge came. I looked down to see my sneakers making eddies
in a sudden flash flood of water sheeting under the tarp into the cooking
area.
It stopped before nine and Dave pondered the winds aloft. There were
three distinct winds blowing from different directions at different
altitudes. Dave figured we were underneath the southern edge of a large
low-pressure center stalled above us which would probably start moving. We
decided to take our chances against the rain and leave. This is not an
island worth exploring and no one wants to be stuck on it for a day. We
paddled west on the now calm gray Lake Gladu to our next portage, a 210 m
trail to Lac Laspron. I'm not being picky about my footing anymore, now I
just slog along in duct-taped boots.
Laspron is a pretty lake, long, narrow, and curved in a bow to the
south under a (briefly) blue sky. It was deliciously cold, much colder
than Gladu. Next came a short, 85m portage to a stream and a haulage (is
that a real word? I never asked) into a twisty, foot wide channel to Lac
Malar where we lunched on a silt bank awhile and amused ourselves with the
huge leech that took an interest in our boots. The air and the setting are
gloomy and desolate.
Then came maigre (shallows) into Lac Fleole and the connection into Lac
Epau. Now the land is growing really flat, really desolate. If I had
thought the trees scraggly before, here they were like very tall cacti
with a ball of foliage clustered at the top. The land is flat. Fleole
hasn't a hill in sight nor is there a trace of altitude change.
We encountered miles of flooded forest. I do mean flooded, as in spring
flood. A beaver dam might have caused it, only the forest below only
marginally less submerged. At two we reached a chute (waterfall) perhaps
ten feet high that seemed to be holding the water back. I guess these
trees, whatever they are – and I only know the genus green and the
families of evergreen and not-evergreen – apparently live in permanent
swamp.
We decided to camp at the chute since Dave knew of no campsites for
hours below. This is a typically awful site. I set erected my tent on the
portage trail and tossed it onto the bushes to dry and be out of the way
in case anyone came through. People are trying to dry things. My stuff
makes the place look like a laundry, but with no wind or sun and
occasional drizzles it isn't working.
We saw our first travelers. Two Quebecois came in to camp and we
crammed them in on to a "2" site already holding 2 1/2 tents. They joined
us beneath our tarp after supper and were good company. Around supper
another pair came up, spoke briefly with the first two, and passed
through. From their nonchalance and clothing (shorts) they seemed to be
mara-thoners who wouldn't mind sleeping in their boats if they had to do
so.
Day Five - 55°F. this morning, overcast but with signs of
breaking up.
Today's river is a narrow stream winding through marshes, picturesque
and varied. We saw sand for the first time. In places this could be the
non-sandy Saco below Walker's Falls.
We had one portage today, 335m a past three seuils (ledges), the last
of which was a vertical drop with a nasty hydraulic, unrunnable by an open
boat. The carry was flat on an abandoned lumber road that was only
beginning to fill up with scattered bushes. It was still flat and sandy –
the best campsites we've seen yet, actually.
Today's lunch was my favorite of the trip: smoked Gouda cheese and
deviled ham on "Cedar's Old World Recipe Thin White Roll-Up Mountain
Bread" – a type of pita bread – with sweetened banana chips for dessert.
Whether the bread was that good or I just appreciated it more, it was
luscious. He had lemonade instead of Gatorade, which I'll drink for my
health but I've always thought, tasted like soapy dishwater.
Somewhere in the marshes near the confluence with Riviere Chochouane
that became the Riviere Domain we were visited by a red-tailed hawk, who
checked us out closely but disappeared across the oxbows to check out the
following canoes before I get a picture.
At an abandoned lumber bridge we carried our gear up a sun-beaten
lumber road to an open field that overlooked the Chochouane River. Here
was an abandoned lumber town, judging from the overgrown roads, cement
foundation and many small glades in the woods. The soil has changed.
There's topsoil and sand, and the glades are covered more in lichen than
sphagnum moss.
We immediately spread things out to dry in the afternoon sun. It's a
fine site and we even have a view of some truly impressively tall crib
work pillars from an abandoned bridge over the Chochouane. There were
tables! Everything dried quickly in the sun and everyone's feeling fine.
We took a bath at the takeout, a delicious and icy-seeming 65°F. We saw
our two Quebecois friends on the ledge below.
Suppers have been good, with Alice's cabbage salad most nights for
greens, but tonight after dark she made us a real treat – lemon cake.
Day Six - We carried our canoes a few yards over a ledge to
enter the Riviere Chochouane, a much larger river with long views
downstream. Passed our first high sandy bank. Today the trees have changed
dramatically. The scraggly black spruce and cedars are decreasing and we
are getting well shaped, almost Christmas Tree-like evergreens. I have no
explanation, as the altitude has not changed. And I can't identify the
trees since, as I said, I only know the genus green, families of evergreen
and not-evergreen.
Today, Dave and I heard something big, probably a bear crashing through
the trees. That reminds me that we've seen almost no wildlife. We've heard
and seen loons most every day. I had walked through decayed moose
carcasses, but aside from three red squirrels at Lac Gladu and a bat -
nothing. Oh, and a leech.
A portage of 175m brought us to the foot of an impressive waterfall,
the last of three ledges, where we stopped for lunch. Another 55m portage,
hardly a blink of the eye by now, and a fifteen-minute paddle brought us
to a campsite on a sandy bank with log stairs. The sand as a drawback, and
Attila and I would have preferred going back to the falls, but the
consensus was to camp here. The two of us volunteered for filtration
detail duty tonight as an opportunity to get out and swim.
Although I never timed it, filtering water for six people and a meal
might take as long as an hour. After dropping off the water we paddled
downstream looking for the "beach" marked on the map. Then we paddled
upstream to the rapids for a swim in the delightfully cool water. We were
careful however, as the falls were fractured rock and it was very sharp
underwater.
The campsite is hot and sandy. Maybe that is why we had bugs for the
first time. They just annoyed me a bit, although some people grumbled. The
bugs have been absent so my experiment with permethrin has been rendered
meaningless. The temperature dropped to 44°F at seven PM. That quieted the
bugs down. Two boats went by this evening.
Day Seven - It is 41°F this morning. The campsite had proved
itself a good one except for the sand in everything. This morning the
river was smooth as glass with well-formed evergreens lining the water
under a blue sky. We were able to avoid the first portage by lining around
the first bend and paddling a few hundred yards of class II. It would have
been a long portage, though the trails on the Chochouane are pretty flat
and clear. The second rapid was short and runnable. Not only did we avoid
the portage and the loading and unloading of the canoes, but also it
provided some lunchtime amusement at Dennis and Attila's expense when they
hung up on the one serious rock in the drop.
We passed the mouth of the Canimiti this afternoon. It doesn't look
that much bigger that it did at Lac Elbow, even though that's 20km and
eight lakes above here. We had to carry a couple of hundred feet over the
ledges at the last drop, but then lined a four-foot drop and easily ran
the rest. The map describes this portage like this: in low water, use the
trail; in medium water, carry over the ledges; in high water, paddle. The
Dozols Reservoir backs up over the rapids, obliterating them.
One shore of the river turned suddenly into deciduous forest, probably
as a result of limbering. Once the river opened up it turned into a wide
blue expanse of stunningly blue water. We still have current though
there's a discernible bathtub ring from the reservoir.
We found a campsite marked by cairns and had a long discussion of
whether this was the place or not. Maps don't mean much in the reservoir
where water levels rise and fall. Attila and I thought not and wanted to
continue, but the vote was to stay. Which was fortunate, since an
after-dinner excursion with Attila found nothing in the next mile but
sandbanks and mudflats. This was the last rock ledge on the river for
swimming – and it had cool and cold running water! Just swimming a few
feet from an eddy into the stream, or visa versa, raised or dropped the
temperature considerably.
We had Alice's brownies for dessert. There's a stationary cloud to the
south, a warm front that Dave predicted will bring rain.
Day Eight - The most interesting aspect of the trip has been its
variety; creeks, marshes, whitewater, miles-long lakes, boreal forest,
beaver dams, haulages, maigres, & seiuls. Today's variety we could have
done without.
After a last breakfast, topped off with bacon, we launched into the
reservoir flow – colored water, sand and mud flats and a wilderness of
clear-cut tree stumps like tombstones in a giant cemetery. This mess is
Reservoir Dozois, part of the Hydro Quebec power grid and just below the
headwaters of the Ottawa River. Under a bright sun the water is blue and
the flats look like dazzling white sandy beaches from a distance. Being
Saturday, we started passing powerboats. This was not the nicest ending
for the trip. We had finished the shuttle and were finishing lunch when we
realized we'd been robbed.
At first it was niggling things. Someone couldn't find their bag of
clean clothes, another couldn't remember where he put his keys... Finally
we realized that Attila's car had been broken into. The loss was mostly
clothes and Alice's prescription sunglasses but it was spread out enough,
and the thieves had been gentlemanly, breaking nothing and even locking
the car up when they were done. Everyone seemed to take it in good
spirits. No one seemed interested in camping at La Domaine and packing up
tomorrow in rain. Those clouds are moving slowly our way. We decided to
make a break for home. We stopped at La Domaine for souvenirs and to
notify the police. We were told to report at the next town – the "next
town" up here being fifty miles down the highway towards Montreal. We
stopped again in Burlington for gas and coffee and were in Suncook by two
in the morning. Unpacking as we had packed, in the rain.
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