48stateroadtrip.com

Before going on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area trip, I figured the hard part of portaging the canoe would be having to carry the canoe around. Not that carrying the canoe is fantastic or anything, just that — it’s more the inconvenience of having to unpack and re-pack every time than it is the canoe hauling. IMHO.

Here are photos to help you sympathize (empathize? I’ll take what I can get).

Step 1: Land ahoy! Identify the landing up ahead (in this case, it’s where those rocks are on the right-hand shore).

Step 2: Beach the canoe by paddling sort of hard and aiming the bow for a soft, rampy spot (if available).

Step 3: Carefully — *carefully* — climb up to the bow of the canoe and get out, making sure to maintain a low COG and balance all the way — this is expecially (you heard me) true if the landing is more rocks than sand.

Step 4: Pick up the canoe at the bow and haul it the rest of the way onto land.

Step 5: Remove the bear barrel from the canoe and put it on the ground somewhere.

Step 6: Take your backpack out of the canoe.

Step 7: Attach the yoke to the canoe by lining up the clamps and tightening them down. Then, tighten them further.

Step 8: Take the plastic cover off your backpack, remove paddles, fishing poles, and anything else still lying around in the canoe, then take a picture of it all.

Step 9: Stow the backpack cover into one of the side pockets on your pack.

Step 10: Put your backpack on. Almost ready to go, sport!

Step 11: Lift canoe over head. But don’t do it like I’m doing it in the photo — grab it around the middle and work it out that way. Trust me.

Step 12: Put yoke around neck with pads on shoulders.

Step 13: Start walkin’!

Step 14: Arrive at put-in location (the end of the portage).

Step 15: Remove canoe from head. This will, 60-percent of the time, result in having your hat fall down over your face.

Step 16: Take off your pack and PFD.

Step 17: Put the plastic cover back over your backpack.

Step 18: Head back to where you left the bear barrell and paddles. Maybe check out your map along the way.

Step 19: Once you’ve arrived at the take-out, strap the bear barrell onto your back.

Step 20: Pick up your paddles and fishing pole and whatever else.

Step 21: Carry them back down the path toward the put-in location.

Step 22: Throw everything back into the canoe.

Step 23: Put your PFD back on.

Step 24: Push, pull, and drag the loaded canoe back into the water.

Step 25: Carefully get back into the canoe. This is trickier than getting out, especially on rocks (as shown).

Step 26: Sit down and shove off, matey! There are bigger adventures — and longer portages! — yet to come.

Anyway, point being: carrying the canoe isn’t that big a deal when it comes to portages. And it takes about 4x longer to do a portage if you’re trying to photograph yourself doing it. And to a certain extent, the portages break up the sometimes-monotony of paddling. And the trip I did didn’t have all that many portages (five each way, the longest of which was a half-mile). But every portage I did required me to hike the route three times (there, back, there), whereas people not doing it solo would probably only hike each one once.

C’est. La. Vie.

More to come on the actual, like, trip part of the trip. You’ll see.

bkd

Some of the resources I’ve used:

• The, uh, Internet.
• The Rand McNally Road Atlas and Travel Guide (spiral-bound edition). Shows a lot of parks, campgrounds, monuments, historical sites, etc. that might be right along your scheduled route — and they’re just really, really easy to see in this format.
• Special-interest magazines. For instance, a recent issue of Backpacker magazine featured their take on the “100 Best Day Hikes” in the US, a number of which sounded really, really good.
• Roadtripamerica.com. Mostly for the forums. The audience skews toward the not-me (it’s mostly older people or college students) and the forums are generally focused on the ROAD part of the road trip, but there are also plenty of great suggestions available there. Further, if you have questions about a particular location, state, or region, it’s likely that someone on there lives there or has been there recently and can offer some worthwhile suggestions.
• Reader’s Digest’s Most Scenic Drives in America. Sounds like it ought to be another resource mostly for older travelers, but I’d suggest it’s de rigeur for anyone planning a serious road trip. Heck, it’d be useful for anyone planning just a normal vacation. A lot of fantastic suggestions for things to do along given roadways, in town and out of town. I’m guessing you could have a pretty cool trip flying to a random city, pulling this book out, and then taking the nearest-by suggested drive.
• TrekEarth.com. This is a website for, essentially, travel photography. You can look up any state in the country and just look at the photos that were taken there. And if they’re pretty enough, schedule a visit to whatever location they’re from.
• National Parks Service websites. These websites are clearly not maintained centrally and the quality can be hit-or-miss in the sense that you may not necessarily get a good idea about what fun you might actually have at the park or lakeshore or monument or whatever that’s listed. But you might.
• The AAA Trip-Tik. I’m not really in AAA’s core demo, so I don’t love their suggestions for most places in the trip-tik — but I imagine they’d be pretty good for folks who are more into antiquing and looking at plant-life. Mostly I just joined so that I can feel superior and brilliant next time I lock myself out of my car…

I’ve not had a lot of luck with most US-focused travel books, which often seem like they’re trying to convince me that I’ll enjoy doing something that, in fact, I won’t. Maybe it’s just the focus on restaurants and hotels that bothers me — I like food well enough, but that doesn’t really tell me what I’m going to do with the other 14 hours in the day. Haven’t used any of the “Road Trip USA” travel guidebooks, but Amazon’s hive-mind gives them mixed reviews at best, which makes sense: how can you cover the entire country within 500-1,000 pages in anything more than a superficial, cursory manner?

But I digress. (Not really.) I’ll add more resources at they become apparent.

bkd