Live Updates

Long time coming, and I can't even begin to sum up all the places I've been in the lasttwo months. I hadn't even realized how ridiculous things had been until I dragged ass all last week, on a more than mediocre trip and beat myself for a while trying to figure out why. I haven't had a break since Christmas...at the most recent. A crazy semester of school and thesis, graduation and the whole family thing, straight to Utah, straight to packing up my life in Portland, straight to Wisconsin and Birch Trail straight through for over a month now. I'm just...tired.

Trips so far have been pretty rad. More epic than I like trips I work on to usually be, but still learning a lot for sure. I'm hiding in the staff lounge watching a movie and trying to drown out the ruccus of the second day of color wars and trying to turn off enough of my brain to be OK to work again in another day. I took out a 6 day canoe trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness up north on the Canadian border in Minnesota with a new tripper named Michael and six Tamarack (rising tenth graders) girls. We had a blast, they were more than stoked about the whole thing, which was awesome, Mike and me pretty much cracked each other up the whole time, but things got progressively more and more epic as the week wore on. The first day on the water we missed a portage trail, slid down a coupla rifles, and came around a corner to a 60 foot waterfall. The stupid thing was, we had the girls on a pee break looking at the falls, and we were literally standing on the trail. We looked at it, Mike and me, and decided that couldn't be the trail. So we went down a little side creek, down two more rapids, and came around a bend to another falls. Only then did we figure it out, then had to backtrack. Backtracking means pulling kids boats against the current up two sets of rapids. Michael got ontop of the rapids, I tied them in, and he pulled. We rolled into camp by like 8 pm or something ridiculous, when we were aiming for about 5. Day two involved 200 rods of portaging, a rod being a canoe length. The thing about portaging that I didn't really understand until I got up there, is its not just carrying boats and gear. I figured, sure, no sweat, I can carry boats and stuff on my back for a half mile. The thing is, its not entirely flat ground that you're carrying boats over, its up and down mountains and over boulders and downed trees. 75 rods of the 200 that day were through a swamp, like knee deep mud and crap. Yea, it was a long ass day. Day three was pretty much flat water for a while, a pretty brutal headwind, and a couple of quick squalls. Then we hit horsetail rapids, an things really got interesting. The portage trail was pretty trashed, plus it put in in the middle of the rapid, and there was only room to load one boat at a time. Long story short, we dumped two boats, including mine, and three kids swam most of the way. I got pinned between the two empty boats on a strainer at the bottom of the rapid, and we had to zee drag them off the tree against the current. It was a pretty epic day....

All for now.