STOP FOLLOWING OUR PROGRESS!!

Our intrepid group of three is making no more progress. In fact yesterday we regressed. We capsized in a set of rapids and I broke a rib in the process. That in itself is not such a big deal, but when you have to be lifting 50 lb packs in and out of canoes all day long and flipping up a canoe and carrying it on your head it became a big deal. I just simply wasn’t able to do that. We considered carrying on anyway and letting me be the Queen of Sheba, sitting in the middle of the canoe and waving it all the bears, but I am quite sure we wouldn’t have made our rendezvous deadline had we done that.  In addition, we lost our Garmin to the water gods in the middle of the battle so we were unable to communicate with the outside world.  The only choice left for us was to turn around and paddle back uptream through the set of rapids that destroyed us in addition to two more sets of rapids. Let me tell you that it is much more difficult to get a loaded canoe up a set of rapids than it is down a set of rapids. It took us 12 hours to get back to Oxford House, in the pouring rain and totally saturated to begin with. We knocked on a stranger’s door at 10:00 p.m. . All three of us ended up in the nursing station, which is what they call their clinic, and were treated for hypothermia and dehydration.

I will be fine physically, but I am agonizingly disappointed over this turn of events. Quitting in the middle was never part of the plan.