As one of the main progenitors of the Bowdoin Outing Club fiasco into which fall break was transformed, it is my duty to inform the College populace of how we managed to conclude the Allagash woods adventure.
As you may have heard from last week’s Orient article, our group of ten was forced to leave five canoes and a good portion of our gear in the woods a mile from any source of water, aside from a nuisance of a swamp.
In light of this, my co-leader Stephen Lightenberg ’15 and I led a trip back up to the Allagash on Saturday, only three days after we had bid it good riddance.
The trip was advertised as a sort of character-building opportunity for any strapping young students wishing to prove their virility by beasting canoes through the woods. Surprisingly, we amassed a crew of nine.
These intrepid individuals gathered at the Schwartz Outdoor Leadership Center at 3:30 a.m., whereupon we departed for the North Maine Woods, stopping for a hearty trucker’s breakfast at Dysart’s in Bangor.
The five-hour drive passed as the sun rose and soon enough we found ourselves bumbling foolishly around the back roads of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway.
After some shoddy orienteering, guess work, and an encounter with a road-side bird hunter, we finagled our way to the exact spot that we had hoped to reach—a road block located a mere 1.5 miles (roughly, but who really knows up there) from our canoes.
With nine able-bodied souls, a refreshed and satellite-aided sense of direction, and the advice of some park rangers, we found our canoes in an amount of time that proved devastatingly embarrassing to the two of us who got them lost in the first place.
The portaging went smoothly, and we pulled it off with a single trip. We ate some pickle and cheese sandwiches, loaded up the canoes, and headed back to Bowdoin with success in our minds and lactic acid in our shoulders.
All in all, the trip was a rewarding success-story, and it was a great relief to the Outing Club to finally wrap up this infamous trip.