Day XVII - A barrel in Middle Earth

Awesome sunrise this morning. Thank you, bugs, for keeping me awake so I could witness this wonderful display of light and colours… NOT.

It’s crazy how quickly one can get used again to the comfort of civilisation…

The landscape is getting out of control. Huge valley, terrifying rock slides. The forest is morphing slowly, too. Black spruce progressively disappears and leaves room to balsam fir and birch trees.




I was scouting today, therefore I spent most of the day:
- working my way through boulders the size of a Kandalore cabin
- sliding and scraching various parts of my body on boulders the size of a Kandalore cabin
- telling Emily what to do and feeling bad for leaving her by herself sitting in the canoe for extended periods of time
- spacing out as I gazed at the ludicrous landscape
- cursing and dry heaving repeatedly after hitting my (now even more) infected cut against rocks

We found a Kandalore barrel full of decaying food at a bushcrash campsite by some impressive waterfalls. Probably Bill’s. It’s been mauled by some wild animal but the straps are still essentially usable. When I first saw it I was terrified of looking inside… I guess 2 weeks in desolate, desert wilderness sharpen one’s imagination…



The landscape looks like:

- A golf green
- Middle Earth
- Scandinavia
- The Saguenay Kingdom
- Conan Doyle’s Lost World
- Some kind of tropical paradise, palm trees apart

There is a moose/caribou carcass lying in ankle-deep water just next to our campsite. We still don’t know why exactly the site is marked as “kooky”. Boys and girls are having a little bit of a fight about daily chores tonight. The conflict seems to have spread after an argument concerning who should be cutting the what's left of the cabbage for tomorrow.

We’re down two barrels. Hurray. Well, not really, since we just gained a full one. Hurray anyways.

We are low on:
Cheese
Potatoes
Onions
Oil (at least we took a little from Berny’s)
Snacks (ironically)

Miscellaneous facts:

The boys threw rocks at the carcass. None made it, so it still lies intact as I am writing these lines... Good thing.

Nat cut himself slicing potatoes.

The taco salad was good but scarce