Last fall, Molly and I went up to do an overnight hike in Bigelow Preserve, ME with my friend Nick and his wife. From the top of the ridge, you can look north onto Flagstaff Lake. Nick and I were standing there looking at this beautiful lake and he said "we should come up and do like a weeklong canoe trip out there". I have never in my life been interested in canoeing, I had kayaked a good bit, and Molly and I paddleboard a lot in the summer - but never canoe. Looking out on that lake though I felt Nick Offerman guiding my heart. So when we got back from that trip, I started researching.
That's when I learned about the Allagash Wilderness Waterway. Situated in North Western Maine, the AWW spans just shy of 93 miles, ending at Allagash Village. Which seemed like the perfect type of trip for us.
Nick and I started looking pretty seriously at planning a trip back in December 2021 and we decided to aim for somewhere in late May 2022, less bugs, less people, and hopefully perfect weather. He had more canoe experience than I did (which again, as none), but only just so. I think he had been in a canoe like, once. So the first step was that we needed to start training in a canoe. I went out and bought an old Sears Roebuck 15ft canoe that needed some repair work and got to work learning about the ins and outs of canoes. Nick went the easy way and decided to buy an old Lincoln 17ft canoe.
We knew we wanted to be out there for a week or so, but we had no idea of what sort of mileage two inexperienced paddlers could do. Luckily for both of us, we each have rivers virtually in our backyard. To get a baseline, we took Nick's canoe out for a 12mi day trip in the Ipswich river in March of 2022
In a tandem, or two-seater canoe, you have the stern (back) paddler and the bow (front) paddler. They each have pretty important roles.
The stern has a few jobs, they are the director, so they need to provide instructions to the bow based on what they need the canoe to do. They are also the rudder, as they have the most control over which direction the canoe goes. The stern ultimately needs to decide on what line to take through a river, and they need to be able to think fast and communicate clearly when things get hairy. Besides that, the stern needs to be paddling in unison with the bow in order to maintain tracking (the canoes path and how straight it is).
The bow has a few jobs too, for starters, they need to be prepared to change what they are doing quickly when receiving direction from the stern. They also need to keep an eye out for things that the stern can't see easily, rocks, logs, and other obstructions just beneath the surface of the water - and be prepared to redirect as necessary.
I sat stern, and Nick sat bow, we felt these roles fit our strengths and ultimately it showed in our training.
That first day on the Ipswich gave us a lot of useful information. We were really surprised at our pace, despite the slow moving and twisty river setting. We got to try out hand at some quick water ( < class 1 rapids) and a couple portages. A portage is when you carry your canoe over land to change water systems or to avoid an otherwise unpassable section of water.
We were hooked, the entire day we each just kept muttering under our breath "this is awesome".
We stopped for lunch, and I started calculating data, as I am wont to do - before finally proclaiming that if we keep this up, we should be able to plan for at least a few high mileage days.
Ultimately it wasn't going to be quite so simple. We needed a lot more data. The Ipswich is slow, much slower than the Allagash, it's also very twisty. We were spending so much energy and time maneuvering around turns that we simply won't have on our trip.
We had a few more training sessions, 8 miles here, 10 miles there, before I ultimately said we needed to do an overnight on a similar river in order to gauge how many miles we could feasibly plan for. At this point, we hadn't secured our trip details.
For some context, the Ipswich river runs at anywhere be 65cf/s and 250cf/s (cubic feet of water per second). The river near my house that we did some training on too, the Shawsheen, barely gets to 200cf/s. Favorable conditions aren't even met on the Allagash until it reaches 1000cf/s, in fact, its strongly discouraged to paddle when it's below that, because the rocks could become impassable in some places. After some research, it seemed the closest we could get in eastern Massachusetts would be the Assabet, Sudbury, and Concord River systems.
We decided to do a 24mi route starting from Wayland, MA on the Sudbury River, joining the Concord River, and ending in Billerica. 2 days, with the bulk of the paddling being done on the first day. In good conditions, these rivers can go from 350cf/s to 900cf/s - which was as close as we were going to get.
Much to our surprise, the first day we ended up paddling 20.5 miles in about 5.5h, and we still felt like we had some energy left. We set up camp on a little island on the Concord River as we began to full plan out our days in the Allagash.
We hopped into our tents before a downpour, and were fast asleep. The next day we got up with the sun and paddled the remaining 3.5mi to the take out in Billerica, feeling pretty stoked about our upcoming trip and completing the remaining of the planning and prep work.
That Concord River trip was in mid April, with a little over a month to gather gear, complete a bit more training, and do more research.
Today, we are less than a week away from setting out. We've read "The Allagash Guide", by Gil Gilpatrick, a really great book to start get a good sense of the trip, what to expect, and how to prepare. We have poured through videos and articles. I particularly have grown pretty fond of the Northern Scavengers youtube channel, and Joe Robinet's as well.
I reached out to the Allagash Guide Service, who we'll be renting the canoe from, and got some more information. They were really helpful, and honestly quite amazed that anyone was putting this much thought and prep into a trip like this; most people show up without any prep whatsoever. We reserved the canoe and the shuttle to the put in, and created a loose plan for 7 days on the water. Now, all we had to do was create an itinerary, get all of our gear together, and create a menu for our food.
As of today, we have gathered the bulk of our gear, just waiting on some luxury items. I also made some gear as well, which I'll make videos and write-ups about after we get back from the trip. Here are a couple of the additions to the fleet:
Feedbags:
I made one of these for Nick and one for myself, my plan is to strap them either to our seats or just in front of us, just for anything you need on hand; snacks, nalgene, or maybe binoculars. These will double as a handlebar feedbag for the bikepacking I do this summer as well.
24" Camp Axe
I didn't want to take my splitting axe, and my hatchet is too small, so I decided to make a 24" camp axe with this old Servall Half Hatchet head I had laying around. It's a bit heavier than most hatchet heads, so it's well suited for processing small logs. Then Molly did some leatherwork for me to make it complete.
Wooden Lake Paddle
Lastly, I made a lake paddle out of a plank of poplar that I harvested myself from my parent's house in Virginia. It's a nice light hardwood, the grain is going to keep the handle stiff and and allow a bit of flex at the tip. Then some red oak on the shoulders. 50" long
Stay tuned for our full itinerary on another post, as soon as we finalize the plan here in a couple days. Thanks for reading!
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