A Series of Unfortunate Events - PARTRIDGE FALLS - Day Eleven

It was time to relax. After 11 hours on the Grand Portage, we were looking forward to a filling dinner at our campsite, a good night's rest and a short paddle the next day, where we had a rest day planned at the top of the thundering Partridge Falls.

But that's not quite the way it went.

Upon arriving at our campsite, exhausted, at the end of the Grand Portage, we discovered our first disaster. The stove fuel bottle had leaked at some point during the portage, and contaminated almost all of our food with its nasty contents. While Brynley miserably tried to the sort the food into "garbage" and "possibly edible" piles, I tried for an hour to light a fire with the scarce wood soaked from the day's storm. Finally a flame held, and we cooked and ate a salvaged dinner while staring in dejection at the pile of food we carried for 14km, now completely spoiled. We got to bed at midnight.

The next morning we woke up horribly sore (and I excruciatingly itchy from being mauled by mosquitoes), but that was to be expected.

The sunny weather and slight tailwind put us in a good mood, and after a lazy morning, we were off to Partridge Falls. An hour later, we arrived at our campsite after a 500m portage. It was perfect. It had a big fire pit with a nice flat, grassy spot for our tent over-looking the roaring waterfall. At this point , Carrie and Jon arrived, bringing us some food. We chit chatted as we partially set up camp, before the four of us trekked a couple hundred metres out to the truck to trade our fuel soaked food for fresh stuff. After many thanks, we parted ways and returned to the campsite.

It was Brynley who noticed it first, as she frantically yelled out "Erik....where's our tent!?" It was nowhere to be found with only one place it could have gone - over the waterfall. I'm not sure what amazed us more - that our tent flew down a waterfall and disappeared or that this happened within 24 hours of losing our food to fuel.

We made plans to tough out the bugs and rigged a shelter with our tarp but upon hearing that our tent was gone, Carrie and Jon were able to get another one to us.

Putting our series of mishaps behind us, we celebrated Canada Day eating some wild strawberries along the trail, taking an evening dip in the river and lighting some sparklers as the sun dropped below the horizon.