29APRIL near Pick City, ND - Though I slept wonderfully, on occasion I was aware that the wind was flapping my tent and I wondered what Friday would reveal. Up to now I had had almost no wind effect and I prefer that things stay like that. The first thing I noticed was my camp area was completely closed in with tinkle ice that had been blown in from the southern end of the bay. The southern end of the bay and every bay entered today was in fact, completely ice-free and for a long distance. Being tinkle ice, though, I paddled out through it with no great difficulty. I quickly concluded that perhaps a moderate wind from one of the southerly directions would be a good thing, keeping what ice there was away from the shore. Good in theory, but wrong in application. What actually happens is that wind moves ice floes together where they begin packing closer and closer. When I finally come along, my canoe has a difficult time moving them around because the wind pushes them back from where I had just moved them. In addition, the easy-to-paddle tinkle ice is applicable only to the southern 30 feet or so of the ice in each bay, the reconstituted tinkle ice is intact and moved north and packed together. So it is that after a mile into the day I entered the last of the large bays, unnamed on any map I have seen. What a fight! First, God's highway - which probably existed yesterday - was completed eliminated. I turned into the wind and began plowing through reconstituted tinkle ice. It can be done, but it is slow. Fortunately the wind is not a meaningful hindrance because the canoe can stop and sit without moving when a rest is desired, and what ice is broken free drifts away driven by the wind. But it is slow. So I struggled through the 1st packed ice and entered the west arm and had to do it all again. I made a few wrong starts here and eventually got across thet arm. From then on it was actually not that bad, but the distance added by traversing this bay as I had to do was extensive - as was the time. When I fanally cleared the bay I decided it would be always known to me as SOB bay.

Thinking that the worst was behind me I headed NE along a cliff face with a modicum of optimism ... and then it got colder and the clouds covered over the sun and the reconstituted tinkle ice no longer got mushy .... and the wind became more and more from the west. West wind sounds good because it is a wind at my back, but as stated above, wind just packs the ice together a bit tighter. Encountering a massive jam I must have spent a couple of hours attempting to get through. Finally I gave up and went to the shore - which is a cliff bottom. Now these are not straight up and down cliffs as the lose material falls down and tumbles into the water at it's given angle of repose. This means the waters edge is boulders and mud ... also an occasional snow drift which are still quite prevalent. This is exactly what I want to avoid. But the good part of this bad shoreline scene is that one can exit the canoe, stand on the ice floe and slide the canoe to the next paddle zone. If one were to fall through it would not be deadly as your feet would strike solid lake bottom. That worst ice jam was about 150 yards. Upon clearing that the paddling was good for several hundred yards and then - you guessed it - another ice jam. Nothing approached the big one, but hey, at this point all I wanted was to combat the distance, the wind, the gathering clouds and the cold ... and not add ice jams to that.

State highway 200 has a N-S segment of 19 miles that points directly to the shoreline/snow drift that caused me to consider storing the canoe and gear and walking out. While lining the canoe across a snow drift, my feet were getting cold and icy, I was sinking up to me knees in wet snow and it is a hard pull . A canoe slides well on ice; not so well on wet snow. I lost a shoe in the snow drift but retrieved it and continued on. Eventually I got into a small bay with an established trailer house and about three nice beaches ... and at the east end of the bay yet another ice jam. I worked my way past that, still huggging the shore, got out to the point that merks the end of the bay, where another small ice jam greeted me. About this time it started raining hard and I decided that, if upon clearing this ice jam, things were not looking clear for a long way, I would retreat to one of the three beaches, store my gear and walk out. Well, that is exactly what happened. Upon getting back to the beach I noticed my left shoe was off, so I did all the gear piling and canoe inverting on a sock and one shoe,. I walked out to a dirt road and was immediately met by a traveler who informed me I should go west 200 yards then turn south to get to Pick City. It would have been a sad thing to walk the wrong direction in my wet, dirty condition, and it is somewhat miraculous that someone met me just as I approached the road. After about a half mile I was picked up by David Isaak and taken to the Riverdale High School Hotel. By 10PM my clothes were washed, I was showered, dry and fed, lying in bed watching William and Kate getting married in London. Bless the British ... it is not possible to do pomp and ceremony better than them, and I think it is good to have that on occasion. Now that I am well caffeined by several Diet Cokes - like (well somewhat like) the other William I will not sleep very much tonight.

I will, however, try to move the canoe tomorrow. Now that I know how close the canoe is, and since the weather and ice for the next several days is not conducive to paddling, I will attempt to do at least a bit of the portage. If I can get it close to highway 200, then early Sunday morning, I could portage the two miles along highway 200 before the traffic builds up and the canoe will be ready to portage down to the river Monday - or even Sunday night. At the end of the day I was at river mile 1399, nine miles from the dam ... but only 4 portage miles.