I downed an oatmeal/granola mix with powdered milk and dried fruit for breakfast inside the bug shelter. I didn't get packed up and on the water until 9:45 AM. I snapped a photo of my island home before continuing south down the Steel River. 

Punchard Lake was very calm, and I made quick work of getting across it. I was eager to get further down the Steel because I was nearing Rainbow Falls, one of the scenic highlights of the trip. 

Back on the narrow river, I was ushered along by continuous swifts for about a kilometre before the river made a turn directly to the west into a small, unnamed lake.  There, I spotted a couple of cached fishing boats on the south shore, no doubt connected by a rough road or trail to the logging road that ran parallel to the river just to the east. 

A park warden once told me that the only way to recover a stolen cached fishing boat was to check your browsing history.

The river veered in a southwesterly heading just past the lake, and from there I ran continuous fast water for two kilometres in less than 15 minutes to a small widening in the river at the top of Rainbow Falls. Though the falls were hidden behind some trees, I knew I was upon them by the thunderous sound and the obvious drop in topography in the distance.

The portage take-out was on a large rock and fairly close to the lip of the falls.  I couldn't really see the falls from the take-out, just the drop in elevation.  

Rather than check out the falls, I immediately took my first load down to the put-in at the base of the falls. I would investigate the falls and the area on my return trip. The trail was in good condition and went down at a steady decline through the forest to the right of the falls. Though the falls were plenty audible, the trees blocked the view of the falls for the most part from the trail. 

Not too far from the put-in, there was a large campsite off the side of the trail atop a steep hill overlooking a small tributary of the Steel. The site was well-used and could provide enough tent spaces for a large group. 

At the put-in, I looked upriver, thinking I would have a good look at the falls from the bottom, but all I could see were the rapids below the falls. The drop was further upriver behind some trees around a bend. 

I hightailed it back up the path to my canoe and food barrel; I was eager to investigate the falls. What an amazing waterfall it was! 

On the many YouTube videos that have been posted on the Steel River Loop, I have seen some canoe trippers sit in the pools at the side of the falls at lower water levels. There was no way that was happening for me at the raging torrents that I was experiencing, but I did sit on the rocks next to the main drop for 15 minutes or so, marvelling at that incredible natural wonder that I had all to myself. In fact, so far on the trip, I had had the whole Steel River to myself! I hadn't seen another human since chatting with the fellows in the bait shop in Longlac two days earlier. 

I don't do it often, but because I was all alone, I took a selfie! Well, I wasn't totally alone. I had a mosquito biting my chin, as seen in the photo. 

For the record, I have learned that if a mosquito lands on your face, it's best to be on a solo trip. When with another, and this happens, your paddling partner thinks that they are helping with the situation when they attempt to correct it, but...

I would have liked to spend a lot more time there, but I knew that below the falls, the Steel River began to meander considerably, and I would have some hefty logjams to deal with. I was hoping to get as close as I could to Santoy Lake before the day was done. 

It wasn't long before I had my canoe and all of my gear down at the put-in, where I loaded my boat and paddled into the swifts below the falls. I begrudgingly said goodbye to Rainbow Falls.

I was only on the water for a minute or two before I got myself into a spot of trouble and almost dumped. 

The swifts were fairly benign just below the falls, and I wasn't really expecting any real whitewater or trouble spots to contend with. I was looking down at my map in the canoe for a few seconds as I rounded a bend and suddenly came upon some rocks protruding from the surface in the center of the river ahead of me. I could see the water moving swiftly around the rocks with a bit of a gurgle, and I simply thought that the noise of the moving water that I could hear was the river moving around the rocks. Those rocks created a bit of an optical illusion; I simply couldn't see the 3-foot ledge spanning the river just behind them. I was aiming to pass the rocks on the right and didn't realize that I was going over a ledge until I was only a couple of feet in front of it!

I dug my paddle in hard on my left, spun the boat around, and began paddling on my right with everything that I had. I was aiming to get back upstream to river-left in an attempt to front ferry under some trees where I had spotted a tongue that I could take downriver to safety. It was a risky move because if I didn't make it, I would have gone over the ledge broadside and had a complete yard sale of a dump, or worse, possibly been pinned on those rocks. For about ten seconds or so, I was completely stationary, paddling hard diagonally upstream while the river tried to push me downstream over the ledge. I managed to inch forward slowly and work myself slowly upriver. 

After about a solid minute of beast-like, full-on, hard-as-I-can-muster paddle strokes, I made it to the left bank and grabbed onto a sturdy root to take a rest with my boat facing upriver. I was still in a steady current, however, so I didn't feel I was out of the frying pan just yet. When my heart stopped trying to thump its way out of my chest, I turned into the current, spun the boat around to face downriver, and rode the tongue on river-left past the ledge while ducking under a cedar sticking out into the river. I snapped the following shot of the situation once I was safely below it all. 

What a sneaky, little, b!t%& of a ledge! It completely caught me by surprise. 

The above photo was taken at a fair distance away, and the ledge doesn't seem that problematic in the photo, but had I gone straight over it, it would have been quite a chore keeping the open side of the canoe facing upward in a fully-loaded canoe. As I mentioned, it was about a vertical drop of at least a couple of feet at the spot where I was about to go over. In addition to the drop, there were some nasty little boulders right below it that I would have smacked into, as well. That would have really rocked the boat. 

I took a risk, and my front-ferry move paid off in the end, but it was a good reminder to stay vigilant always while paddling a wilderness river. The aim is not to be in a position where a 'risky' move is required. Sometimes it isn't always best to go with the flow. 

Grateful (and more importantly, safe and dry), I moved on downriver. Indeed, the river began to meander a little more, and the rocky cliffs and shoreline that I was enjoying north of Rainbow Falls gave way to sandy banks and bushy shoreline.

Just under an hour past the 'tricky little ledge from hell', the current pushed me into a newly fallen spruce sweeper that had fallen across the river onto a jam of logs on the side, making the river impassable.  

As I hung onto it, I reached for my saw and a few minutes later...Voila!...I had a clear passage. 

Twenty minutes after that, I came upon an incredible sand bluff that was probably a good eighty feet high on a bend in the river. Not quite the Big Bend on the Big East River, but not far off! 

What was very cool about this sand bluff was the number of bank swallows that made it their home. The number of little nesting holes in the sand was too numerous to count. 

(I am happy to report that the swallows were neither African nor European in origin, and no coconuts could be found anywhere in the vicinity. )

Twenty minutes past that, I was paddling under Deadhorse Bridge and heading into the legendary logjam territory of the lower Steel River.  Gulp. 

Paddling under it, I wondered why the bridge was called Deadhorse Bridge. Maybe it was because the bridge was in such a remote location and took people nowhere, thus making the bridge builders feel like the task of constructing it was like beating a dead horse. Don't take my word for it, though. I mean, it's not like I heard it straight from the horse's mouth or anything. 

I checked my watch and saw that it was 1 PM. No wonder I was hungry! I hadn't had anything to eat since early in the morning. 

It took about twenty minutes or so, but I found a sand spit large enough under the protection of some trees where I could easily pull the boat ashore, sit in the shade for a bit, filter more water, and eat a lunch wrap or two. Normally, the river would have a ton of sand spits to do so, but with the water so high, most of those spits were submerged. I hear that these sand spits get fed up at the river in high water conditions. If you listen closely, you can hear them telling the river that they just need some space. 

The clouds of the morning had dissipated, and the sun was strong at that point; I was feeling a bit depleted. The energy boost of some wraps and a granola bar certainly hit the spot. Some rehydration mix in my water bottle also tasted mighty refreshing. 

I moved on down the river. 

Thirty minutes after lunch, I rounded a bend and an enormous rocky cliff emerged above the treeline ahead of me. The landscape surrounding the Steel River was simply breathtaking. 

Downriver from the spectacular view of that amazing cliff, the river meandered, and with each bend in the river, I expected to run into it. Looking at my map and trip notes, I knew it was imminent. 

Was it this one? Nope, not yet. 

The next bend in the river? Not quite. 

This one has got to be it, right? Almost, but no.

Then, finally...

Logjam. As far as the eye can see!

Wow. They say that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, it doesn't make a sound. But it sure can make one hell of a mess. I mean, where is a lumberjack when you need one, right?

My map and trip notes indicated a 100-meter portage around a smaller logjam, followed by another 800-meter portage around a longer one. Soon, I would discover that the initial smaller logjam had been pushed downriver into the larger one, making only one portage necessary, thankfully! 

But first I had to find the take-out. My notes stated that the take-out was on the right. I looked for it and couldn't easily see it. I paddled back upriver for a bit and saw a place where I could get my canoe ashore on the very steep bank. The problem was that it was nearly 200 meters before the logjam even began, adding considerable length to an already long and purportedly difficult portage. 

I pulled the canoe up there, climbed up the bank, empty-handed, just to scout the portage, and began walking parallel to the river. There was a faint trail and evidence of people being there before, so I knew I was on the right track. When I got very close to where the logjam began, I spotted a steep sandy bank down to the river, where I could see footprints and markings of where people brought their boats up to the top of the bank. A-ha! I had found the take-out! There was no signage or flagging tape, and from the water, it simply appeared to be a steep slope in the river. In other words, it certainly did not seem like a take-out spot. 

I walked back to my canoe through the bush and paddled over to the proper take-out, happy that I wasn't adding a couple of hundred extra meters to the portage. Here is a shot of the take-out from the water. 

It was straight up and about 6 or 7 feet high. At least the high water made it a little shorter; later in the year in much lower water, it would be a 10 to 12' bank that canoeists would need to hoist everything up. Sheesh! 

Oh, and did I mention that it was incredibly muddy? The sand had a sticky, clay-like quality that got everything really mucky. Boy, I certainly was canoe-trippin' now! 

It was a challenge because there was nowhere really to stand, and I was alone. I ended up standing in the muck knee-deep in the river. I had to tie my canoe to a nearby branch and let it float slightly offshore while I got my gear up because there was nowhere to pull it ashore. I had no one to pass my gear to, so I used a cedar tree up at the top of the bank as a winch and tied a rope to my gear. I had to keep climbing up and down the muddy embankment for each piece of gear. After tying the rope to my stuff, I would climb back up and pull from the top using the rope to get my load to a point where I could reach it. While keeping the rope taut, I would lunge down with my other hand to pull the gear up. It wasn't easy, but it worked. The hardest part was not sinking too deep in the muck or falling backward into the river. Ironically, the easiest thing to get up was the canoe because I could just yank it up in the river without worrying about it falling back into the river and getting wet, which was a concern with my canoe pack. 

When all was up on the bank, I lay on my back for a second next to the canoe to catch my breath. Whew. And that was just the take-out! 

I walked through the bush parallel to the river for a few hundred meters first before carrying anything. I could see from some cut branches that someone had already been on the portage earlier in the year, but it was still rough. (I later discovered from his YouTube post that it was most likely Ben Beauchamp and his brother who completed the loop a week or two before me.) There wasn't much of a trail for the first few hundred meters, but after that, it became much clearer and obvious. As mentioned earlier, I suspected that the first logjam had recently been pushed into the larger one behind it, and that first section of the portage was very new. It was basically a bushwhack in many spots.

The tricky bit was negotiating the massive amounts of deadfall and parts of the trail on the bank that had eroded and fallen off into the river. For the most part, I could skirt the lip of the bank and get by, but in some spots, there was very little room. I nearly fell into the river a couple of times coming through with the canoe. One time, carrying my canoe over my head, I bounced it broadside off a tree by mistake and simply had to let it go and watch it fall into the river as it ricocheted backward. With the massive logjam there, it didn't go far! 

 Here is what one of those spots looked like. 

More than once, at those kinds of spots, I just put the canoe down and scraped it over whatever deadfall blocked the way. 

After the first few hundred meters of the portage, there was a break in the logjam of 50 meters or so before it continued. Here is a shot of the second half of the logjam from the trail. 

The last half of the portage was MUCH easier than the first since the trail was established. I did have a spot of trouble locating it at one point, where I thought the trail came down a sandy embankment to the riverside again, but when I carried my gear down there, I found that I couldn't get back up from that spot. Backtracking, I realized the original trail was hidden by some new deadfall that I had to work around. 

The put-in was down another steep sandy embankment, but this one was a long stretch of sand with plenty of room to put my gear down. The tricky part was propping my gear up on something so it wouldn't fall down the steep bank and into the river. I stuck some fallen branches into the sand to make a mini makeshift retaining wall for my gear. 

In total, from the time I first arrived at the logjam until the time when I put in and started paddling downriver after it, about 90 minutes had elapsed to complete the 800-meter portage. The scouting, the take-out, clearing some overgrown bits, pausing to locate the best way forward, backtracking to find a better route, and doing all of that in two trips took some time. In the end, I was pleased it didn't take longer. I gave forth a giant whoop in delight when all was done. Type 2 fun earned!

Paddling downriver from the take-out, another lofty cliff loomed over the east bank of the river. If Lord Paddlesworth spent any time on top of that cliff, he would probably look down and get a good chuckle at the canoeists trying to get past that logjam. 

If that, in fact, is true, I have made peace with it. I'd like to think that the enjoyment experienced by the beauty of the Steel River route is earned by those who do it. I knew that at the moment, I was certainly earning something because the scenery was incredible.  

Below the big logjam, the river twisted and meandered through the terrain; each new bend in the river began to resemble the last. I kept paddling at a steady rate, and even though I was out of the fast-moving water that I had experienced north of Rainbow Falls, there was a healthy current still prodding me along. 

By 5:30 PM, I found myself, once again, facing a large logjam ahead of me. This time, the takeout was signposted and marked on the left. 

As the sign in the photo states, the Steel River route is maintained by the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg. I'd like to offer a heartfelt Miigwetch to those wonderful stewards of the lands for doing fabulous work on the portages to assist canoeists. This portage was in fantastic shape and was, by far, the easiest of the day. 

It was a short carry of about 100 metres across the land on an inside bend in the river. The take-out was easy, the trail relatively flat, and although the put-in was a little steep, it was nowhere near as steep as the longer portage further upriver. The path was well-worn, and there wasn't any deadfall impeding my progress at the time. 

Because the portage traversed the bend in the river, I couldn't get a great view of the logjam from the trail. One spot near the start of the trail offered a quick glimpse of the carnage. 

After putting in and heading downriver for a bit past that logjam, I began looking for a viable place to camp. It was after 6 PM and I was getting tired. 

I began doubting that I had enough gas left in the tank to reach Santoy Lake by that time.  I knew that I had at least one more logjam portage to contend with between my location and Santoy, and I was getting tired. I most likely had enough daylight hours to reach Santoy if I really made a push for it, but it would be close. As is the nature of a wilderness river, there might have been another logjam that formed just that year to further slow my progress. I quickly gave up the notion of trying to make it to Santoy Lake that evening. 

The more immediate issue that I had, however,  was that there were no established campsites between where I was and Santoy Lake. Most people who make camp along this part of the river would simply pull up to one of the many sand spits on a bend in the river, throw down their tent, and make do. The problem that I had was that there weren't many wide sand spits at the high water levels, and the ones that I did come across only had thick bush behind them, offering no options to hang my hammock. As a hammocker, I normally have more choices than tenters to find a place to sleep; this was one occasion when having a hammock worked against me. 

The water was so high for late June that many trees at the riverside had their bases submerged. 

I kept paddling south while looking for a viable spot to camp. By 7:30 PM, I was growing more concerned because I simply couldn't find a [place to hang my hammock.  

I had arrived at the confluence with the creek that flowed in from Larry Lake, and I considered for a second heading up it to see if I could find a spot to camp on Larry Lake, but I had no information on that creek. I certainly didn't have enough daylight hours left to be heading upstream on a creek that was potentially clogged with deadfall. I moved on, hoping a spot would materialize soon. 

Well, it finally did. On one of the first bends downriver from that confluence, after a straightaway, I spotted a raised, but flat, sandy embankment under a low-hanging canopy of trees. Two good-sized cedar trees were appropriately spaced apart, from which I could hang my hammock. It would take a bit of clearing to make it work, but it would do. 

I pulled aside and yanked my gear and canoe up the six-foot sandy embankment and got to work. By 8:30 PM, I had the area cleared and my hammock up. 

It was very buggy, however. I probably should have just made dinner with my bug jacket on and called it a night by climbing into the hammock right away, but I had paddled nearly 40 kilometres that day. I mean, I did want to spend some time just hanging out, but not literally. I wanted to unwind and needed to just sit and enjoy the quiet of the river comfortably for a spell. It took a bit more clearing, and the end result didn't look pretty, but I managed to create a space just large enough to get my bug shelter erected, as well.