11-May-2001 -- This, our third degree confluence in Northern Ontario, Canada proved to be our toughest. It is in the bush in the middle of hard to get to nowhere.

Badge Darling and I met up in Iroquois Falls about 45 KM away from N49W80. We used Garmin's Mapsource of Canada Enhanced and followed bush roads to within about 2.6 KM of our point. After scouting up and down the road and finding no trails, roads or bunny paths we took off straight through thick bush with Badge using a compass,and me using my GPS III PLUS to correct the course. The terrain changed from dense thick bush to soft swampy peat moss that seemed to want to hold your boots and was like walking across a wet sponge with countless low hurdles.

The two chocolate bars and the jug of water Badge brought were rationed and he did manage to cut a stake and do the picture taking after completing the confluence dance for all zeroes.

This was obviously a busy section of forest as we did encounter many bear and moose scat piles. I would not recommend anyone else looking for N49W80 as there is nothing there but swamp and trees. The one good thing about the trek was that we were too early for the black flies and mosquitoes. We may be setting walking limits on any future confluence attempts. The approximately 6 KM trip took us nearly 8 hours with only a few rest stops.

The delay in posting from May to Aug has more to do to with enjoying our short summer up north and a little bit of delay waiting on the pics.