03-Sep-2006 -- We spend the second half of Saturday (2nd of September) getting from Kapuskasing to the 50 N 85 W (the first half of a day was spent on 49 N 83 W). We turned from Highway 11 to a gravel service road which is really put over an abandoned segment of National Transcontinental Railway and after some time to a logging road. We stopped at the point that we thought is closest to the confluence.

Surroundings looked like young forest on the old logging site. The area on both sides of the road is apparently totally swamped in spring and autumn (and we've seen quite a few pockets of water still), so it looks like summer is the only season when we can get to this confluence without special preparations. Using snowshoes in winter would be possible too, provided that we could make our way to this point in a car, that is. Which is unlikely but possible - our experience with winter logging roads near 49 N 84 W was pretty encouraging. But then again, our first attempt on this confluence in mid-April stopped us 20-30km from the goal, due to extremely deep snow on both access routes we attempted (that was in April!)

We parked our car on a turnabout (a small widening used for U-turns and yielding to oncoming vehicles, the whole road is one-lane only) and set up a tent near the road.

Next day in the morning, after breakfast and packing tent into the trunk, we headed to the confluence. Rising sun and the haze created rather impressive halo. The forest around obviously gets swamped and there is a lot of fallen rotten trees, lots of young trees and lots of underbush. After some time we unexpectedly got onto another logging road which was perpendicular to our direction. We took a short walk there and back on this road to recalibrate our direction (our movement in the forest was too slow and reception a little bit flaky for GPS to show a good stable direction). After another bushwacking segment we found yet another abandoned logging road that went exactly in the direction we needed. This road ended in mere 30 metres near the confluence! GPS reception got jittery so we did a little spiral around the wrong place but then we found a right place, got all zeroes, and did all necessary photos.

We took slighly different way back, using discovered logging road for as long as we could. After we drove off the confluence we stopped several times to take photos of picturesque surroundings.