Ice Fishing the Allagash
By Tom Remington

It was the winter of 1987, in February, I believe. A friend of mine named Dale, who had been working with me a lot over the past year, invited me to go with a group of men to The Allagash on a week long ice fishing trip. The thought was intriguing but I was far from equipped to tackle an adventure such as this one. I really had only a half dozen ice traps – the cheapest thing money could buy and a 1970 Ski-Doo Nordic I bought from a friend for 50 bucks. I found out later that it was the same snowmobile that had been in a head on collision with a Maine State Police cruiser while being chased by another State Police officer – long story!

Dale kept prodding and encouraging me to go until I finally accepted the invitation. With a lot of his help, I was able to scrape together enough gear to get by. I borrowed a pull-behind sled from another friend and Dale supplied me with much of his “extra” gear.

The morning finally came that we were to leave. Our destination was Nugent’s Camps on Chamberlain Lake. We loaded two snowmobiles and two sleds into Dale’s pick-up truck and double trailer – somehow getting all our gear and food in and hit the road for the 6 hour ride.

The trip started out on the wrong foot for me because I was sicker than a dog. I had the flu and a bad cold coming on and I debated whether to go or not. I stocked up on aspirin and some decongestant – I may have even slipped a bottle or two of brandy into my pack somewhere. I slept most of the ride, which is fine, because I think we got lost at least twice before we got to our destination.

I was not aware of the fact that we had to park our vehicles on a logging road and bring all our gear by snow machine into the camps. We unloaded the vehicles and packed everything into our sleds and headed into Nugent’s Camps.

It had snowed a little bit the night before and everything looked fresh and clean with a bright white blanket of snow. The ride in was short and the new snow made it picturesque as well. As it would turn out, the first day was the warmest of all.

We arrived at the cabin and commenced to unload all our gear and get it stowed, It was chilly and the inside of the log cabin was as cold as the outside. We each picked out a bunk and someone tried to build a fire, which was a difficult thing to do with green wood. I guess that was my biggest complaint of the entire trip was not having dry firewood and therefore the cabin never got toasty warm.

What seemed like a flash of time, gear was stowed and ice-fishing gear loaded into sleds and up across the lake everyone headed to go fishing. Having never fished Chamberlain Lake in summer or winter, I just followed the lead of others. I was the slow one to get up and down the lake because of the age of my machine. Everyone else was driving pretty modern sleds.

The first trip up across the lake was long for me and I didn’t understand why it was necessary to drive several miles north on Chamberlain to get to good ice-fishing. I figured they knew where the good spots were.

There was one or two gas-powered ice augers available and all I had to do is tell someone where I wanted a hole and they drilled it for me. It seemed way too easy but for some playing around with gadgets like the augers was fun. There were no complaints from me.

The sun was excruciatingly brilliant and without sunglasses I think my eyes would have be cooked instantly. I got my traps set and returned to a central location where everyone gathered to watch and wait for flags to fly up and talk about anything that came up.

After a while, the wind began to pick up and blow from out of the northwest. This definitely sent a chill through me as I stood, unprotected in the middle of a lake in northern Maine – the mercury plummeting. The blowing wind would almost instantly fill in your hole and if you didn’t keep at it, it wasn’t long before your trap would freeze into the lake. The remainder of the afternoon I spent just walking from one hole to the next skimming snow and chopping ice from my trap hole.

The sun sank lower and lower as did the temperatures. Many of us began to pick up our gear and get ready to head for camp. It didn’t take me long to get all my stuff loaded into my sled and head south.

I knew it was getting real cold as well, because when I began pulling on my starter rope – everyone else had electric start – the engine turned over hard. I got the motor started and was the last to leave.

On the ride back to camp I had some difficulty with my machine. About halfway between the cabin and where we fished, someone had placed a small ice-fishing house on the lake beside the trail that everyone used to travel the length of the lake. When I got exactly beside it, my snowmobile engine stopped. There was no sputtering or anything. It just died.

I tried pulling and cranking to get it started with no success. In frustration, I finally sat back figuring eventually someone in my party would figure out I wasn’t in camp and they would come looking for me.

I began to scout out the shack but there wasn’t much to see – no windows to look into and the door was padlocked shut. I contemplated walking back to camp but it seemed a bit far and it was getting dark. After about 15 minutes, I pulled on the starter chord one more time and the old girl started right up and off I went back to what I hoped would be a warm log cabin.

Much to my disappointment the camp was not warm at all. Everyone was huddled around the stove trying to get some heat out of it. I still wasn’t feeling very well from my cold and flu and I really wanted to get warm. I was dressed heavily in pack boots, several layers and a large pair of insulated coveralls and I didn’t remove any of my clothing for 3 days I think.

In time we got some heat going but I don’t believe the inside of the cabin ever got above 50 degrees that first night. We all worked together and got a good meal cooked. Dishes needed washing, of which I was not opposed to doing. Water was located out in front of camp – hole that was cut in the ice and covered over with an insulated top to help keep the hole from freezing over. After dishes, we all gathered around the big table for a friendly game of poker.

It was real tough getting out of the sleeping bag in the morning. It seemed that nobody wanted to get up in the night and feed the hungry fire either. I had slept in most of my clothes with the exception of my coveralls to stay warm. As each of us would brave the elements to get up, it was a mad dash to the wood stove for some much-desired heat.

If memory serves me correctly, I think the mercury on the thermometer outside the front door read –24 degrees – a balmy day by Allagash standards. We cooked bacon and eggs for breakfast and scurried around to pack our gear for a day of ice fishing on the lake.

Before I left, Mother Nature was calling and so I ventured to the outhouse located just out behind the cabin. That was an adventure all in itself. From the cabin door all you could see was the roof of the 2-holer. The snow was drifted high around it. You had to climb up the snowdrift and slide down into the privy through the permanently frozen open door. Once I dropped my coveralls, that was the end of any urges I had for several days.

As would become the case, I was the last one to leave camp. I knew that it didn’t matter when I left, everyone would just pass me on the ride up the lake. I went back into the cabin and completely filled as much wood as I could get into the stove and began the strenuous exercise of starting my snowmobile. After several labored cranks, it started and purred like a kitten all the way up the lake – even past the ice shack located halfway.

It was another bright, cloudless day. The sun was just beginning to get up over the treetops but the wind was still pretty much a steady force of 10 – 15 mph. We set up our traps and gathered at the usual central meeting spot. We tried several ways to park machines so to provide a windbreak but it really didn’t amount to much. About the best way to tolerate the weather was to park your snowmobile facing directly into the wind and lay down on the machine and use the windshield as a break. It helped but it wasn’t the answer.

It was mid February and the sun was getting higher in the sky. If there were a way to get out of the wind and remain in the sun’s rays, it would be pleasant. That’s when I remembered that I had folded up a huge blue plastic tarp and tucked it in behind Dale’s front seat before I left home – just in case! I think it was Greg who without hesitation, jumped on his machine and in a flash was halfway down across the lake headed for the vehicles to retrieve the tarp.

They say necessity is the mother of invention and how true it was this day. Everyone scattered on their snowmobiles and shortly returned with dead and dried blow-downs that varied in length anywhere from 6 to 12 feet. We took an ice auger and drilled holes into the ice but not through to the water and stood the dead logs up in the holes. When the tarp arrived, we stretched it between and around the logs to create a windbreak.

This certainly made the day that much more bearable and out of the wind it was warm – of course still with several layers of clothes on. It was all relative.

It remained a constant effort to keep your traps clean and functional. Some of us had some luck. We were catching mostly togue (lake trout). I learned that to catch brook trout, you had to set your trap in shallow water and many times near feeder brooks. But even with that knowledge, I think there was one brook trout that was caught all week.

We all enjoyed ourselves sipping on brandy and laughing and telling stories. Once in a while someone would go for a short snowmobile ride and once in a while we would get some action with our traps.

The activity seemed to come in flurries. It seemed that if one flag went up, several would follow in a short amount of time. One guy with us vowed that whenever you felt or heard the ice crack from pressure or expansion, it would cause the fish to move and thus we would catch fish. I certainly don’t know if that actually had any truth to it or not but it did seem that way at times.

The end of the day was rapidly approaching once again and once again, I was the last to leave the ice and head back to camp. Right on schedule, as soon as I got exactly beside the ice shack halfway down the lake, my motor died again. This became the ritual everyday – without fail.

Either the cabin started warming up or I was just getting more and more used to it but after I got back I was able to at least take off my insulated coveralls to lounge around camp. We fried up a few pounds of togue for supper that night. Denny showed us all how he deep fried chunks of togue in bacon fat. He rolled the chunks in cornmeal and some other spices and dropped them into hot bacon fat that he had saved from breakfast each morning.

It was really very tasty but I can tell you that making that meal a staple in your diet would kill you in short order. We had more than enough for supper and once again the table was cleared and the poker began.

Long days on the lake and short nights in bed trying to sleep made it a little easier to get to sleep in the cold. After about the third day my cold was on the downhill side and I was beginning to feel better.

The temperature during the day never got above 5 degrees and most every night it got down to the minus twenties. We would be up each morning long before daylight and most of us would be headed up the lake for a day of fishing before sunrise. This was the coldest part of the day and that long lonely ride up across the lake in the dark at –25 degrees makes a man think – what in the hell am I doing out here?

Temperatures of this severity make everything work more difficult. Each morning it took a few more cranks to get the snowmobile running. Each morning the seat on the machine was frozen rock hard and the pull-behind sled seemed like it would snap into pieces at any time. Even the joints in your arms and legs didn’t move as freely either. The cold was taking its’ toll on me that was for certain.

We continued to have a good time fishing and exchanging war stories. The fishing never was outstanding but here and there we managed a few fish and were able to have a couple of fish fries for supper. Other than a snack or whatever you could manage to throw in your pack in the early morning, it was your lunch. It was difficult to eat anyway in the wind and the cold and whatever you did, it usually involved having to remove your gloves or mittens for short periods of time.

Greg had brought his two sons with him on the trip. I think the older of the two was around 13 and the younger, about 10. As most young kids are, they seemed oblivious to the cold and regularly had their gloves off baiting hooks and handling wet fish. It was a great learning experience of both of them and they were real troopers. I don’t think I heard either one of them complain about anything.

We had all decided that on the day of our departure from Nugent’s Camp, we would arise early as we had done all week long and spend most of the morning fishing. Then we would return to camp, quickly pack our gear and head out. It wouldn’t take long to pack as most of our gear always remained in a pack anyway.

That last morning was no different than any other morning had been that week. It was icy cold and clear. We packed our gear for the morning fish and headed out. It was dead fishing. There was no action at all and it wasn’t long before we were all talking of reeling in our gear and hitting the road.

Not to be any different than any other day, my machine quit again at the icehouse half way down the lake. I made my usually 10 minute stopover and then got the machine started again. As I traveled at a leisurely pace down across Lake Chamberlain, I began to feel a thumping coming from under my seat. I stopped and looked everywhere I could but saw nothing.

I was the last to arrive back at camp and most everyone was nearly packed and ready to go. I quickly threw my gear into my sled and one by one we headed for our vehicles.

Fortunately the ride out was short as the noise under my seat got louder with each passing corner heading out the trail. We made it to our truck and when I appeared from out of the woods on my sled, Dale had the trailer tilted and ready to load. He directed me to drive my machine onto his trailer and I obliged.

We loaded his machine and stowed our gear for the long drive back to civilization. I took one more look at the underside of my snowmobile and discovered that the track was ripped about half way across. If I had to go another quarter of a mile, I don’t think that old machine would have been up to the challenge.

The heater in Dale’s truck was like a potent drug. It was only after I began to shed layer after layer of clothing, did I truly come to realize how cold it had been and I was. It took a long time for the heat to penetrate down to the bones and with each passing minute of soaking up the heat it became that much more difficult to keep the eyes open.

Dale and I relived the highlights of the week’s events as we cruised for home. It would be a memorable trip as all outdoor adventures are. We learned to deal with the cold and adjust to its’ harshness but as cold as it was, nothing can compare to a crystal clear February night in the Allagash Wilderness Waterway of Maine.

To this day, I remember vividly the massive numbers of stars in the sky that twinkled brightly against a midnight blue sky. To step outside the cabin, even in the cold, you would enter a world of deafening silence but still could hear the snap of tiny twig across the ice. At night the coyotes would come out onto the ice and clean up any leftover bait or entrails we had discarded. From the 3 or 4 miles down the lake, I could hear the yips and howls as the families of dogs would communicate with each other.

I left the Allagash with mixed feelings – feelings that are still embedded in me today. The harshness of nature there reminds me that I should just stay away, yet the natural beauty and the absence of man’s influence somehow beckons me to return. I know why it is a wilderness as is much of Alaska. It takes a special strength within a person to tame the wilds or should I say become harmonious with it. Very few have that. Some, like myself, take it in very small doses.

The wilderness then becomes somewhat self-regulating. Providing that Mother Nature continues her onslaught of harshness, she will succeed in keeping man away. For those few who find true comfort and understanding there, will, out of respect, be allowed to experience a bit more of the realities of wilderness life. It grows on some and distances others.

As man continues to encroach on more and more land, I can only hope and pray that man’s influence will not tame Mother Nature. Yet, if nothing more than to allow her to continue as she is, will it keep the masses away? I believe so.

I continue to age and as I do I find myself wanting to return to that which I knew growing up as a boy in rural Maine. I think this only natural. We always find the path of least resistance is the one we followed growing up. I will return to the Allagash again. Perhaps not in the frigid winter – maybe the middle of summer and hear the loons cry. When I return, I hope to be reminded that she is in control.