On the next big tundra lake, the ice was 30-50 cm thick and rock solid. There were no leads around the islands of the main body of the lake. This made us think that there would be quite a bit of tracking over ice during the next 150 km of lake travel.
It was virtually impossible to proceed with the trip. So we needed a new route to the Ellice River. During the long preparation (we started the planning for the first approach in 1998), we had looked at many different routes one could go and under these conditions, the Baillie River was promising.
It was close and it would avoid large lakes, i.e. ice. The problem was that we did not have the appropriate map for that river (we were carrying tons of maps for all kinds of different routes but this one was missing). Further, this route would involve tracking up the Back River and taking a different portage route to the Ellice River.