“Portages, like other things with which we are familiar, develop personality as we endow them with human associations and past experience. Things that have been long lived with, that have known joy and sorrow, failure and success, work and rest: these things we think of differently. They have become a part of the human picture, part and parcel of our lives and we feel toward them as we can only feel toward things which we know well. All old trails and roads have their allure and we follow them easily, knowing that many have gone before.”

— Sigurd F. Olson, 1936