I got up about an hour before the sun on the last day of our trip. It felt very cold outside the tent. But there was no frost or ice, so it must have stayed above freezing overnight.

No miraculous change in the weather had occurred. With the prospect of a repeat of yesterday's difficult paddling, the distance back to the car had never seemed so long on the last day of a trip as it did this morning. We packed up and started the paddle out around 9:00.

This picture looks back at our little campsite, which was perfect for last night -

Though still blowing, the wind had shifted some during the night and was now coming more from the northwest. We hoped that meant we wouldn't have any more of those dead-on headwinds that tormented us yesterday, as the first half of our paddle today would continue in the same general direction down Carp and Birch Lakes.

First we crossed Sheridan Lake to the portage to Carp, with the wind more or less at our back. The steady wave action overnight had washed a lot of foam up on shore at the beginning of the portage -

This portage parallels a creek tumbling down from Sheridan to Carp. Back in 2009, we spent some time enjoying its charms on a sunny day. But today we kept moving. Soon were ready to launch from the leeward shore out on Carp Lake -

As we paddled down Carp, wind conditions were much improved over yesterday afternoon. We still had to contend with some mighty gusts that were squirreling around from different angles, but nothing like yesterday.

On the other hand, my feet were cold as hell. I had on my SealSkinz socks, which kept the feet themselves dry. But my wet-footing boots were still soaked through. The evaporation from the boots in the cold windy air was creating icebox conditions below.

In fact, when you got right down to it, it was just generally cold as hell. And I said so when we got to the international boundary and the portage from Carp to Birch -

Now that we were back to the border, we started to see a few more people. And the portage was wide and easy compared to our carries north of the border. David at the Birch Lake end -

By the time we were done portaging, my hands were cold too, mostly from holding the cold metal gunwales of the canoe. Suddenly I saw the advantage of wood trim there. We own neoprene paddling gloves, but after many trips of never using them, we'd left them at home this trip. So I pulled on a pair of fleece gloves instead. They slowly soaked through, but for a while they provided a bit of warmth for my hands.

Conditions continued better than expected on Birch Lake, where we followed the north shore for most of its length. Things got rougher at the end, when we had to cut across open water exposed to that northwest wind. But soon we pulled up at the 5-rod "Indian Portage" that provides a short cut between Birch and Sucker Lakes.

Your author at the portage -

There was a couple there who were a little older than us and we had a nice talk with them. The man told us it got down to 37 last night and was heading down to the mid-20s overnight tonight, so they were heading out a day early. We waited while they loaded up and pushed off -

Away they go -

We followed a few minutes later. The end of the portage on Sucker is in a small protected cove. But as soon as we got a little further out on the lake, we were hit with the full brunt of the northwest wind. We cut an angle through the waves, and made a beeline for the long point that divides the two arms of U-shaped Sucker. 

Once behind the point we were mostly out of the wind as we continued down Sucker and through the narrows to Newfound Lake. We pulled over at the island at the north end of Newfound for a final pit stop before paddling the rest of the way to the landing on Moose. Looking across the lake from our rest stop -

Continuing down Newfound, I tried to steer us more along the northwest shore for better wind protection, instead of taking the most direct angle to the narrows to Moose. But the wind was still squirreling around so much I'm not sure the detour was worth it. The couple we'd talked to on the Indian Portage were taking the more direct route and seemed to be doing fine as we overtook them along the way.

As we got closer to the "S-curve" narrows into Moose, we turned to cross the south end of Newfound and zipped across with the wind to our back. Nice! There were a couple guys up having lunch on shore at the narrows. But we were skipping lunch until we got back to town.

I initially planned to do the same thing on Moose we had done on Newfound - follow the northwest shore, then shoot across the lake when we were close to the landing. But as we paddled down the lake a bit, it seemed like the wind was coming more or less straight up it anyway. So we switched tacks and just aimed directly down the lake toward the landing.

The wind slowly shifted again from the west and picked up strength as we got further down the lake, where we were fully exposed to the increasing waves battering us from the side. But we just had to go another half mile or so to duck behind the big island near the landing. Stroke, stroke, stroke, keep going, stroke, stroke, stroke, keep going, stroke, stroke, stroke . . . we made it!

We pulled into the wide channel behind the big island and found refuge from the wind and waves. A few hundred yards before our destination, we paused to take a few pictures. In the picture below, the landing where our Jeep awaited is directly in front of the bow, and a building at the boy scout canoe base is all the way on the left -

We could see the wind whipping up white caps further down the lake, beyond the protection of our island. After a couple minutes, I said "I don't like the look of this, let's get moving." Almost as soon as the camera was back in the dry bag and we picked up our paddles, the gale hit. It turned out that big island wasn't enough shelter after all. We had to fight our way the last couple hundred yards to shore. We made it just in the nick of time as things got even rougher out on the lake -

That's one scary looking cloud -

We got back a little before 2:00. As we gathered our gear to load up the Jeep, a motor boat limped up the channel, barely making headway back to the ramp a little further south. A couple other paddlers made it to shore, probably the guys who were having lunch back at the narrows. We didn't see the couple from the Indian Portage but they couldn't be far behind. I was glad to be up on shore, and extra glad that we weren't trying to shoot across the lake just as the tempest struck.

I put on dry boats as soon as I could get to them. But it was still cold as we loaded up the Jeep, and we blasted the heat when we started down the road back to town. A few minutes later, snow was swirling in the wind. What a day!

When we got back to Ely, we slowly began to find out how far the Pagami fire had spread. The extent of the fire was hard to fathom. It still is. But then I think about the Bird Lake fire in Quetico, which was more or less the same size as Pagami and also very intense. As we saw on this trip, 15 years after that fire, the landscape it altered is austerely beautiful, at least along the perimeter.

Pagami might also have contributed to the conditions we faced at the south end of Moose Lake. That menacing arcing cloud in the last picture above could have been caused by the turbulent firestorm burning just a few miles to the southeast.

Not that it was balmy and calm further from the fire. As we drove out of Ely back toward the cabin, the bank thermometer read 41 degrees. With the intense wind, and almost no sun, it had been a very cold day of paddling. How different from the bright warm sunshine that marked most of the trip.

We planned to come back into town a little later for a celebratory steak dinner. But after showering and sorting through some of our gear back at the cabin, we were just too exhausted. We settled for eggs and bacon and a couple beers we found in the fridge - and the comfort of our warm dry cabin.