Boundary Waters, Trip Reports, BWCA, Stories

Little Caribou
by treehorn

Trip Type: Paddling Canoe
Entry Date: 07/20/2016
Entry & Exit Point: Clearwater Lake (EP 62)
Number of Days: 5
Group Size: 5
Day 4 of 5
Saturday, July 23, 2016

This day was spent similar to the day before...swimming, hanging around camp, striking out with the fish....but with a trip to Johnson's Falls mixed in.

We made the portage from Little Caribou to Pine. Not the world's easiest portage, but not too bad. Paddled the short stretch of Pine over to the path to Johnson's falls.

I found the path to be quite a brutal little hike. Which surprised me because in all of the trip reports I've perused, I don't think I've ever really seen it described as being such a b!tch to get to! In hindsight, I believe this was a direct result of the storms we got Wednesday night when we were in the bunkhouse. I didn't really put 2 and 2 together at the time (because I still didn't realize how bad that storm actually was (more on this later)), but there was a lot of deadfall and branches, etc to navigate on the way back to the falls...and actually kind of hard to track the trail in a couple spots.

Anyway, we got to the falls and they were raging. Not much opportunity for swimming when they were chugging that hard. It was cool to see though, and we hung around for a while.

Back at camp we finished up the evening with a swim and some dinner (don't remember what we had to be honest).