4:11am
As the alarm on my cell phone breaks me out of my slumber, I wake to realize that in order to end my day in Northern Minnesota, I need to get my butt out of bed get some job related things taken care of here in central Minnesota.

I finished updating software on 20 computers and installed a Linux server all before 9:00am. Now if I could just get through rush hour traffic. I still need to drive from St. Paul to Monticello and toss all of our gear in the pickup and tie on the canoe. Currently, I am two hours ahead of schedule.

After making just over 100 stops to pickup last minute items and complete final chores I made it to Ely just after 5:00. I had to pick up our permits, buy food and pickup a solo canoe for my brother who will be leaving our 3-man group a day early. I met Jenny at the Spirit of the Wilderness Outfitters who amazed with her "yeah we can just stack the solo right on top of your canoe" statement. Sure enough, by the time I left I had two canoes stacked on my truck. She didn’t even laugh at my canoe rack! I wish that I would have thought to take a picture of the odd rigging.

I got my Ely Steakhouse beer just before 7:00. After the ale was on the bar, I called my brother to check on their progress. They had just left Coon Rapids; which left me plenty of time to finish the beer and get a nap in at the cabin. Just after I put down the phone, Will Steger pulled up a chair next to me at the bar. He asked how I was doing, I said great and then I explained that I had met him a long time ago at a Perkins. After a few more words about his visit to Ely (he is living in Minneapolis for a year) I left to take care of a few more loose ends. I would have loved to spend the evening talking about all of his adventures while drinking Summit, but I got the impression that his stories had been told plenty of times for his taste. I was very happy to have met him again; I have always admired his accomplishments.

After spending most of the rest of my money in Ely, I drove out to Farm Lake where my father has started building a cabin. I unpacked the food and repacked into ice and then put it onto our old, but sturdy pontoon and headed across the lake. I arrived at the cabin to find in good shape. I flipped open the futon and took a nap trying to kill some time. I was awakened by my cell phone again. It will be nice to be able to shut it off for the next couple of days. Now that I was fully awake again and still waiting to hear from my brother and my long time partner in crime-Brent, I decided to drive down to the Wood Lake entry point and check it out as our little group was still uncertain as to where we would spend the night. On the way, I saw a bear leaving the road and heading into the woods. It had been a long time since I have seen one. I made a quick survey of the parking lot and decided that if we wanted to, we could catch a few winks there if we needed to.

I met my two companions at a bar in Ely around 10:00. We discussed our trip and eventually decided to stay at the cabin instead of the EP. That was probably a good decision, as we were pretty comfortable.

We slept in the truck on a couple of the kids sleeping pads the night before our entry so that we can get an early start. It's something I like to do since I rarely sleep much the night before a trip, but it was a first for my wife and she seemed to get more sleep than I did, so it worked out well. With that said, a huge storm barreled through in the middle of the night in multiple waves of torrential rainfall, lightning and thunder. I was really happy not to be out in a tent for that one.

The storm from last night left us with a wet morning. We woke, pulled the canoe and gear off/out of the truck and Sara took the truck and drove over to the Moose River EP to drop it off and bike back. While she did that I started the 480 rod portage with the gear hoping to be almost done by the time she got back. Well, the trail was really sloppy from all the rain, but nothing too bad at all until I got down to where you cross the stream that's located just below a beaver pond. In all the trip reports I've read, this stream is supposed to be something you can easily cross when the water's low and one that you can walk across some downed birch trees when the water's high, but today this stream was a raging rapids. I stared at it for a few minutes looking left and right to see if there was another way around because the stream was running so hard that the two small trees laid across were practically under the rushing water. I'm not sure if the pond above this area had a beaver dam that gave way from all of the rain from last night, or if it was just raging from the rainfall and high water levels in general, but I didn't know how we would get across. I looked for spots to maybe float the canoe across with gear, but there was only one possible spot for that and we'd still need someone on the other side to make it happen.

I started back for the last packs and about a 1/4 mile up the trail I ran into my wife, double packing it with the food pack and small backpack. This was the first of many indicators I had on this trip of how much of a badass my wife is in the wilderness. I took that backpack from her and explained the predicament ahead and we hiked to the "raging creek" together. Once we got there, she assessed the situation like I did and came to the same conclusion... someone has to get across. So she threw on her pfd and proceeded to cross the downed trees through the raging rapids. I watched with a degree of nervousness as her boots dipped below the strong current as the trees tried to support her and the current at the same time, but she kept on moving and made it across without incident and said, "it's not bad at all". So I through on the food pack and started across, but with my weight and the weight of the pack the branches sank down deeper in the rapids, I made it across, but going back would be even tougher. Sara decided she'd do it again, but this time the current got her and she fell about halfway in, soaked, but not pinned or anything, she climbed out and we decided to float the canoe across with the resort of the gear a few feet upstream away from the rocks. We angled the Northstar so the bow was pointing at an angle and I stood upstream farther from Sara and she was able to shove the boat across to me and we got everything across. Now Sara had to cross the rapids for the third time and she made it without incident. The rest of the portage was a walk in the park and we were able to put in early at Swamp Creek because the water was so high. This cut out the last 30-40 rods of portaging. The Stuart River is gorgeous. It's wide open immediately and you can see for quite a ways around you, which is much different than the Moose River EP and I appreciated it immensely. We were so excited to be on the river heading towards Stuart Lake. Even though the "raging creek" set us back about an hour, it was still only 8ish by the time were were paddling so I knew we had lots of the day left to enjoy ourselves. The rest of the portages along the way were easy and we only had to carrry down one beaver dam before we got the the last portage into Stuart Lake. The time was only 11:30 and we were almost to our destination for the day. We crossed the portage into Stuart and it is a thing of beauty, paddling a river all day and being greeted by a vast lake, with a majestic waterfall at your side is my idea of a vacation. We hung around the bottom of the falls taking some pics and resting a bit before we headed out to find a campsite. Note: there was a nice looking medium action spinning combo just sitting at the bottom of the portage that someone must have left there, we left it thinking that person would be back. Hopefully they came back for their gear. I had read great stuff about the NW campsite so we started paddling and planned on checking the island site on our way by because I'd heard good stuff about that site too. The island was empty, but we paddled on and the NW site was occupied so we headed back to the island. Sara loved this site and so did I, the bugs weren't bad because we had a strange easterly wind today blowing right into camp. We lounged around and I fished from shore for the rest of the afternoon and we had campfire pizza for dinner. It was awesome. A great end to a great day.