Again an early start (7:30) for which I am grateful. We came through Smoke Lake and as we entered Burnt Lake we took the elevated site on the right. We were in by 10:30 and so glad we found something. The lake was filling fast or already filled as we found out later. There was a huge elevated area surrounding the fire grate so we settled in comfortably. Josh took out the weather radio to catch up on the latest forecast and we found we were in for some potentially dangerous storms that evening. We strung a couple of tarps together, covered the fire pit well enough, and battened down the hatches. As the afternoon wore on it was breezy/windy and cool but the back side of our site was protected and gave us a place to jump off rocks into the lake and have a great time. Terry and I explored into Flame Lake and found it to be a beautiful little spot. As we came back to Burnt Lake we found the wind was stronger and some whitecaps were forming. Dark clouds were looming to the west.

We sat down to supper around 6:00 and were met with a shout from the north side of the camp. An older gent with a young man in the front of his canoe was there with another canoe filled with young women. He was checking for an open site quite late with a nasty looking storm bearing down on us. When he found this site taken he told us he’d take the site by the Flame Lake portage but Terry and I found no site there even though it showed one on his map. By this time the weather was getting darker and much windier. We tried to catch their attention to let them share our camp but they couldn’t hear us and didn’t look our way as they went past us at a distance and headed north up into the end of the lake. They never came back around for us to see again so we figure they either found someplace to hole up or someone let them into their site. We talked about this for some time wondering if we should have offered to let them in right away. Anyway it bothered us to find someone put themselves, and us, in that kind of situation. The guy was astonished to find out we’d been there since 10:30 and seemed less than realistic by showing up so late in the day to try and find a site.

We sat on the north side of our peninsula and watched a steady string of ugly looking clouds and lightning stream past us to the north. I ended up moving my tent because I didn’t like the looks of some dead trees but it was unnecessary since we only got some wind but mostly rain for the rest of the night. Before going to bed we took down our tarps and packed as much as we could anticipating a 6:00 departure the next morning.