Saturday, October 04, 2014

Around 1:00am I made a little trip outside the tent to take care of some business and lo and behold it was snowing! Small little flakes, but they were just a sign of what was to come this day... We arose in the morning to find the wind still a blowin' and the drizzle/snow still a fallin'. We struggled through the chores of morning making a breakfast of sausage and pancakes. The wind was so bad that as I neared the completion of the first pancake, the wind decided to deposit it on my lap. We quickly moved to the tarp that sheltered our secondary kitchen area.

After we cleaned up breakfast, we called a meeting to see what in the world we were going to do this day. We entertained the idea of just leaving today. The weather was already bad. We thought about just hunkering down in camp all day. And, we also thought about journeying down to Gadwall Lake to chase some more of those delicious/beautiful brook trout. We chose fish! We just couldn't see ourselves bailing on this trip early... We hyped ourselves up got more dressed than we already were and headed out. We hugged the shoreline for the mile or so we had to travel to get to the portage. We knew the Gadwall Lake portage was much longer, so again we walked it with our gear first. The first portion of the portage was through the muckiest, wettest swamp you could imagine. THEN, the traverse straight up the mountain happened. When we finally got to the top, I told my buddy there was no way we where bringing the canoe up today.
We did not want to chance getting very muddy and wet on our last day there, when we knew that last night was going to be a cold one. We had all of our gear up, so we just decided to do some shore fishing.
We were about 20 minutes into our fishing, when it started snowing like crazy!
We toughed it out and soon it stopped again. I then made my way up the northern shoreline. Soon after that, I heard movement in the brush up ahead of me. I initially thought that it was my buddy just sneaking in front of me to fish. Then a gigantic bear head popped out of the brush and was scanning the lake. As its head turned my way, I jumped back into the underbrush. As I moved back, I saw the body of the bear... All six feet of it! I quickly made my way down the trail, whisper-yelling at my buddy that we had to go! He finally heard me as I got to the place we had set down our gear. Of course it was spread all over the ground. I kept glancing back over my shoulder, as this bear had only been about 25 yards from me. It seemed like forever until my buddy finally joined me and we quickly made tracks down the portage. About halfway down the hill we heard movement above us on the hill and I knew the bear was trying to figure out what we were. We got to the boggy swamp and started to delicateley make our way across it. My buddy missed a step and sunk down to his knee in the mud and muck! As he pulled his leg out, the unthinkable happened! His boot stayed behind in the muck hole! I slammed the paddle down to try and get under it and he reached his hand down the hole now filling with water and mud. He got his boot back and kinda just looked at it. I told him to put the darn thing on and at that moment we heard more branches breaking and brush moving. We had to keep moving! We FINALLY got back to the lake only to find the waves were now gigantic and we were going to be paddling right into them! It took us what seemed like an eternity to get back to camp. We headed for refuge in the tent. We were now defeated. That was the last fishing we did on the trip... We game planned to leave the next morning at sunrise. We had plenty of time the rest of the day to prepare camp for the early departure. Dinner was soup and rice. Bedtime was very early.