Sawbill to Lake One, Across the Center of the BWCA
by TominMpls
Trip Type:
Paddling Canoe
Entry Date:
07/02/2018
Entry Point:
Sawbill Lake (EP 38)
Exit Point:
Lake One (EP 30)
Number of Days:
7
Group Size:
2
Discuss Trip:
View Discussion Thread (13 messages)
Part 6 of 9
Thursday, July 5 - Day Four
I'd been looking forward to Thursday's paddle when I was planning the trip - a day with very few portages, wide-open stretches of the Kawishiwi River, but not much big water would be quite different from any BWCA travel I'd done in years. Add to it the way Wednesday's storm had killed the humidity, and I was expecting a beautiful, relaxing day of paddling. So we woke up pretty early and immediately saw that in fact, it was a beautiful, clear, low-humidity day. We fixed hashbrowns, bacon, and eggs with our morning coffee, took a leisurely time doing dishes and packing up our gear, and got on the water at 9:45.
One short portage right away took us off Malberg and onto the Kawishiwi River. This portage was noted by many as muddy, but even with the previous day's rain, we found it to be fine, with no big issues. The paddle down the Kawishiwi went extremely quickly, and was absolutely as beautiful as I'd hoped:
We saw lots of ducks, loons, and other birds, and I'm pretty sure we saw an otter. It was a gorgeous, sunny day with a wind mostly blowing from the west, and we reached the portage to Alice a little less than two hours and almost five miles after leaving our site. M has little experience on big water - as noted before, she and I both prefer lots of portaging, so we tend not to paddle lots of big water - and the wind was picking up as the day went on. She was nervous about the big water ahead, and asked that we skip the pictos on Fishdance to get on with crossing the big water before it got much later. So we took the two portages to Alice, which were easy and uneventful.
The wind on Alice was substantial and coming from WNW; the entrance to Alice pointed straight into the wind and so we were perfectly at a leeward point as we came off the portage, which exaggerated the sense of the wind. I could tell that we didn't have anything to worry about, but M was nervous about the relatively big waves and strong wind. M is a *very* strong paddler when she wants to be, and from my GPS devices I could tell we were paddling at almost 4 mph into the headwind as she dug in to get across it as fast as possible; since we were heading to Insula we only barely even went on to Alice, and we were only out of protection from the wind for about twelve minutes. With the wind blocked by land as we headed back down the Kawishiwi away from Alice, we only picked up speed, which was fun.
Much to my surprise, it was on the stretch of the Kawishiwi heading northwest toward Insula from Alice that we started encountering large rookie groups of paddlers - and not just one, but three. This seems much too deep in the Boundary Waters for such groups to be, but there they were, in their aluminum canoes, making a ton of noise and not steering very well against the wind. The first group was surprising, after almost four days of near-solitude, but the second so soon after was really a shock. The third group, with four canoes and nine people, were tucked against the shore with three canoes drifting, unmanned and untethered, precariously close to a place where the wind would catch them, and it was because all nine people were in the water or on the shore dealing with the fourth canoe, which had been flipped. They didn't seem to be having a very good day, but they didn't want assistance and so we paddled on.
Shortly after leaving Alice M had suggested that we take one of the sites just north of the narrow channel that leads on to the main body of Insula, as our goal for the day had just been to reach the start of Insula and the wind was picking up substantially. So we passed site 1160, which turned out to be taken anyway, and made our way to site 1322 just at the mouth of the channel, and took it. It was just about 1:30 in the afternoon and we'd paddled 9.5 beautiful miles, but with the wind picking up I was just as happy that we were stopping for the day.
The main part of the site, though beautiful, was very windy, and so we set up our bug shelter to provide some wind blocking and we set up camp. We discovered later in the afternoon that back along the latrine trail, the site had very open wooded areas stretching back away from the fire grate, which were too tight for a tent but provided some nice spots away from the wind.
As the day progressed, we watched many more paddlers going by our site, both eastward and westward, which was really strange to us after having been in near-total solitude up to this day. Several groups verbally expressed disappointment that our site was already taken, and we saw a few rookie groups in aluminum canoes head off toward the main body of Insula as late as 4 in the afternoon, when the wind was at its absolute strongest. I hadn't been on the number chain lakes in fifteen years and had forgotten how busy they are, but even at that I didn't expect that the heavy number chain traffic extended all the way to the far end of Insula. We definitely crossed into a very different zone of the Boundary Waters somewhere between Malberg and Alice on the Kawishiwi.
My meal plan worked well with this day, as mac and cheese made a quick lunch that gave us plenty of time to relax before the more-involved dinner preparation of chili and biscuits. Again we played lots of cards, read a bit, and watched the paddlers go by. Considering today's high winds - which were pleasant at the site but would be less pleasant paddling across Insula - we decided to just get up and go in the morning, waiting to have breakfast until we reached the far side of Insula. So we made it a fairly early night.
~Malberg Lake, Alice Lake, Insula, Lake
I'd been looking forward to Thursday's paddle when I was planning the trip - a day with very few portages, wide-open stretches of the Kawishiwi River, but not much big water would be quite different from any BWCA travel I'd done in years. Add to it the way Wednesday's storm had killed the humidity, and I was expecting a beautiful, relaxing day of paddling. So we woke up pretty early and immediately saw that in fact, it was a beautiful, clear, low-humidity day. We fixed hashbrowns, bacon, and eggs with our morning coffee, took a leisurely time doing dishes and packing up our gear, and got on the water at 9:45.
One short portage right away took us off Malberg and onto the Kawishiwi River. This portage was noted by many as muddy, but even with the previous day's rain, we found it to be fine, with no big issues. The paddle down the Kawishiwi went extremely quickly, and was absolutely as beautiful as I'd hoped:
We saw lots of ducks, loons, and other birds, and I'm pretty sure we saw an otter. It was a gorgeous, sunny day with a wind mostly blowing from the west, and we reached the portage to Alice a little less than two hours and almost five miles after leaving our site. M has little experience on big water - as noted before, she and I both prefer lots of portaging, so we tend not to paddle lots of big water - and the wind was picking up as the day went on. She was nervous about the big water ahead, and asked that we skip the pictos on Fishdance to get on with crossing the big water before it got much later. So we took the two portages to Alice, which were easy and uneventful.
The wind on Alice was substantial and coming from WNW; the entrance to Alice pointed straight into the wind and so we were perfectly at a leeward point as we came off the portage, which exaggerated the sense of the wind. I could tell that we didn't have anything to worry about, but M was nervous about the relatively big waves and strong wind. M is a *very* strong paddler when she wants to be, and from my GPS devices I could tell we were paddling at almost 4 mph into the headwind as she dug in to get across it as fast as possible; since we were heading to Insula we only barely even went on to Alice, and we were only out of protection from the wind for about twelve minutes. With the wind blocked by land as we headed back down the Kawishiwi away from Alice, we only picked up speed, which was fun.
Much to my surprise, it was on the stretch of the Kawishiwi heading northwest toward Insula from Alice that we started encountering large rookie groups of paddlers - and not just one, but three. This seems much too deep in the Boundary Waters for such groups to be, but there they were, in their aluminum canoes, making a ton of noise and not steering very well against the wind. The first group was surprising, after almost four days of near-solitude, but the second so soon after was really a shock. The third group, with four canoes and nine people, were tucked against the shore with three canoes drifting, unmanned and untethered, precariously close to a place where the wind would catch them, and it was because all nine people were in the water or on the shore dealing with the fourth canoe, which had been flipped. They didn't seem to be having a very good day, but they didn't want assistance and so we paddled on.
Shortly after leaving Alice M had suggested that we take one of the sites just north of the narrow channel that leads on to the main body of Insula, as our goal for the day had just been to reach the start of Insula and the wind was picking up substantially. So we passed site 1160, which turned out to be taken anyway, and made our way to site 1322 just at the mouth of the channel, and took it. It was just about 1:30 in the afternoon and we'd paddled 9.5 beautiful miles, but with the wind picking up I was just as happy that we were stopping for the day.
The main part of the site, though beautiful, was very windy, and so we set up our bug shelter to provide some wind blocking and we set up camp. We discovered later in the afternoon that back along the latrine trail, the site had very open wooded areas stretching back away from the fire grate, which were too tight for a tent but provided some nice spots away from the wind.
As the day progressed, we watched many more paddlers going by our site, both eastward and westward, which was really strange to us after having been in near-total solitude up to this day. Several groups verbally expressed disappointment that our site was already taken, and we saw a few rookie groups in aluminum canoes head off toward the main body of Insula as late as 4 in the afternoon, when the wind was at its absolute strongest. I hadn't been on the number chain lakes in fifteen years and had forgotten how busy they are, but even at that I didn't expect that the heavy number chain traffic extended all the way to the far end of Insula. We definitely crossed into a very different zone of the Boundary Waters somewhere between Malberg and Alice on the Kawishiwi.
My meal plan worked well with this day, as mac and cheese made a quick lunch that gave us plenty of time to relax before the more-involved dinner preparation of chili and biscuits. Again we played lots of cards, read a bit, and watched the paddlers go by. Considering today's high winds - which were pleasant at the site but would be less pleasant paddling across Insula - we decided to just get up and go in the morning, waiting to have breakfast until we reached the far side of Insula. So we made it a fairly early night.
~Malberg Lake, Alice Lake, Insula, Lake
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