We woke up to our daily 7 am alarm that Claire’s dad loaned/gave us that he used to use on his trips as a pilot. It was old but was very small and worked well. We were up and out of the tent by 8 or a little before. We hit the water right at 9 after taking a little time to get some pictures. There was a strong wind out of the east as the weather radio predicted. It was a very easy paddle to the first of our last three portages. 

Before the trip I had thought there was no way I would want to spend our last night that south on Fourtown. For one I thought we would have trouble getting a site, and two, I thought it would too busy being closer to the entry point. It was nice though to not have to paddle a lot of Fourtown in the wind, and other than the loudish group across the way it wasn’t very busy. 

As we enjoyed our last few minutes of our third ever trip, we saw a lone guy sitting on the north shore of Mudro all by himself. He had what looked like a canoe pack, not a hiking pack, but we didn’t see a canoe. It was odd and almost as if he was left there by someone. He seemed content however so we didn’t bother him. We wound our way back through the narrows and were off the water at 10:40 and in Ely right around noon. 

We picked up a coffee and a wrap at Front Porch and headed to the Steger store. After stopping at a few other shops, we made our way out of town around 1:00 just as a nasty system was rolling in. We arrived in Two Harbors at 2:15. We had wanted to order a pizza before we got to town so we wouldn’t have to wait a long time, but we didn’t have cell service until we were basically in town. 

After getting our beers at Castle Danger we were finally able to order our pizza. Turns out they didn’t open until 4! There goes that plan. We each had a beer and then shared one more. We ran into a gal my mom knew and some of her friends and got stuck chatting for 20 minutes. Then as we were about to leave, the table behind them heard where we were from and knew my parents too! We were finally on the road about 3:30. 

We can’t drive by Knife River without stopping at Russ Kendall’s to get some smoked fish for my dad. There was a big storm near our house on Sunday so he drove the 2-½ hour round trip to make sure nothing bad happened. He said he saw boats a few miles away from our house that were blown off their trailer. Luckily we only had some small branches down in our yard. Even though we were starving we couldn’t decide on food and ended up waiting until Duluth to get sandwiches at Northern Waters Smokehaus. We were finally back on the road again around 4:30-4:45. Claire’s parents were nice enough to deliver our 2-½ year old and the dogs to our house to save us another 2+ hours of driving.

~Fourtown Lake, Mudro Lake