Thursday, June 18, 2020

Woke up around 5 a.m. and decided to make myself a cup of coffee before we headed into the Boundary Waters. I had my MSR Pocket Rocket with, so it was a breeze.

We quickly packed up at the camper cabin, and were on the lake before no time. We officially hit the water at 6:45 a.m.

It was a decent paddle through East Bearskin, and through to Alder. The portage between East Bearskin and Alder was a cake walk! Nice pine needles to walk on, it was easy as a State Park trail. Mini_MN (henceforth known as simply "MNy") upgraded to a CCS Rucksack and was super happy to have room to carry essentials such as a sleep mask, a few books, and a stuffed animal! She also carried her own sleeping bag/mat, TP and the first aid kit!

While paddling on Alder we noticed EVERY campsite was full. We were aiming for site 708, but there was someone on it. It looked as though they might be packing up, but just before we asked they disappeared into the woods. We waited for a while in the bay but they didn't reappear, so we paddled across to campsite 706, but that was taken as well.

On to Canoe! Both western campsites were full, as we paddled down towards Pine/Crystal a family was leaving the easternmost campsite and they said it was free. We were relieved until we pulled up to the site. It was nothing to write home about and left us all a little depressed. We didn't feel like carrying all our gear over the pine/caribou portage, and I didn't read good things about the sites over on Crystal.

We pulled up on the shore of the eastern site of Canoe just to be sure before we gave up a free campsite. It was definitely not good for hammock camping, so we were about to get back into the canoe when we noticed the fire grate was still warm, and the coals still burning. We got out our cups and doused the fire, and stirred up the pit to ensure that it was all out. It might have been fine, but we refused to learn later that a fire had broken out and we could have prevented it.

We headed back to Alder to check out the 708 4/5 star site with a plan to head east towards Pirez if it was full. I prayed the whole time, and WALA, it was FREE! It was PERFECT for hammock camping. It had a great gravel shoreline and was shallow, great for swimming.

After lazily setting up camp, we headed to one of the bays to do a little fishing. We enjoyed fishing with a loon and beaver friend and pretended we had a podcast called Mny Mic giving play-by-plays of our fishing.

We caught a few smallies, a few keepers, but we threw them all back.

Tonight for dinner we had spaghetti and sausage.

Washing dishes was a BEAST with the mosquitos! MNy was helping me, and I told her at one point to just run back to the fire grate with dad, but she wanted to make sure I was okay... we had a small fire before retiring to our hammocks for the night.

Slept a bit fitfully again, but I usually do on the first night in the woods. Began to rain and was glad Mr.MN tinkered with my tarp, as we were all dry throughout the night.