Now most of my friends are not early risers, but a super long drive home always seems to be the factor that makes people get up early. I got up and ate a few bowls of granola, milk and berries while downing some coffee and watching folks pack up.

The water was calm as we headed out and the portage landing area was really small, and easy to overlook in the fog. It went up, flat and then descended to the water on the other side, a fairly unremarkable portage and nobody got wet :)

The maps we used were McKenzie maps and afterwards I learned from our proprietor that the creator of the maps never visited this region of the BWCA, so his notation of campsites and portages can be off at times. Well, for the next EP/portage it's off, by a good margin.

According to our maps the EP/portage on Bearskin to Hungry Jack is directly south of the point, which is directly south of the portage we just came across. Well, adding to the confusion is a dock and a few spot that look like the portage slightly to the east. However, the true location of the portage is to the west of that point, and it took us a bit to finally go that direction, because I was treating the map as truth. Before doing that we first hit the dock, at which point my friend from the other canoe went to go check and only found a dirt road, so I got out to check myself. Well, I could have chose to run east or west down the road and I chose poorly by running east, because apparently running west 150' would have brought me to the EP parking lot and the obvious portage :(. Well, I ran for a while, saw a fox and finally turned around when I hit a sign for a YMCA camp, Camp Menogyn. This finally led me to the parking lot and then back to my friends to direct them to the real portage.

Once there it was one of those annoyingly short portages and then towards finding the boat landing for our outfitter on Hungry Jack, which was a little harder than it should have been, but with it being a popular lake we had to get pretty close to the landing before finally seeing a sign.

Safe and sound back at our outfitter we packed up, retrieved our car, showered and said our goodbyes. It was a fun trip with perfect weather, low bugs, some challenging work, but nothing I wouldn't do again.

~Duncan Lake, Bearskin Lake, Hungry Jack Lake