Wednesday, August 26, 2020 Oh yeah the weather was on the way. And now at 2 AM it’s here. Started with some light rain falling on my shelter. Then moves to full thunder and lightning until about 4. We wake up early to full cloudy skies and occasional drizzle. Three of us pack everything up while Bill cooks breakfast. We eat and get out on the water by 8:30 with a slightly clearing sky. We are headed back towards our tow out tomorrow at Indian Portage. Figuring that we will find a nice camp sometime after we do the first long Big Knife portage away from knife lake. We get through that and the next two short one okay and head on Carp Lake. Then Steve sees his glasses aren’t there and has to return to the portage. The sites on Carp are occupied so we head to the portage to Birch lake. It’s 40 rods which is a pretty good hike. We see some yahoos leaving the portage. The guy in front is lighting his pipe instead of looking for rocks and DONK, center punches one. Turns out this is the lead of a group of 14. Though the guy at the other end says it’s actually two groups that are splitting up the next day. The group is mixed with old and young. Mostly older and they have a ton of crap! Besides having a mix of canoes, One of them looks like an old green Coleman with a full metal frame. And one or two were wearing Crocks. They looked totally beat and it was only the first portage. I wonder haw many of them knew of the 70 rod portage coming up. At least it looked like they had a lot of Canadian Mist to drink that night We head out onto Birch lake an look for campsites. The first five star camps look occupied and we don’t check out the others too closely as it is still early in the day. So we continue on and notice that there are NO vacant campsites now. Labor day weekend is almost here and the crowds are on the way! We have to go around the corner from the portage to the west end of Birch to find a nice campsite. The weather has turned beautiful again and we settle into a very nice site #1288. I found a flat spot between two trees and set up my lean to with a full view of the lake. We got all our stuff set up and went for a swim. As we had every day on this trip. Then tried some more shore fishing with no bites. There were plenty of trails around the camp so we went into the woods and found some firewood. Next trip we will collect wood away from camp during the day as I have since read on this forum. We had our last dinner out in the wilderness and relaxed by the fire.