Tuesday, June 06, 2023
Morning of day four. I was wishing I had taken more photos, but I kept the phone in a ziploc bag inside the breast pocket of my PFD, and when paddling it was a multi-step process to get it out for a photo. Make sure I'm stable, not being blown by the wind. Stow the paddle safety. Unsnap the pocket, fish out the phone, get it out of the bag and tuck that securely so it won't blow away. Take a photo. Reverse all those steps, being cautious not to drop. It was used primarily for photos, but also for the Earthmate app, which I used to interact with the Garmin inreach on my PFD without having to fiddle with the user-unfriendly interface. If I dropped the phone, I'd have been pretty reasonably upset. But it wasn't essential for navigation, just the tertiary backup. Paper maps and compass? Yup. Garmin GPS? Definitely. Phone? That's just there for pictures and easier messaging.
On to the Kek ponds. I had been told they had the clearest water in the BWCA, and that wasn't wrong. It felt like I could see ten feet straight down. I wish I had taken more pictures here, but my goal this day was Kekekabic, the ponds, a detour to look at Eddy Falls, then through Eddy, Jenny, Annie and onto Ogishkemuncie to end the day. I got to Eddy, and at this point remembered to start taking higher-resolution photos; I don't know if they'll show up huge here but they're detailed as heck.
On Eddy Lake I turned west to head to the portage by the falls. This was a mistake. It was the first time the wind was at my back, which felt great, but it also meant that I'd unnecessarily have to paddle back into the wind... and by now I was exceedingly sore, not just from the day's effort, but from everything compounding. I took a picture from the top of the falls, but also, had no desire to try to get a better one. Other people have good photos looking up from the base of the falls. Some other trip I'll portage downhill just to see that point of view and then slog uphill again.
At this point the Garmin chirped, and I looked to see a message from my friend who'd meet me at Trail's End. I gave him the link to follow me, so he'd know in advance before he got to the campsite if I was coming or not. He'd have no cell service there, and so the plan was that if he arrived and I wasn't there yet, once a day he'd drive down the Gunflint Trail until he got service to see if he had a message from me, but he hadn't yet driven up and was just following my progress. His message? "Dude, you're going the wrong way!"
Eddy Lake to Jenny Lake, and ... another deadfall right there across the path. It's not a new one; you can see how some of the limbs have been trimmed off, and you can get past this if you try hard enough. And you can; if you're five feet tall you can walk under that without issue, but if you're over six feet and have a canoe on your shoulders ... you just have to try harder.
Through Jenny to Annie, through Annie to Ogishkemuncie. The winds were strong out of the east, and the lake was beginning to whitecap, and there were only a few sites on the west side of the lake (which also runs about 3.5 miles southwest to northeast). More discouragement here; should I go back two lakes? There were sites on Jenny; I knew I could get one of them, and I knew those lakes were more sheltered by the wind, but backtracking to any degree also felt like failure. There were two island sites very near the portage, surely one of them would be open.
Not the first. I paddled out to it, rounded the corner, and swore loudly when I saw a tent already there. The second was clear, though, and after I set up camp and crashed in a hammock for a while, while seeing what bird calls were around me. Common loon, ovenbird, northern waterthrush, black-throated green warbler, white-throated sparrow, Nashville warbler, blue jay, red-eyed vireo, northern parula, Canada warbler, ruby-crowned kinglet, yellow-rumped warbler, Philadelphia vireo, American robin. Nice to end on a simple one I know I can recognize.
Daily distance: 8.1 miles, 6.2 paddling, 1.9 portaging. Total 45.9 (33.8/12.1).