We met Denise at the EP as she was dropping off our canoe and headed into the wilderness. The first portage into Stuart River is long but not extremely technical or challenging. We took turns carrying the canoe, trying not to overdo it on the first portage. I had read a bit about this portage and the beaver dam about ¾ of the way into the portage is everything everyone says it is. Trust the experts and don’t get into your boat when you first see the River. We thought we’d paddle down and check it out to see if we could get through, but it was a complete waste of time.

We had to pull over 4 beaver dams, navigate a few boulder fields that had really tight squeezes, but overall the river was a nice paddle. We did notice on the trip back, the second to last portage was a bit tough to find as it’s quite a ways up the river before the rock field and we weren’t looking for it yet. It was a mucky mess.

We reached Stuart Lake around 1:00. I had not seen anything about the small set of falls on the west side of the portage but that was a beautiful surprise as we entered Stuart Lake. We found the island site empty so we set up camp there that afternoon. After a short break to enjoy the lake, 2 of us hopped into the canoe and promptly caught three nice walleye for dinner. I also lost a 36” pike (silly mistake not having a leader on), which was a bit of a bummer but that’s fishing. We had a nice Walleye dinner to supplement our dehydrated chili. We had a small fire that night as there was no wind so we felt okay about using it to cook and eat around it. I was debuting my new Amok Hammock setup on this trip and was surprised to see it took about an hour to set up.