We launch on Burntside Lake at 9:00 am. An hour later we arrive at the portage. It takes us close to two and a half hours to double portage. I carry a light pack with the canoe. Brenda carries the food pack and fishing poles and then we each carry another pack on the two trips as we leap-frog the portage. The water levels in the middle of the portage have changed because of beaver activity. We reload the canoe and float across it. We get to campsite 310 at around 12:45. We have lunch and talk it over. Do we want to push on for Silica Lake today or wait? I know that if we wait, I won’t want to move tomorrow, so do we spend 2 nights here? Since we where not in a hurry, we decided to wait. Brenda catches her biggest smallmouth bass of the trip that night.

The adventure to get to Silica Lake begins. It was supposed to be a rainy morning, so we were not in a hurry to break camp. We leave around noon and it really starts to rain while we are on the portage to Little Crab Lake. We wait for the rain to pass and then continue. We easily travel to the creek that breaks off the Korb River to go to Silica Lake. It’s very clear to us that we may not make it to our destination fully loaded with gear. There are dead lily pads and exposed creek bottom. The water is low and there are at least five challenging places to get through. The worst was a tree we had to get over. It was slightly submerged but we couldn’t float over it. Brenda got out and balanced on the tree, I then gunnel walked to the front of the canoe and got out and balanced on the other side of canoe on the tree. We then had to pull the canoe over and then get back into the canoe. Thankfully we didn’t fall into the muck and made it through. We came up to a beaver dam and I told Brenda, “If we can’t portage from here, I don’t think we can make it.” Luckily, we could portage. Thankfully, no one was camping at Silica Lake and we liked the campsite enough to not explore the Coxey Pond campsite. In the evening, we decided to go fishing because the lake was calm. We caught some really nice sized bluegill.

We travel to Coxey Pond and there is a significant dead fall right on the path. There is no good path around it, so we just crash through. We explore the campsite and we are glad we chose the Silica Lake campsite. The wind was fairly consistent so we fish the east shoreline of the big bay and we catch some smaller smallmouth bass. On the way back we take the time to clear the dead fall. This portage area is loaded with blueberry plants, but we are too late in the season.