Miles traveled: 7.7 Portages: 2 (120 rods)

We awake and gather up our things, arriving at Ray and Sue’s cabin door about 8:10, the appointed hour for breakfast. Sue prepares a fantastic feast to send us off: bacon and eggs and wonderful blueberry muffins, and a really unique orange-flavored coffee.

We get everything packed up and start off for Ely again. For awhile I think we will just be spending our vacation at Camp Lake a few miles west of Ely, as it takes us three tries to get the big old Ford and trailer up one of the interesting slopes on the gravel road. Finally we make it out to the highway, and after a quick stop at Zup’s for our steak and oranges we are on our way to Fall Lake.

[IMG]http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af153/LyndaLu17/Canoe%20Trip%201985%20%20Fall%20Lake-Basswood%20Lake/1985Maprelg.jpg[/IMG] [Pink outlining is for 1985 trip, blue lines are for other canoe trips.]

There is a new Forest Service campground at Fall Lake that seems to be very nice. We park the car, portage the gear and the canoe to the landing, take advantage of the opportunity for a “flushie” (the last for nine days!) and push off at 10:30 A. M. After a beautiful sunrise the sky is clouding up and looks threatening, and there is quite a wind. We encounter very heavy chop as we try to go around the point of the big island and I am scared! Unreasonable as it might seem (we have certainly been in worse!) I like to have at least a few minutes of nice calm canoeing to get my “sea legs” before the wild stuff starts! Neil calms me down by mentioning that we are really making some progress in spite of what it looks like to me. We ferry on the waves and round the point, making a tricky turn to begin heading downwind, and in awhile I am feeling more comfortable.

The portage around the man-made dam into Newton Lake is “improved” to be accessible for powerboats. It is a super-highway!

We have much wind assist as we paddle up Newton Lake and also in Pipestone Bay. The portage into Pipestone is at Pipestone Falls. They aren’t all that impressive.

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We camp about 2:30 on Pipestone, at the point west of the entrance to the small pond which leads to the portage to Jackfish Bay. It is windy and cool. This is a very open campsite, with lots of “widow-makers” to creak and groan. It isn’t a particularly pretty one, but I am tired enough and glad we stopped.

Supper is early this afternoon. It is our traditional one: steak, hash browns, fresh oranges and hot chocolate. We have also brought a few marshmallows to roast and they taste good. There are some boys from a nearby campsite out in the woods knocking down dead trees and Neil goes out to investigate.

We have decided to boil our water on the more heavily traveled lakes this time (or when there is a lot of evidence of beavers) so we start getting into the routine of boiling and cooling it. We have two water bottles and one canteen, can easily carry enough until tomorrow’s camp.

I had an unfortunate accident during the car trip to Minnesota when I spilled some boiling hot coffee on my leg (upper thigh, wearing polyester stretch pants) and I now have a fairly large burned area that is of some concern. It has a rather nasty open sore and is painful. I will keep it covered all of the time and try to keep it very clean. It wouldn’t do it get an infection out here! The extra-large Band-Aids that I searched all over Ely to find are obviously old—the glue melts and makes a mess I cannot peel off. Thank goodness for the trusty B-D alcohol swabs! Sometimes it is convenient to be traveling with an insulin-dependent diabetic, I guess.

[2011 NOTE: Unlike our trips these days, we had very little medication with us. No antibiotics, no pain medicine other than a handful of aspirin, no muscle relaxer tablets. Spartan1 had insulin and syringes, and tested his urine sporadically—this was before blood sugar monitoring. Basically figuring out the balance of calories/activity/insulin was guesswork. We had a 17 foot Grumman aluminum canoe, two canvas Duluth packs, a lightweight (orange) nylon external frame backpack that was our food pack. No water filter, and I don’t think we had a stove along. We had a small folding reflector oven, two flashlights, and a candle lantern. My camera was a Yashica Electro35 and I believe this was the first trip that I ever tried 400 speed film. Now back to 1985:]

[IMG]http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af153/LyndaLu17/Canoe%20Trip%201985%20%20Fall%20Lake-Basswood%20Lake/1stcampsitePipestone.jpg[/IMG]

The weather is cool; the sky looks alternatively threatening and blue. It is very windy on Pipestone Bay!

15.5 miles 1 portage (140 rods)

We were up early and on the water by 7:00. It is raining and cold and windy, we are wet, and we have had a cold breakfast. This isn’t much fun right now! We paddle to the portage at Curtain Falls. The falls are large and powerful and sound like a railroad train. I hadn’t remembered them as impressive as they are. [We had been here in 1980 on another trip] It is a gorgeous spot, but I would like to see it on a nice day; both times I have been here it has been drizzly and with a gray sky. It’s a good portage, too, 140 rods, no mud even in bad weather.

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It is really raining now, and I am cold and wet and depressed. We paddle the length of Crooked Lake: Sunday Bay, Saturday Bay, Friday Bay, Thursday Bay—windy, choppy, sometimes heavy waves and whitecaps. At the narrows out of Thursday Bay my teeth are chattering and I am chilled to the bone. When we round the point and see a nice campsite we decide to stop and warm up. It is lovely here, sheltered and pretty, and someone has left dry driftwood for the fire—bless them! Neil makes a great fire and we cook pancakes, Mountain House sausage patties [2011 note: I really wish they still made these, as they were very good], and have lots of coffee and hot chocolate. I take off my slacks and dry them over the fire and that helps me warm up considerably. This may end up being the greatest feeling of the trip—getting warm again! [2011 note: I believe to this day that this is the closest to true hypothermia I have ever experienced, and it was a very good move that we stopped to build that fire when we did. I had a raincoat-style of rain gear that didn’t come down far enough to protect all of my pants, and they had wicked up to make my entire bottom wet and cold. Soon after this trip I bought my first real rain suit with pants.]

On Crooked Lake we saw 2 eagles soaring overhead (or one eagle twice.) There were about four other canoes out today, one had pair of older men whom we saw several times. It wasn’t too bad going, as we rode with the wind and waves. Just the rain and cold made it uncomfortable. It appears to be fall here, the maples are turning red and some of the birches are lightening up towards their fall gold color.

We camped at Table Rock, which is a very old campsite dating back to the Indians and the Voyageurs. It is large, open, and is a nice place. Table Rock is just as its name implies, an enormous table right on the flat rock at the shore. I can just picture the Voyageurs sitting on the warm rock in the evening after a hard day of paddling. Tonight the rock isn’t warm; in fact, there haven’t been any warm rocks for quite awhile!

[IMG]http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af153/LyndaLu17/Canoe%20Trip%201985%20%20Fall%20Lake-Basswood%20Lake/1985TableRock.jpg[/IMG]

[IMG]http://i1003.photobucket.com/albums/af153/LyndaLu17/Canoe%20Trip%201985%20%20Fall%20Lake-Basswood%20Lake/1985CanoeatTableRock.jpg[/IMG]

There is a nice family of ducks who paddle by, also several parties of canoeists wanting to see the rock. I discover that the stupid, bold chipmunk (well. . .maybe it isn’t really so stupid) has eaten into our German’s Sweet Chocolate. This may be war!!

Someone has painted the old birch trees with white paint. Would the Forest Service do that?

The Salisbury steak in the “soft can” is good. We have it with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. We warmed by the fire for a while after supper, then Neil hung the packs in the rain. It just keeps coming! I am feeling the need of a bath and a shampoo desperately and the zipper in the tent isn’t working at all well in the moisture. We are DAMP, DAMP, DAMP!

Friday Day 3 Lakes (Winchell, Gaskin)

What a gorgeous morning, the only day of the trip that didn't include rain. I took some pictures of the sunrise that look pretty good. We decided to make this our rest day and do a little exploring. A little exploring ended up being a good 7-8 miles of paddling with a little bit of portaging tossed in. We investigated some of the water inlets and outlets for Lake Winchell and did a bit of lure wetting. I'd say fishing, but we'd already caught our one fish for the trip on Thursday. "Lure wetting" sets the correct tone for our expectations. 

Late in the afternoon, we decided it was nap time. This was the only day that the hammock was put to use. I'm not quite sure how Chris and his 10 year old son Michael managed to hang his orange hammock in May, but apparently Michael's expertise is required for the feat, because Chris and Joel didn't seem up to the task. Let's just say that the hammock set up time was probably longer than Chris's nap time. I left for the tent to take my nap, Chris prepared for his in the hammock. Not fully confident with the hammock entrance and exit procedures, we set up a series of signals should he require help extricating himself. 

This was one of those gorgeous, peaceful, uneventful days that characterize one of the main reasons we head to the boundary waters area. Uneventful, however, makes for poor story fodder.

Saturday Day 4 Lakes (Winchell, Wanihigan, Grassy, Mulligan, Lily, Brule, Brule Bay, Vernon, Swan)

Repeat after me, wet, cool (I reserve Cold for when it snows), windy, muddy… and that was the trip to the latrine. The trip plan for Saturday was fairly aggressive. So we started the day with cold cereal and broke camp early. Well not as early as I initially tried to send us out. You see, when we went to bed I'd made the statement that we should get going when the sun came up because we had a long way to travel. Chris agreed. Well, I woke up and it had started to get lighter out, so I figured the sun would be up soon. I began to get dressed and rustle about. Chris woke up and asked, "What in the world are you doing?". I told him it was getting lighter out so I thought I'd get up. He graciously informed me that it was the middle of the night and to go back to bed. I stuck my head out the tent door. Sure enough, moon and stars. Bright moon, but still, just moon and stars. There must have been a break in the clouds.  I went back to sleep…

Once the sky did actually get brighter via the sun, we were on our way under a gray sky. As we got to the first portage, it began to rain. It was one of those short portages that follow a small rapids beneath cedar trees. My favorite kind. Well when we got to the other side with our first load, the wind began to blow and it started to rain harder. We decided to put our rain pants on after moving the second load and wait out the heavy rain under the cover of trees. My rain pants slide on quickly. Chris begins to grumble that he can't get his boot through his rain pant leg. Why would they make rain pants that force you to take off your shoes in order to get dressed? So he sits on a rock and carefully removes his boots one at a time, slips his foot through the leg and quickly into his boot to keep his feet dry. Chris re-laces the boots, and tries to pull up "his" rain pants. Turns out "his" rain pants are really Michael's rain pants (Michael being his 10 year old son) and Chris can't pull them up beyond his knees without losing circulation to his feet. We have a little chuckle (belly laugh) over that one. Chris foregoes rain pants for the rest of the trip.  Apparently it is difficult to portage with your knees bound together.

Once the wind died down (notice I didn't say the rain let up) we worked our way over portages and lakes until we reached the portage into Grass lake. In this case Grass was mud stew. The end of the portage was a good 75 yards short of water. Between the water and the end of the portage was a field of soupy looking mud. We surmized later, that the large amounts of rain water earlier in the month must have washed out a beaver dam, draining most of the lake. We chose to bushwhack along the edge of the lake alternating between fighting through trees or slopping through the shoreline mud. In this manner we portaged, to the portage out of Grass/mud Lake. It was here that we met a couple of moose hunters on the there way in for a second attempt at a moose for the fall. Good luck to them. 

We worked our way down to Brule lake and found a spot to eat lunch on an island campsite as it started to rain harder. After lunch we paddle in the rain across the expanse of Brule Lake. The portages didn't need the extra rain. They were already squishy with excess water. The only bright spot to the travel conditions was that it was not cold. Once off Brule, the rain subsided. For the rest of the day, the rain was much lighter and intermittent. 

Once we reach Swan Lake, we pick an elevated camp site with a unique entrance. The location to get out of the canoe is tucked off to the side in a small alcove of trees. A short path connected the landing area to the camp site. The tent and tarp were set up for one last time. The dry spot under the tarp was very much appreciated. The Noah tarp was a good purchase. In this case we set up the tarp over the camp fire grate as we did not plan to build a fire.  For a final time supper is prepared by the light of a head-lamp. The soup and grilled cheese are something easily prepared with the camp stove. This had been a tiring paddle day, we do not linger over the camp stove once supper is consumed.

Just a quick note about this camp site. Wow, was the ground soft for the tent pad. Exhaustion and soft ground, nice combination. Only draw back was that one of the grommets on the tent pushed through the strap. Chris did a nice job securing the tent poles so that the tent stayed up all night.  

Sunday Day 5 Lake (Swan, Skidaway, Dugout, Marshall, Bower Trout)

This is exit day. Still had a good bit of rain as we paddle. Two Bald Eagle sightings highlight our paddling. On the first we spot an eagle perched high above us in a tree on the hillside. The height of the tree accentuated by the fact that blow down and fire have been through the area in the past couple of years. The eagle watches our entire passage across the small lake. Our second eagle sighting is made impressionable by the fact that it is on a shoreline rock eating something. As we paddle quietly closer, the eagle takes off carrying the entrails of whatever it was eating. Very cool.

We make our way to the exit point on Bower Trout Lake. This is the first time that we've ever tried exiting at a different point than where we went into the BWCA. In this case our two entry points are only a mile or two apart so Joel heads off with the canoe on the portage. At the parking lot he sets the canoe down and makes his way to the truck parked at the other entry point. Every five steps he checks for the vehicle keys, paranoid that he forgot them back with Chris. Images of getting to the car only to find that the keys are a mile away dance through his head. 

A quick drive back to pick up Chris and we are on our way to Grand Marais for our long awaited pizza at Swen and Ole's. Emphasis on "long-awaited". The Vikings are playing the Packers on T.V. We watch the second and third quarters while we wait in line and wait for our pizza.  Once served, it is delicious.