Good afternoon all! Long time reader of these forums, first time poster. I'm making a post because I've been planning this BWCA trip for the past 8 months or so, trip is all booked and permits figured out. But want to ask - has anyone actually done this stretch before relatively recently and aware of portage/paddle conditions? Looking on the satellite map it looks like skidway lake/Dugout Lake that connects Marshall lake to Swan Lake might be murky/shallow/impassable if the water is low? Is that true? Or am I pretty in the clear to assume I'll likely be able to get through between those two lakes with canoes? We are leaving a car at Marshall/Bower Trout entry point and then driving out to Brule Lake to start our journey, it's my first time leaving out of an entry point and not directly returning to it which has me *slightly sketched out. I have the whole thing planned out on OnX, not worried in the slightest about not knowing where to go or where I am (we have a satphone too). BUT if we get all the way to skidway and it's straight mud for a mile or something like that, and we can't get through we would be WAY late getting back to our first car, so I need to be certain that someone has been through that stretch before.

Could someone help ease my concerns and let me know if they went there last year (or even recently?) and how deep the lake is? I found some great records of other threads but they were pretty old and idk how water conditions now compare. The trip is in about a month.

If anyone is further curious about plans, the way we are planning to tackle it is to leave one morning around 7:00 from grande marais, drop off the cars at the end, get to brule around 10:00, 1.5 hour paddle to the first portage or less, small portage between brule bay and Vernon, check out the waterfall at Vernon, arrive at the second portage (vernon-swan) around 1:00 pm or something, and have time to steal one of the campsites on swan. Then we might burn a day for fun at swan and leave camp there, then the third day we'd tackle the Swan to Skidway to Dugout to Marshall stretch (the one I'm slightly concerned about), on paper it's 2.5 miles of paddling, 129 total rods of portages (half a mile?) depending on how much of that is actually solid vs lake, not sure how water level dependant it will be? to be safe, expecting to spend a day getting from Swan to Marshall. Then we're zipping out early from Marshall to the car to do the roughly 3 hour hookup (ugh, it's 1.5 hours drive from each landing) and hopefully be able to put all 4 canoes on 2 cars with a double roof rack on each.

We COULD plan on burning our "fun do nothing" day on Marshall and if dugout is impassable, we'd have plenty of time to turn around. Idk yet.

That's the plan! If anyone notices any other glaring issues with that I would LOVE to hear them lol. I've planned many a BWCA trip before but have always had the peace of mind that if part of the trip is impassable we can turn around and be exactly or ahead of schedule at worst. The A to B nature of this one I'm trying has me really wanting to be certain about dugout and skidway.

Thanks in advance for anyone who comments! I will update how this trip went at the end of it if anyone else wants to give it or a similar trip a try.

I don't have any recent experience but, am confident that you'll make it through without serious issue. Yoy might have to pinball around some boulders etc but, in general, water levels have been higher than normal this year.

When I did that route in a normal to slightly low water year, I had absolutely no concerns about getting through that area. This year is similar water levels. Relax and enjoy the trip. It will be fine.