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.

[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.

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:]

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