What a lazy morning!! I was up at 6 and checked out the mist situation on the lake. (I really like misty mornings.) It didn’t look promising. We had said we would get up and paddle the stream again in the morning, to see if we could see some wildlife. So much for good intentions.

We got up at 7:30. Still no mist. A few clouds in the sky, and a pretty morning. Just feeling lazy.

We had scrambled eggs and bacon for breakfast, along with oatmeal bannock (which I burned a little, unfortunately. Note to self: use lower heat!) with jelly. Our usual hot chocolate, and coffee. We are cutting down on the Tang on this trip to cut carbs, but we do have some along. Perhaps another day.

At 10 A. M. I was just starting to wash up the dishes, but of course I had to take time out to photograph this white admiral butterfly that happened by:

As a committed spring tripper I am frustrated when I take a trip in September and find so few butterflies and flowers to photograph. On our Celebration Trip in 2009 we did have some orange comma butterflies, but there weren’t even any of those around this time. The white admiral is pretty, but they are so very common, and the only other butterflies I saw on this trip were mourning cloaks that didn’t cooperate for photography. Ah, well. I can’t summon up a moose either.

We didn’t see any loons on this trip. We heard them. Often. Morning and night, usually. We would awaken to loons and go to sleep with the loon lullaby in our ears. What a wonderful sound! But we didn’t ever see them. The only loons we saw in our month in Minnesota this year were on Poplar Lake during the week we spent with Anna at the cabin at Rockwood. There we had a family to entertain us. I suppose if you are only going to see them at one time in a month, the time when you have your granddaughter along is the right time, eh?

But the feathered friends were with us on Square Lake. An immature eagle did a fly-over while I was reading in the chair after breakfast. And these Canada Jays flew in to check out our situation a of couple times:

Spartan1 was getting his fishing gear ready for our afternoon paddle. It is a new experience for me to even think of going fishing. I wondered if he would catch anything?

I took a walk on the path over to the lake and pondered the meaning of autumn. I am not one of those people who loves the autumn. The colors are beginning here, and I can see beauty each year in the changes that fall brings to our northern world, but it generally makes me sad. It is a dying. I love the canoe country most in the spring; when the greens are bright and fresh, the flowers are abundant, the loon chicks are bundles of fluff on their parents’ backs, and the air is full of dragonflies and butterflies. (Yes, I know it is also full of other kinds of flies, and mosquitoes, and there are ticks in the grass. I am ignoring that for the present.) But on my walk I am looking for the beauty in the autumn and in the time here and NOW.

It is dry. Not as lush as the Gunflint where there has been more rain recently. The bracken is brown, the leaves are falling from the birches even before they turn yellow, and the few purple asters remaining are fading fast. Mountain ash has bright red-orange berries and the sumac berries are a brilliant red. We have a shrub at the campsite that is a deep burnt orange, but I don’t know what it is.

But the best thing about this campsite is the one big pine tree.

As I was getting out the lunch and we were sitting around by the fire grate four gentlemen paddled up in two canoes. They were looking for our campsite and were disappointed, but they greeted us and said that we would have “neighbors”.

We had our usual lunch about noon. Lunch for us on canoe trips is almost always the same. We take crackers for our starch (have tried many different kinds but now have pretty much settled upon the round Bretons that come in the long box), and top those with cheese (this year we had Baby Bels and those worked out well), or with summer sausage, or with peanut butter and/or jelly. For years I put peanut butter and jelly into squeeze tubes, but for the past three trips I have just ordered packets from Packit Gourmet. It is far more convenient, albeit making a bit more waste to pack out. Sometimes we have Kool-Aid with our lunch, and we always have dried fruit of some kind. Another protein source can be jerky. Last year we visited the home of Jack Link’s Jerky in Wisconsin and discovered Ham Jerky. That is now a favorite when we can find it.

We hung up our packs and headed out for an afternoon paddle. A little frog was at our landing, so he delayed our departure for his photo shoot:

We passed these turtles sunning themselves on a log in our secluded bay:

We paddled over to the portage to Baskatong and looked at it, (we were thinking we might go that way the next day), and watched two immature eagles who were perched in a tree watching us. Well. . .they probably were watching for fish and not watching US all that much, but we all kept an eye on each other.

Neil caught a fish! It was just a small northern and he released it, but it was a first for me to see him catch a fish, so it was thrilling. He had trouble with no rod holder and with a rather inexperienced person helping him troll, so we didn’t keep up very long with the fishing efforts.

We were back to the campsite at 3:30 on a lovely, warm and breezy day.

We read our books and relaxed. I made a cherry cobbler in the Jello-mold oven. It was an experiment and I filled the oven just a tad too full (I have a small-size mold), so had a bit of boil-over, but the end result tasted excellent. I used freeze-dried tart cherries from North Bay Trading Company, combined those with a little sugar, cornstarch and water, and topped with a cake batter made from Bisquick, Nido, squeeze Parkay and a bit of sugar (and water, of course.)

Our dinner was Mountain House turkey tetrazzini and the cobbler, and cups of hot decaf. Yum!

It was another cool evening. We had a little pine fire for warmth and ambience. As we normally do, we retired about dark, which in September is 9 o’clock. I miss those long spring evenings.

Spartan1 took a photo of me reading my IPOD under the rising moon.

Our “neighbors” had a keg with them and their party heated up about 11 P. M. By midnight they were going full blast. They were yelling, laughing and making lots of noise at 1:45 when I put in my ear plugs, pulled my pillow over my head, and finally went back to sleep again. Grrr!

We both thought we heard wolves howling about 5 A. M. It didn’t last long.