** Day 6 **
We woke up before sun-up, but stayed in bed as this was our planned layover day and snoozed in. A squirrel finally clambered onto one of the trees right beside our tent and began to chatter, non-stop, until we came out. Talk about a wake-up call!
The sun felt exceptionally hot for the BW, and I was soaked in sweat before we even got going around camp. The afternoon before, we had talked of perhaps NOT staying over on Fourtown today, but maybe moving on to Mudro, and staying there.
In retrospect, that wasn’t the best of ideas: Number 1 – The campsite on Mudro turned out to be adequate, but nothing to write home about, and not nearly the lake to explore as Fourtown. Number 2 – It would have been better to just check out another site on Fourtown, perhaps for a future trip to this lake.
Matthew fished along the shoreline a bit while I pumped up some water for our bottles, and the day. Together we cooked up some breakfast, and as I cleaned up, Matthew broke off and took down and packed up the tent. At our leisure, we gathered our gear and tidied up the campsite.
As we started to carry our packs down to the shore to load, we saw three canoes emerging from river mouth off to our right. We hopped in and tried to beat it out from the peninsula and through the channel going South, but they were really making good time, and zipped right on by and ahead of us.
The wind was gusting a bit from the big body ahead and made the going a little tougher than we would have liked here early in the morning. We figured those guys must've had a pretty powerful breakfast, because the wind didn't seem to bother them much at all, or, we guessed they had somewhere to be today, because they were movin'! We had pushed off from camp close to 8, and if it took an steady hour to make the river from Moosecamp, they must have left their camp extremely early, or, been the group that we passed the day before that didn’t wave back at us.
As we began to reach the large island in the center of the lake, Matthew pointed out 5 or 6 canoes coming in from the right, and I saw more back in the Western bay. Besides us, there turned out to be 12 other canoes that we counted at one time, all converging towards the middle part of the lake, and heading South towards the Mudro portage. It felt like we were part of the BW Spanish Armada! We had been in several backups at portages before, but this had the potential to be the Mother of all bad log-jams.
We looked to see if a site was open on an island on the lower East portion, but, no. Instead, we both agreed to drop out of the convoy and put some time and distance between us and all the traffic to try some more fishing here along the island shorelines, and glad later we did.
Matthew had several bites and caught a few nice Smallies. On one little inlet, we drifted unknowingly right up on a deer lying just above the shore, not 15 feet from and just above us. I took several pictures as we enjoyed the close encounter. The deer didn’t seem fazed by our presence at all. It just watched us and chewed its cud.
Just as soon as a nice calmness settled in here though, it left. Four canoes came paddling down the lake behind us, towards that island camp - singing songs, yelling, you name it…as loud as they could, obviously very entertained with themselves, but with absolutely NO regard for anyone else’s privacy, or solitude. Any silence that was across the bottom part of the lake was just shattered by their presence.
“Grandad would paddle right over there and tell them to shut up,” Matthew said, “and if they come anywhere near here, I’m going to.” I was as irritated as he was. In fact, I was sorely tempted to paddle right up to that camp island and outright ask them if they were affiliated with any organization, or Scout group. But, good sense got the better of me, and we just paddled on down the shoreline further away. I knew any contact at all would just make things (them) worse, and, likely create some sort of confrontation, which was the last thing anyone is looking for out there. We laughed later, because if they had been scouts, we could have put them in for their “Obnoxious” Badge.
After fishing and exploring for about an hour, we finally paddled on down to the portage. All the canoes were gone and through, and it was a GOOD thing.
The takeout for the portage was down on the left, just below where the running creek rapids flowed in. It was almost straight up the side of a rock face, then up the top, and into the trees. It followed the creek above, then dropped gradually back down to meet the water above the rapids. We met some nice folks there as we carried across the first time, helped them a bit with their gear going back for ours, then made the last leg back. It was a short paddle up to the next portage.
It was another rocky uphill start, a 140 rodder, and definitely another cardio workout and calf-burner! We were GLAD to see this one behind us. It had everything: Rocks, roots, mud, incline, 30-foot drop-offs RIGHT beside the path…everything.
We met another really nice couple at the end of the portage on the creek bed. It was a fella with a first-timer girl, and did I ever feel sorry for her. As we visited, she was telling us how the 30 rod portage they had just done was sooo hard..did she ever have a surprise coming right now, behind us. Maybe it was the fella I should have felt sorry for!
We paddled up a few yards to the next/last portage along the creek – the 30 rod section the girl had just talked about. We met 3 guys coming in with only one canoe...and a ton of gear. The canoe was metal and had a blunt back end. We couldn’t help ourselves and hurried back across, just to watch the 3 big guys load themselves, and all their gear, into that one canoe, and paddle off. It looked liked a river barge!
Back on the Mudro end of the portage there was a flotsam dam to put in off of, with the rocks climbing up beside it. It wasn’t too awfully precarious, but, I wasn’t too thrilled to stand across two wet logs in the water to load off of! Earlier when we met the nice newbie couple, we had asked if they saw anyone on the Mudro camp, and they had said “yes”. We both had frowned, but hoped they were wrong, or had seen someone early before they left. As we paddled up the shoreline from the portage, Matthew and I talked about the possibility of heading over to Sandpit, or even Tin Can Mike, where some camps looked nice a few days ago. Or, we could go out Mudro and over to Pickett. It wouldn’t be what we had planned on doing, but hey, it was all good.
As we rounded the curved shore though, we saw that the sole camp here on Mudro was open. It was a bit of a relief for the moving part of the day to be over (it had been quite a bit more taxing than I was thinking when we pushed off from camp that morning), and even though this was a 1 or 2 star camp at best, we were proud to have it.
We spent another long, HOT, windy afternoon there on Mudro – exploring the paths and rocks up behind camp – fishing when we could from shore – napping (though that was somewhat uncomfortable with the heat) – watching random parties passing through here and there from our chairs, including that group of obnoxious guys from Fourtown the day before.
We heard them WELL before they came into view from the right, coming out of the portage. There were 4 or 5 canoes, I can’t remember exactly, with 2 persons per, and they were just as loud and raucous as they had been the lake before. They splashed, yelled, chased, even rammed each other in their aluminum canoes, all the way down Mudro, until they disappeared into the narrow channel heading up towards Pickett. Matthew and I looked at each other and just shook our heads.
There was some fun with wildlife though. At one point a “pod” of otters swam by our camp, heading towards the direction of the Mudro entry point. They way they moved up and down through the water reminded me of a school of dolphins. I whistled, and they stopped. They bobbed there for a few seconds, heads only up out of the water, looking right at us. One briefly swam towards us as if to investigate, but they soon resumed their course and disappeared across the lake. We also had been hearing occasionally throughout the afternoon a deep resonating sound, echoing across the lake. I thought it was some kind of woodpecker – Matthew thought a frog.
Finally, closer to sundown, the wind petered out like it had the night before. We went out to work the shores down towards Sandpit, and had lots of bites – Lots. Even I had several. Matthew hauled in 6 Smallies, with at LEAST that many hopping off either in tow, or RIGHT AT the brim of the canoe. As much fun as we were having, we wanted to have some coffee and cocoa here on our last night in the BW. After about an hour on the water, we headed back.
We enjoyed our beverages as the darkness fell, tidied up the camp, and turned in after dark. It was super quiet, and still. Even after sundown, it was overly warm for up here, and with no breeze at all, quite uncomfortable laying there.
We guessed we weren’t the only ones disliking the heat. Matthew heard a mouse or something scratching at and trying to climb up the outside of the tent under the fly. We laughed and told him “Sorry. No vacancy.” Right after that, we saw the outline of a snake trying to scale the side of the tent and sliding back down. It didn’t take me long to plug the small hole at the zipper and push my pack up into the corner to seal it off!
Soon after, we began to hear some kind of bird, that sounded like a car alarm going off. Canoe alarm might be more appropriate! It was relentless, and must have had the lungs of an Ostrich. It would call about 18 to 20 times in a row, then fly to another tree nearby, and repeat. This went on for about 20 minutes. Finally, and THANKFULLY, it worked its way down the shoreline, towards the Fourtown portage.
When everything at last settled down, we eventually began to doze off for a good, sound, last-night’s sleep here in the Boundary Waters. I actually didn’t want to fall asleep. The week had gone by so fast, or at least it seemed so at this point, but, sleep finally took me. *** Fourtown Lake, Mudro Lake ***