I was up at 6:30, but the sunrise wasn’t anything to climb out of the tent to witness.

Still, it is always my favorite time of day, the early morning in the canoe country. A loon was calling ‘way off down the lake, and the others in the tents began stirring soon after I made it to the kitchen area (do you suppose they heard me, even though I was trying to be so quiet? Piwi has GREAT hearing!)

Spartan1 took this shot of our early morning camp soon after he got up.

After savoring my hot chocolate, I set to preparing a breakfast of scrambled eggs and hash browns. It was a cool, cloudy, breezy morning.

Bill and David decided to go check on some other campsites. A friend of theirs writes campsite articles for the Boundary Waters Journal and she had a couple of sites on Cherokee that she hadn’t gotten to in order to review, so they wanted to visit those specific sites and check them out for her. (They also checked to see if the people had left the site across the way, but the answer for that was negative.) In addition to that, we had told them about the portage from Cherokee to Sitka and some other challenging portages in the vicinity. They are always looking to investigate challenging routes and one possibility was that perhaps Neil and I would base-camp on Cherokee for a few days and they would go off on a loop of their own.

Piwi decided to give her best imitation of a lap dog while Neil was walking around with his camera out.

And we all got a chuckle out of watching David try to clean up his black fleece which was then covered with white dog hair! We decided that he needs to get a lighter-colored fleece if he is going to care what he looks like when he goes out on an expedition in the canoe with Bill and Piwi!

The sky was looking "interesting" as they were loading up to go on their way. Perhaps that was why Piwi seemed a bit reluctant to load up into the almost-empty canoe for a little day excursion.

A light rain blew in, and I took refuge in the tent for a few minutes about 11:30, writing in my journal and warming up a bit. It didn’t last long, and sitting around in the tent gets boring, so I was out and about again, trying to photograph an uncooperative chickadee, and just puttering around the campsite, looking for mushrooms and such.

This was an odd day, weather-wise. We had periods of lovely blue sky, warm sun, and what looked like perfect conditions, shortly followed by a blow-in of dark gray, stormy-looking clouds and light rain. Over and over. At one point I lay down on the warm rock by the lake and snoozed for a few minutes in the sun, only to be awakened by rain falling on me and a cold wind blowing my hat off my head.

It wasn't busy on Cherokee. We did see these people paddle by:

Bill and David returned from their sojourn and decided to put up a rain tarp. This task was accomplished in bright sun. We lunched at 12:15, under the tarp with light rain falling. And so it went, all day. A little rain, a little sunshine. During one of the sunshiny periods, a couple of mergansers landed and paddled around in the bay down below our campsite.

Pretty pitiful merganser photo, but we didn't see many on this trip.

Some Canada geese flew by in their typical V formation:

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The guys left again in the afternoon to find another campsite, and Neil “encouraged” Piwi to go along. She seemed to get rather alarmed when she was left behind with us while her “Dads” went for water, so we didn’t think she would want us to dog-sit for any extended period of time just yet.

We stayed back, resting and adapting our activities to the alternating sunny and rainy weather.

And then they were back again! What a delight it is for a dog to nap in the sun!

It's traumatic when your favorite "toy" rolls down the rock and into the water,

but one of your "Dads" can rescue it with a canoe paddle,

and then it tastes just as good, or maybe even better!

And if you "help" the guy who is splitting wood, you can maybe even grab another new "toy".

We thought this formation in the knot of the wood was interesting:

Supper tonight was cooked and eaten under the tarp, although Neil built us a nice little campfire for atmosphere later on. Neil and I had Mountain House Chicken and Rice (OK but I probably wouldn't get it again, as I could do as well with grocery store items), to which I added a package of Packit Gourmet freeze-dried green peas, and all was cooked over the stove instead of just warmed in the package. This improves the freeze-dried meals considerably, in my opinion. Then I made a cherry cobbler in my Jello-mold oven, using freeze-dried tart cherries from North Bay Trading Company and some home-cooking ingredients (sugar, cornstarch, Bisquick, a little more sugar, Nido, and water), and we shared that dessert with Bill and David. It seemed to be appreciated. After our dessert and coffee, we sat at the campfire for a couple hours, talking and sharing the rather generous amount of Maker’s Mark that Bill and David had brought along with them. It was a pleasant evening, but it got very cold.

The sky was perfectly clear, the Milky Way was visible, and the stars were gorgeous to see! Some day I am going to learn how to photograph the night sky successfully, but this night I was too cold to even give it a try. It was enough just to see it, and to marvel in its glory.

Later in the night, I was chilled. We heard afterwards that this night got down to 35 degrees at Sawbill, and in some places down to freezing. It was the only night on the trip that I had trouble sleeping because I wasn’t warm enough, and I was up in the night to put on another layer, fully zip my warm bag and mummy it around my head.