I got up with the sun a little after 7:00 on our first morning at our Lake Agnes campsite. While the coffee was brewing, I paused to snap this picture of the eastward scene -

David crawled out of the tent a little later and took this picture of me enjoying my first mug of joe down on our lakeside "front porch." Judging from the lichen and vegetation growth, this rock shelf might be submerged during normal high water, which would eliminate one of the excellent assets of this site -

From my perch I could see man and a dog walking along a narrow sliver of beach on the western shore of the lake, north of the occupied point campsite. Eventually they disappeared into the woods. Glancing at the map, I realized that's where the portage to the Oyster River and Oyster Lake begins. That seemed like a great way to start the morning, and I was a little jealous. Somehow, though, I muddled through by drinking a couple large mugs of strong coffee and enjoying the comforts of our own site.

Later in the morning, David took some photos of the autumn scene on Agnes. This picture is more or less the same view as the first one above, a couple hours later -

Aspens brightened up the opposite shore -

The fall foliage also highlighted a fair number of oaks on Agnes, conspicuous in their dark rusty crimson hue -

Eventually we got ready to embark on our planned day trip to visit the pictographs on Lac la Croix. The forecast before we left home predicted that today would be very calm, which would be perfect for this outing. And, in fact, the day had been completely windless so far. Hoping it stayed that way, we set out a bit before 11:00 for the big lake and international boundary.

We paddled north across Agnes, turned east, shot through a spot of fast water, and arrived at the first of two portages on the day's route, an easy 30 rods into the Boulder River. This picture looks out at the river from the far end of the portage -

From there we paddled less than half a mile to our second portage, a 65-rod up-and-over from the river into Boulder Bay of Lac la Croix. La Croix is a big lake that stretches many, many miles to the north and west from where we stood. But the section that we would paddle on this day trip is relatively sheltered, almost like a separate smaller body of water, connected to the rest of the lake by a narrows at the north end.

Still, as we emerged from Boulder Bay and the islands just to its north, even our small section of la Croix opened into a significant expanse. This picture looks across a mile of water toward (what I believe is) Warrior Hill on the Canadian shore -

Zooming in -

Hiking up Warrior Hill is popular, and we brought along our Canadian-issued remote border crossing permits just in case we wanted to do it without committing any border violations. (It's permissible to travel the border lakes and border portages on either side of the boundary without border-crossing documents; going ashore elsewhere is another matter.) But we were not particularly drawn to do it today.

Instead, we thought it seemed like time for lunch. We aimed toward a campsite to stop and eat, but as we got closer we noticed it was occupied. So instead we pulled ashore on a rocky point where we could enjoy the warm sunshine and blessedly light breeze. Here's David and Piwi at our lunch spot -

Dave-O close-up -

After lunch we continued on our way to the pictographs, which are on the Canadian shore across a comparatively narrow channel from some good-sized islands on the American side. This picture looks across that channel toward the pictograph cliffs -

Arriving at the pictos, we were greeted by a moose with a great rack -

From there we scouted the cliffs to the north -

Cliff close-up -

Looping back, we found another well-racked moose -

Then we explored the cliffs to the south -

By now it was pretty warm in the sunshine. We soaked up the warmth in our own little world of sky, trees, rock, water -

Once we had sated ourselves on the painted cliffs, we started on our homeward journey back to Agnes. Not too far was another canoe with a couple and a dog that we thought were the people from Babbitt we met at the entry point yesterday. We saw one or two other canoes in the distance during our visit to Lac la Croix. But on the whole it was very quiet.

We decided to vary our return trip by detouring through a back bay on the west side the American archipelago we had followed northward. One of the islands had a striking outcrop of black basalt-like rock framed by the yellow hardwoods -

Group selfie taken near the same spot -

You can see in the picture above that we had we had shed our shirts for the paddle home. It was plenty warm in the bright sunshine with little wind. Apparently the temperature topped 70 in Ely this day, and it felt like it. We would have dispensed with the PFDs too, but we were mindful that the water was a chilly October temperature even if the air was not.

We paused to gather firewood on the portage back into Agnes, then made a beeline back to camp. No one else could be seen as we crossed the quiet lake. Agnes has something like 17 campsites, yet the only ones occupied now were ours and the one of the western point opposite us. I imagine there's quite a hubbub here during the peak summer season. We were lucky to visit during beautiful weather in the fall.

We got back to camp around 4:30 and had an early dinner of brats cooked over the fire. At some point Piwi decided she had to be a lap dog -

Piwi looks comfortable, though I'm not sure David is -

Lake Agnes during the "golden hour" -

Later when it was getting dark, we were surprised by a snowshoe hare dashing all over around our campsite. By now Piwi had gotten kind of restless, and the last thing we needed was for her to go in hot pursuit of a crazy lagomorph. So Piwi had to go on the leash while we enjoyed another evening by the campfire, sipping some Maker's Mark, before retiring to the tent for the night.

Distance traveled on Day 2: 14.3 miles.