Boundary Waters, Trip Reports, BWCA, Stories

East End of Brule
by Dbldppr1250

Trip Type: Paddling Canoe
Entry Date: 08/05/2014
Entry & Exit Point: Brule Lake (EP 41)
Number of Days: 4
Group Size: 2
Part 3 of 5
Another beautiful morning for Day 3! Were we in heaven? This weather has been as good as it gets. Got up and got into the routine without too much hustle. Cranked up the stove and we prepared some oatmeal that was Lesley's special mix, filled with all kinds of healthy stuff including oatmeal. It tasted great and filled us up nicely. Filtered the dromedary full of water for the day as well as our water bottles for the day trip. We talked about today's plan and decided to paddle and fish to the east end of Brule Bay. We also wanted to check out the portage to Vernon, which we'd noticed on trip reports that there were some falls that might be nice to see and cool off in. We'd had 2 enormous fish dinners, and we decided that we'd release everything and eat some Mountain House freeze-died meal tonight. We'd brought 4 different meals and decided on Beef Stroganoff for dinner later on. We got started paddling, trolling most of the time, and we discovered as we paddled and fish our way east that it was a long way to the east end. We didn't have much luck fishing, but really didn't focus on it much, knowing that Mountain House was going to be dinner. A few hours later we were at the end of Brule Bay. We found the portage and discovered that it was very steep up and down to Vernon. As we walked, carrying only camera and trail mix, we could hear voices of people having a good time somewhere ahead to our left. The entire time we could hear the falls. They were somewhere off to the left. This portage turned into a real tough walk up and down. As we started down, we noticed a less-traveled path to the left, and we decided that maybe it was a trail to the falls. We walked a bit and began working harder to follow this path, which really seemed like we were now bush-pushing. As we got to the water, we saw nothing but rapids spread into a few streams. It was obvious that we did not use the correct path to the falls. We went back up to the portage and finished walking down to Vernon. We concluded that there must be another way to those falls that we missed. We dejectedly walked the portage back to our canoe. The mystery of those falls, we just don't know. Maybe someone that reads this report can straighten us out on where we went wrong. We were very tired when we got back to the canoe and realized that we still had a very long paddle back to our camp site, probably an hour and a half at our pace. We paddled most of the way back without fishing much. Got back at ~ 7:00, and the routine this night did not include cleaning fish. We got the stove going and quickly boiled 3 cups of water. We used 2 in the bag of beef stroganoff and 1 to cook some more peas. It wasn't long and we were feasting on some relly good beef stroganoff. We also decided to have our dessert that we packed. We brought along a package of freeze-dried cinnamon apple crisp made by Alpine. Boil a cup of water and let the bag do the cooking. After cooking put it on a plate and add the crisp provided in a small packet inside the package. 10 minutes later we enjoyed a very tasty dessert. I decided to clean out the bag to save it for tomorrow morning's breakfast to cook our oatmeal mix. Seems much simpler and saves cleaning out the pot. We cleaned up, enjoyed a campfire while talking about future plans. At this time we were both thinking alike but didn't want to cut this perfect trip short. I was very interested in George's fishing lakes that he often goes to, and George had one undisclosed lake in mind. We were both in favor of paddling out tomorrow and moving to another undisclosed lake somewhere in Cook County to do some more great fishing. George was confident that he could put us on some fish from prior trips he'd experienced. We did a little packing inside our tents and went to sleep early after another beautiful sunset.