Tuesday, August 19, 2014 The next morning was still overcast but the weather was dry and the clouds did not look threatening. After a bacon and egg breakfast, cooked again without a campfire, we packed up and headed east with a goal of making it to Omega Lake early enough that our chances would be good of snagging a campsite there.

After a pleasant paddle along Long Island Lake we reached the portage to Muskeg Creek. It's not a long trail but what a rock-filled ankle buster! The east end of this portage appears to be on top of an old beaver dam so the put-in to Muskeg Creek is a bit awkward too. After winding our way through swampy, mucky Muskeg Creek the landing of the portage to Muskeg Lake really gave us fits! The creek got too shallow to navigate a loaded canoe well before dry land and getting out to walk the canoe through the remainder of the creek was not much of an option either as the muddy bottom of this creek was ready to suck you in past your knees. We ended up working our canoes and the whole load, pack by pack, to solid ground by carefully stepping along the few rocks that protruded from the water. This all made progress rather slow so by the time we made it to Muskeg Lake it was already about time for lunch.

The lone campsite on Muskeg was open and made a nice place to grab lunch, fueling up for our long steep portage over "The Wall" to Kiskadinna Lake. We were dreading this next portage somewhat as we had heard of its difficulty and believed it would be the hardest one on our whole trip. We made a plan of attack that would utilize our strength as a team and decided we would work this portage slow and steady. And you know what? We did it! It was certainly some challenging work but not the toughest I'd ever done and really not quite as hard as we had anticipated. That being said, it was still nice to have that one behind us.

After paddling Kiskadinna we had at least one more portage we wanted to finish before calling it a day and this path to Omega Lake turned out to be a tester as well. While not nearly as long as our previous portage, this one still had some steep up and down so by the time we reached Omega we really hoped to be done portaging for the day.

The western site on Omega was already taken so we continued on toward a site about mid-lake that we had heard some good things about. It was open! This site's reputation is well deserved as it has some great views, good tent pads and other nice features.

After we set up camp, Matt, our head fisherman on this trip, decided to try his luck but was not able to get anything to bite so that meant a macaroni/cheese and freeze-dried entrée supper. After the hard work we had done this day even that tasted great, as did the roasted marshmallows we had while we enjoyed an evening fire before turning in for the night.