A light misty rain greeted us as we woke up the next morning. Thankfully it let up by the time we had the canoe loaded, and we paddled away from the dock at Seagull Outfitters at about 7:30 AM. The first ten or fifteen minutes of the trip were sort of painful, as our paddling muscles got used for the first time in a while, but we soon got into a rhythm. We were paddling into the wind but thankfully it wasn’t very strong. We saw another bear high up on one of the islands near the end of Three Mile Island.

After we had crossed most of the open water, I got a little bewildered as to where we were and passed the map up to Camden, who immediately figured out where we were and had us to the Alpine-Seagull portage in about ten minutes. He promptly became the trip navigator. As we were unloading our canoes at the portage landing, another party of two that was just pushing off told us that their outfitter had informed them of bear problems on Alpine. Apparently a bear had been swimming between the islands and checking out the campsites. We thought about it and decided to stick to our original plan of camping on Alpine, since Deb had told me nothing about any bear issues, and these guys had been out for five days already. If any bear problems materialized we would just move. It worked out okay and we didn’t see any bears for the rest of the trip. We just made sure to keep a clean camp.

We grabbed the second site up from Jasper-Alpine Falls. It was obviously a heavily used site but it had a good view and was closer to the falls for better access. We would have been better off taking the site that looked right at the falls since it was open as well. After setting up camp, we headed over to the falls where Cam promptly caught a nice pike on a buzz bait.

With summer sausage sandwiches under our belts we headed in for a nap. I was struggling with a caffeine deprivation headache (skipped my morning coffee) so it felt good to sleep for a bit. We managed to find some dry wood and lit up a campfire to cook hot dogs for dinner, which we downed with a can of Pringles. The sky cleared and we were able to enjoy a relatively clear evening and beautiful sunset. Despite the fact that we were in the burn area, the forest was still beautiful with tinges of fall color in the birches and aspen. The area has come a long way since my first pass through the area back in 2013.