Agnes - LLC - Ge-be-on-e-quet Loop
by TominMpls
Trip Type:
Paddling Canoe
Entry Date:
06/30/2017
Entry & Exit Point:
Moose/Portage River (north) (EP 16)
Number of Days:
8
Group Size:
2
Discuss Trip:
View Discussion Thread (14 messages)
Day 4 of 8
Sunday, July 02, 2017 (day 3, LLC to Ge-be-on-e-quet)
We woke up surprisingly refreshed on Sunday, and the rain had stopped. All of our gear was still wet, of course, but it wasn't raining, and the mosquitoes were less annoying. We still used the rain/bug fly to fix coffee and pancakes for breakfast, and broke everything in camp before the fly just in case, but the weather held, and we were on our way by 9.
Though it had really appealed to my orderly tendencies to have all the shared gear in the portage pack and all our individual gear in our backpacks, I was coming to realize that it wasn't appealing to my back and shoulders so much - two BV500s and a BV450 with food in addition to the tent, fly, cooking gear, fuel, etc. was making for a heavy pack, while the other two were very light. So I redistributed the load, moving a Bear Vault to one of the other packs and bringing light but bulky personal items into the big pack. It was still the heaviest pack, but substantially more manageable.
I'd worried about navigating from Fish Stake Narrows to the mouth of the Pocket Creek, because I wasn't sure how well M would be able to double-check my orienteering work, and I figured we'd need to actually orienteer our way across this lake. It turned out that I didn't need to worry, as M had just gotten home from Camp Birchwood the week before left, and at that camp she had learned proper map-and-compass orienteering this year, so she was in fact able to double-check my work, which was fun. Though the wind on Lac La Croix was high and the sky did look fairly threatening, we got from our site to the mouth of the Pocket Creek much faster than I expected - about an hour - and I was able to relax a bit.
This portion of the trip was my favorite part of the entire trip, mainly due to the solitude and to the illusion that we were the only people to have been here recently. We hadn't see any other people since arriving at our LLC site the day before, and we wouldn't see another person until 48 hours later, so this day we were completely alone. The portages on Pocket Creek looked completely unmolested - the first was actually flooded since Pocket Creek was quite high, and from the west side it wasn't really possible to even tell where the portage was, and the forest was tight around the portage too. The turn from Pocket Creek onto Ge-be-on-e-quet Creek was easy, and we saw a lot of frogs, turtles, loons, birds of various types, and evidence of beavers along the way, but no other signs of people.
Ge-be-on-e-quet itself was completely empty - five sites, all available, nobody fishing. So we chose to take the site closest to the portage on to Green Lake, which faces east, and set up camp before noon.
By now the sun was out and there was a cool breeze off the lake. We set up camp as though it might rain anyway, and learning lessons from the day before, I hung the tarp very high, with a steep pitch and with the bug screens well secured, although it would turn out that neither was necessary this time. We hung up all our wet gear and started drying things out.
Really digging in to our packs for the first time on the trip, I remembered that (1) I had a phone with a camera; and (2) since it was in airplane mode, it still had plenty of battery. So I finally started getting some pictures of the trip. I also started tracking our daily travels on my running watch, since I found the charger too.
Late that evening, after dinner and as the sun was getting low in the sky, I was surprised to hear the loud *slap* of a beaver tail on the water. Initially concerned that somehow were getting a warning from a beaver, I found instead that the beaver was fishing. We sat and watched it fish for a good twenty minutes, each time slapping its tail as it dove down, coming up about a minute later. Eventually it swam off.
The night was so clear and beautiful that we decided to sit in the hammock to watch the sun set and the stars to come out. So close to the solstice, it was a surprisingly long wait - at 10:30 it was still twilight, and we didn't finally start seeing much in the way of stars until after 11. Eventually we decided we'd seen enough and went to sleep, before the full depth of the night sky became fully visible.
~Lac La Croix, Ge-be-on-e-quet Lake
We woke up surprisingly refreshed on Sunday, and the rain had stopped. All of our gear was still wet, of course, but it wasn't raining, and the mosquitoes were less annoying. We still used the rain/bug fly to fix coffee and pancakes for breakfast, and broke everything in camp before the fly just in case, but the weather held, and we were on our way by 9.
Though it had really appealed to my orderly tendencies to have all the shared gear in the portage pack and all our individual gear in our backpacks, I was coming to realize that it wasn't appealing to my back and shoulders so much - two BV500s and a BV450 with food in addition to the tent, fly, cooking gear, fuel, etc. was making for a heavy pack, while the other two were very light. So I redistributed the load, moving a Bear Vault to one of the other packs and bringing light but bulky personal items into the big pack. It was still the heaviest pack, but substantially more manageable.
I'd worried about navigating from Fish Stake Narrows to the mouth of the Pocket Creek, because I wasn't sure how well M would be able to double-check my orienteering work, and I figured we'd need to actually orienteer our way across this lake. It turned out that I didn't need to worry, as M had just gotten home from Camp Birchwood the week before left, and at that camp she had learned proper map-and-compass orienteering this year, so she was in fact able to double-check my work, which was fun. Though the wind on Lac La Croix was high and the sky did look fairly threatening, we got from our site to the mouth of the Pocket Creek much faster than I expected - about an hour - and I was able to relax a bit.
This portion of the trip was my favorite part of the entire trip, mainly due to the solitude and to the illusion that we were the only people to have been here recently. We hadn't see any other people since arriving at our LLC site the day before, and we wouldn't see another person until 48 hours later, so this day we were completely alone. The portages on Pocket Creek looked completely unmolested - the first was actually flooded since Pocket Creek was quite high, and from the west side it wasn't really possible to even tell where the portage was, and the forest was tight around the portage too. The turn from Pocket Creek onto Ge-be-on-e-quet Creek was easy, and we saw a lot of frogs, turtles, loons, birds of various types, and evidence of beavers along the way, but no other signs of people.
Ge-be-on-e-quet itself was completely empty - five sites, all available, nobody fishing. So we chose to take the site closest to the portage on to Green Lake, which faces east, and set up camp before noon.
By now the sun was out and there was a cool breeze off the lake. We set up camp as though it might rain anyway, and learning lessons from the day before, I hung the tarp very high, with a steep pitch and with the bug screens well secured, although it would turn out that neither was necessary this time. We hung up all our wet gear and started drying things out.
Really digging in to our packs for the first time on the trip, I remembered that (1) I had a phone with a camera; and (2) since it was in airplane mode, it still had plenty of battery. So I finally started getting some pictures of the trip. I also started tracking our daily travels on my running watch, since I found the charger too.
Late that evening, after dinner and as the sun was getting low in the sky, I was surprised to hear the loud *slap* of a beaver tail on the water. Initially concerned that somehow were getting a warning from a beaver, I found instead that the beaver was fishing. We sat and watched it fish for a good twenty minutes, each time slapping its tail as it dove down, coming up about a minute later. Eventually it swam off.
The night was so clear and beautiful that we decided to sit in the hammock to watch the sun set and the stars to come out. So close to the solstice, it was a surprisingly long wait - at 10:30 it was still twilight, and we didn't finally start seeing much in the way of stars until after 11. Eventually we decided we'd seen enough and went to sleep, before the full depth of the night sky became fully visible.
Donate - BWCA.com