Thursday, June 07, 2018 Thursday morning we stayed in our hammocks long enough to let the sun warm things up a bit (the Phil Cotton schedule). The days are long enough so that you don’t need to hit the water ridiculously early, and I find that I stay quite a bit drier if I let the dew burn off before getting up. This also makes packing up the hammock and tarp a lot easier. After putting our hammock rigs away, we fired up our camping stove and made some coffee and a very large pancake (a staple for us). The stove that we use burns small twigs, pine cones, etc... Which saves us the burden of carrying in fuel. A thermo-coupler on the stove charges a battery back that operates a fan to drive the flames, and it also has a USB port that can charge devices such as phones, cameras etc…. We don’t use the charger a lot, but it is handy when you need it.  After breakfast, we finished packing up and paddled 3km north on Diablo lake, to a series of 3 portages to Cairngorm Lake. Initially I was excited to see that some chainsaw work had been done on the first 700m portage, but the slash had been left on the trail, and the entire path was blocked by fir trees that had been stomped down by snow, across the trail. It appeared that someone had been trapping wolves along all of today’s portages. Every now and then we’d come across a birdhouse shaped box 3ft above the ground, and there was a wolf pelt discarded near one of these boxes (why the wolf was skinned only to have left the pelt there, is unknown to me). I wondered if the chainsaw work had been done by a trapper on a snowmobile, but I couldn’t imagine how someone would get a snowmobile into that area. At any rate, by the end of the day it became clear that all of the portage trails were going to be blocked by trees and brush, making portaging considerably harder than you’d expect in other parks like the bwca for instance. All told, 3 portages separate Diablo and Cairngorm lakes, with short paddles across a couple of ponds in between. Navigation was pretty straight-forward, and we soon found ourselves on the south end of Cairngorm Lake. Cairngorm is over 20km long, and our desired campsite for the next 2 days was about halfway down the lake. There was no wind from the south to help us along this day, so we rigged up our fishing rods to troll for lake trout, and headed north. The troll up Cairngorm lake was uneventful (no fish) and we soon found ourselves pulling up to a small sand beach where the campsite was located. It was nice to have a beach landing site, and a couple of trip reports we had read suggested this would be the nicest campsite on the route. We decided that we would take a layover day here, so we hung our hammocks and prepared to settle in for a couple of days.
Having caught no fish, we prepared a dinner of coffee and mac and cheese. We both drink quite a bit of coffee and we used Starbucks Via instant coffee packets for this trip (as I have on my last couple). Previously, we would haul in fresh grounds and a French press. This makes for good coffee but adds considerable weight and pack space. We stayed up until 11pm, talking around the camp fire this night and slept soundly in our hammocks.