Friday, June 08, 2018 Friday, being a layover day, we had no plans save for exploring Cairngorm. We started the day off with oatmeal (fortified with blueberries, cranberries, and dehydrated cream) and coffee. I like to make oatmeal while canoe camping, as boiling a pot of water gets you coffee, breakfast and dishwater all in one shot. Unfortunately, Bobs has a slight aversion to it. We have had a light-hearted back and forth about this for years, with the compromise being switching to pancakes every other day. 
After breakfast we were off to troll and explore for the day. The surface temperature of the lake was still quite cold, and by all measures the lake trout fishing should have been excellent. This did not turn out to be the case however, and ultimately we only pulled one laker out of Cairngorm over many hours of fishing. The area was so scenic that we don’t mind hours of trolling and site-seeing. Every time we rounded a peninsula we found a new, dramatic landscape before us. The north half of Cairngorm was burned pretty heavily in the year 2000, but the landscape has recovered quite nicely. The ‘burn area’ of our trip had a larger concentration of birch and aspen then the older forest, with the addition of dense jack-pine stands on its sandier northern boundary (there are no red or white pines in this region).  Like many of the lakes in this area, Cairngorm is long from north to south, and quite narrow from east to west. There are a couple of pinch points where the lake is very narrow. With cliffs rising a few hundred feet on both sides, it makes for an interesting landscape. Apparently the local animals use these narrow areas for crossing the lake, as we would discover while trolling this day. Just before the narrowest part of the lake we startled a mother moose and her calf. They crashed into the lake from shore and began swimming in the bay just before the narrow, appearing to be unclear where to head to safely avoid us. The calf couldn’t have been more than a couple of weeks old, but it swam well during the several minutes that we watched it. The mother was about 20 feet ahead of it. Occasionally, the calf would call out for its mom, who would circle back to encourage it along. I took a brief break from watching the two moose swim to look at the narrow ahead of us, and was surprised to see a black bear jumping into the lake to swim across. I don’t think that I have ever seen a moose and a bear at the same time before! We tried to get a video of the bear swimming, but really not much of it was visible above water accept for the ears. It reached the opposite bank of the lake very quickly, and disappeared into the bush. All told, we paddled many hours this day, and saw most of Cairngorm Lake. At some point, we caught a laker, which we fried up with some rice for lunch. For dinner I rose some pizza dough and attempted to make a calzone with salami, string cheese and red-sauce, which we cooked in some foil over coals. This was fairly successful, but like many things I’m convinced I’d do much better the second time.