Boundary Waters, Trip Reports, BWCA, Stories

ER Nurses in BWCA
by GearGuy

Trip Type: Paddling Canoe
Entry Date: 06/10/2019
Entry & Exit Point: Stuart River (EP 19)
Number of Days: 6
Group Size: 7
Day 2 of 6
Tuesday - The “Second Long Day”

   So, I title this day the “Second Long Day” for good reason. We slept great that 1st night, I woke up at about 5am, something I always do, with what I thought was a really bad headache from being dehydrated. It probably had a little to do with not drinking enough water, something that’s always a challenge to do in the BWCA, but it probably had more to do with the vodka I was drinking with my water the night before. I didn’t think it was THAT much to produce a hangover let alone more than a buzz, but like I said I hadn’t eaten as much as I usually do so it probably snuck up on me. Went back to bed, slept for a few more hours, long enough to listen to my friend and Pike Guy snore up a storm, it wasn’t actually annoying snoring, more comical. You know that snoring you always joke about, but have never actually heard that goes “Snoreeeeee (nasally inhale)” with the “mum mum mum” exhale? I found it, get Pike Guy a little drunk and totally exhausted a day into the BWCA and the unicorn of a snore can be heard at 530am on a little island at Stuart Lake. We all woke up around 8:00am and lazily packed our stuff, after of course coffee was made for the coffee drinkers. Felt like it didn’t take long to pack, but I remember us leaving that campsite around 10:30-11am, doesn’t seem like we got a late start but in retrospect an earlier one might not have helped much as all the campers we ran into on Iron looked like they had been there for days, more on that in a moment.

   So we’re packed, everyone knew our goal was to pack and move that morning so there was a good flow to the morning. Didn’t take long to travel across Stuart to the portage into Fox, and likewise it didn’t take long for the realization to set in that the portage itself was hell! I had done all the portages the day before, so Pike Guy stepped up and carried our 3 person canoe across the first half of this portage, definitely the harder half. About 10 rods into the portage there’s a tree fallen over that makes a “Low bridge”, you don’t notice it on the way up cause you’re going up a hill. On the way back if you aren’t keeping your nose down you can easily bonk that. Then there’s a big tree root in the portage, so you have to squeeze through that and a rock, followed by about 6 trees that are all thigh-high and hard to step over (imagine carrying a canoe and stepping over them, single portaging). It proceeds to go for about 75 rods before the real monster comes out. In the thick of a bunch of pine trees, one of the pine trees fell over the portage, and it’s not just a tree it’s bushes, roots, other bushes and trees, and it’s so thick there’s no way of getting over it. Looks like a pile of dead pine trees waist-height that is approx. 10 feet wide and 12 feet deep (where the other side of the portage comes out, but you can’t see that). A little poking around and we find that there’s a path trampled around this pile, but it too is in this dense pine thicket, long story short maneuvering a canoe through there was really difficult, and getting 20 feet turned into a 10-minute ordeal. On the way back it was easier because we knew what it was, but still very physically difficult. This is just the first lick of the portage. It has another 10 or so trees down that you have to step over, and it goes up and down 20-40 feet at least 4-5 times, not to mention the whole portage is a mile long. The longer portage is out of the entry point, which was a mile and a half. But that is more of a gentle slope down to the water, where as this was a rollercoaster of downed trees. The group made it through, another shoe hang-up with those military boots, the other boot’s sole came off, and the boots were left in a bush off the portage (which we retrieved on the way back, more on that later). Once into Fox lake, it was a cake walk. The portages following were in the 70-rod length average, and a walk in the park compared to the Stuart/Fox portage. We were on Iron in no time.

   Once on Iron Lake, it became a mission of finding a campsite. Today is Tuesday so I’m thinking the odds of finding a site are better than most days. We paddle to the nearby island site only to be disappointed. Knowing Curtain Falls is a good target for fishing and sightseeing, not just Peterson Bay, we continue heading east, there’s one sight on the south shore, taken. There’s two campsites on “Three Island”, both taken. There’s 2 more on the east Shore on the far east end of the lake, both taken. This sucks we thought, we stopped at a nearby bay on the east end of the lake, sat in our canoes out of the wind, took bathroom breaks on the nearby rocky peninsula, and made a game plan on where to go. The only sites left were on the far west shore, where we had started out at, and I knew the odds of an open site were highest at the worst site, the south western most campsite. We headed there as it was already 2:30pm, it took us about an hour to get back to the Island campsite north of Peterson bay when the weather started getting darker and darker. Getting to the “worst campsite on Iron”, it was open, and willing to settle, we happily accept it as our campsite of the night. Again, original goal was to land on the Island campsite on day 1. Oh well, we’re here. This campsite was a bad campsite, it functioned, but it had very little going for it other than being open that day. I have now decided that you can judge the quality of a campsite by the size of the spiders that accumulate in your bugout tarp. More on that in a minute. I set up my Green CCS 10x14 just in time for it to rain for 2-3 hours, we all sat in our chairs on this rocky slope under the tarp and just talked as our camp’s pyro tended the fire and dried out wet pine wood for that nights fire. We used this time to make up some food, and try my dehydrated chili and new Solo Stove light. The chili was great, all I did was make homemade chili at home, and then dehydrate it on a cheap dehydrator from Walmart, and vacuum sealed it to keep it small. Absolutely hit the spot and next year I’ll double my quantities for the same amount of people, it was that easy and that amazing. The Solo Stove caught everyone’s attention, I had never used it before, so I myself didn’t really know what to expect. If you’ve never used one I suggest you try it out, the double can style was just too great, it burned with such efficiency I couldn’t believe it. Next trip it’ll definitely be my workhouse, and I’ll just use my Pocket rocket and/or whisperlite to boil water and fry fish. It took no more than 5-10 minutes to gather fuel for it for an hour or so of cooking, I was primarily just using wood chips, pine cones, broken twigs and what not that were literally under-foot, where I sat. I’d throw in a couple pieces of wood every time I lifted the pot to stir it, at first I wondered if it was a two person job but once I started cooking I realized throwing in more fuel was as easy as stirring and lifting the pot for 5 seconds in one motion.

   After a couple of hours, the rain dies down and stops, we were lucky. 3 of the guys take the 3-person out, 3 different guys from yesterday which was nice to see everyone mix things up. They actually left mid-rain so we didn’t see them for a little while until the rest of us decided to go out and try our luck. I paired with badass-army-medic/ER-nurse-broken-boot-guy for a great afternoon of fishing, we just went out to that south western most bay, just north west of the portage into Iron from Rush, and we found the other party fishing off the shore, beats the heck out of fighting for canoe space when you have a productive spot that can be fished easily from a good shore spot nearby. Army medic and I decide to attack from water rather than land, and we lazily drift around this big open bay casting stuff out. He hooked a massive pike, the kind of pike that you only get a glance of its mid-section before it sees the boat, and makes a huge dive, running your line like a massive lake trout for a solid 3 seconds before the heart-dropping “doink” can be felt/heard, and the line returned snapped off somethings razor sharp teeth. No leaders out fished leaders 6:1 in my opinion. The guys who religiously used leaders caught very few if not any walleye. The smallmouth were bedding, and the pike just didn’t seem to be as active. It was walleye time, and once I tied on an Orange jig that became all too apparent. For some reason all of the fish were really into Orange colors and we were hitting them left and right on orange. They ended up not minding the green and other colored jigs we ended up having to use after we snagged up the few orange jigs I had brought, but it definitely felt like they preferred orange and were easier to find and caught more when we had the orange. Anyways, Medic guy loses his huge pike, I wasn’t having much luck with whatever I was trying, so I tied on an orange jig, and stuck a leech on it. I then casted out, and wanted to slow us down so I left my rod in the bottom of the boat with the line just hanging over the side, I took one stroke with the paddle and my rod dove down and “doink”, snapped off as I lifted the line. “Wow” I thought to myself, not thinking much of it other than I should have been paying attention to my line, but I’ve always been told that you have the best look when you’re not thinking about it. I tied on another orange jig and right away a walleye is in the boat, good eater size, maybe 15 inches. I set my rod down, paddle us around for a few minutes and cast a few more times, another walleye. I set my buddy up with a jig and we both started getting into them. The 3 guys came off the shore which had stopped producing, and caught a few where we were floating around. We drifted around for a while just catching walleye here and there. Pretty soon we had 8-9 between the 5 of us and the other 2 guys show up with a big pike from their adventure, they take our fish and Medic guy and I stay out past everyone else just trying out the walleye bite. We paddled in as the sun went down and the ambient temp dropped a good 5 degrees. When they’re biting, you can’t beat it. If I didn't say it before, Pike guy delivered on his name by catching the biggest pike of the trip. Way to go Pike Guy!

   Back at camp everyone is going strong on getting our fish cleaned, I loved how competitive everyone was, and how helpful and willing everyone was to do their part. It seemed like we all fell into our roles and niches that we like to fill and accomplish. One guy really took to getting water, and fulfilling that role, filling the water bag, getting it going on the gravity filter, and filling up our clean water reservoir. Another person really enjoyed being on fire duty, collecting firewood, exploring the campsites, and cleaning fish, and cooking fish on the fires. I have a Silky Saw Big Boy that I got after reading rave reviews on the forums, and it was just as much a hit on this trip as it ever is. The guys loved it so much, collecting firewood was something you had to call “dibs” on. Everyone took turns using it to cut wood at camp, they really are just such great saws. We made fish, didn’t turn out the best but this was the first trip where instead of bringing any liquid oil I brought just Ghee in little vacuum sealed packets (I made them myself). Ghee is amazing, and we really started having great success frying with it at the end of the trip when we were using much more of it than we did at the start. All in all the amount of Ghee we brought compared to the normal volume of oil was smaller, and it went much further. That night we stayed up and burned a lot of the wood we had previously dried out, hit the hay and the night was rather uneventful.