Thursday, July 25, 2019 We decided to cut the trip short, coming out Fri instead of Sat (which turned out to be a good decision).

So we packed up after breakfast with blueberry pancakes and headed back to Lower Pauness.

While there is a portage from Lynx to Little Shell, the water was high enough that you could paddle through. Yeah!! Paddling across Shell was no problem though the wind was starting to come up even at 9 AM.

The portage from Shell to Lower Pauness is easy to find, however, depending on water level it is what I call a "mud" portage. This year the water was high enough that you could pretty much paddle up to some logs the Forest Service had placed. In previous trips howevr, the water was lower and you had to wade though knee deep mud.  I have a vivid memory of coming up to this portage when it was mud. Two older, apparently experienced men, were sitting in a canoe watching some teenage boys trying to get into their canoe coming out of the portage. The boys were wearing bluejeans and sneakers. And were mud past their knees. Their comment we could hear well out in the lake was "This s####*" .  Be prepared for the BWCA!

And speaking of surprises, we got about 80 rods into the portage and some busy beavers had decided to build a dam someplace nearby and 3-4 rods of the portage were under water. WELL underwater. One of our group waded it - waist deep. The rest of us wimped out and loaded the packs into a canoe and I paddled/poled across the deep area. You could see the boards the Forest Service had installed over the normally muddy section of the trail now about 3-4 feet below the surface of the water.

The rest of the portage was easy and we made it to Lower Pauness without a problem. The nice rock ledge campsite on the peninsula was open but we decided to look on Upper Pauness again. We checked out the campsite just to the north of the 40rod portage and it was very nice - another 8/10. There are also A LOT of sites to pitch a tent on this campsite. At least three areas to pitch tents which would be nice for groups of 9.

Thunderstorms again tonight at dinner time so we didn't cook supper - just a quicky supper and made for the tent. Pitched our tent on a slight downhill slope which turned out to be wise because the other tent was on a lower, flatter region and they had water in their tent during the storms.