Day 3 - Long Island Lake to Rush Lake, 10 miles
After another beautiful morning and delicious breakfast we got on the water about 10 again on an already warmer day. M decided to take the canoe on the first portage, an uneventful but strenuous 100 rod job to Cave Lake.
I took the canoe on the 180 to Ross, which turned out to be quite a bit more eventful. M with the pack is a good deal faster than me with the canoe so I was surprised to come upon her about halfway through the portage, to discover she was almost up to her waist in a mudhole. I was trying to figure out how to set down the canoe to help her when she managed to extract herself while staying vertical, without taking off the pack. We realized the middle of this portage was *full* of these mudholes, with uneven rocks, sticks, moss, and other biomass providing unstable and unpromising routes to avoid the holes. M, being flexible and agile on her feet, went slowly ahead of me, identifying a route for me to take the canoe through this part of the portage. It was slow and tedious, but neither of us went in again, so it was a success.
The Ross to Sebeka portage was dry and easy, and both lakes made for beautiful and quick paddles. Just as we reached the Sebeka to Banadad portage a huge group and their dog emerged onto our side of the portage and we expected to be waiting for them to load, but it turns out they were walking the portage for fun (?!?) and had left their unladen canoes on the other side. They warned us about how muddy and difficult the portage would be, which was almost comical given the Cave to Ross portage we'd just done. This was also a muddy portage, but not anywhere near as difficult as that one had been, and even with our gear we were to Banadad long before they got back to their canoes.
Banadad is a shockingly gorgeous lake; I'd visited it for the first time last year on a very long one-way trip across Quetico-Superior with a friend and his son, and in my opinion Banadad feels like the long, narrow lakes of Quetico more than any other lake I've been on in the BWCA. I'd been excited to show M this Quetico-like chain, and Banadad definitely lived up to my memory from last year.
In retrospect we probably should have stopped for the day on Banadad - since we were leaving the next day anyway and we only had about seven total miles to our car left, it didn't really matter which day we put the Banadad-to-Rush portage on, but we both liked the idea of getting a bit more mileage on this day, leaving the exit day for short mileage. We left Banadad, with its beautiful sites, for Rush, which has four sites. I don't read up on sites before trips even when I am planning carefully because it doesn't matter that much to me, and this trip was a minimal-planning event, but Rush demonstrated why sometimes that's not the best strategy. Rush, while not as pretty as Banadad, is a nice lake, but its sites aren't so much. We passed 584, which wasn't taken but looked pretty crappy, to aim for 613, which looked nice on the map, but it was taken; so we cut south to 612 and agreed we'd stay there unless it was unworkable.
M jumped out of the canoe at 612 pretty confident we'd stay there, but she came back to the canoe about two minutes later and said we should find a different site. I've literally never heard her declare a site not good enough for out little two-person tent so I was surprised but figured she had to be overreacting - we've stayed at plenty of mediocre sites that met our needs just fine. So I had her hold the canoe while I took a look, and I can say 612 may be in the running to be the most miserable site in the whole BWCA. The fire grate is perched on a tiny rock outcropping that isn't even flat enough to properly hold the grate, which is attached in three places instead of four; there's a tiny sideways-leaning quasi-cleared spot on the same rock outcropping that *might*, in an emergency, kind of hold a freestanding single-person tent precariously. There's scrub bushes everywhere but nothing over four feet tall. No issue, I figured, there's often a crappy common area at sites that have tent spots tucked back in the woods, so I headed back the latrail. I'd gone less than fifty feet back when I came across the latrine leaning sideways and exposed in a crack between a couple rocks, completely surrounded by more scrub bushes and a couple dead tree trunks. There were no tent spots whatsoever, and no trail leading anywhere beyond the latrine. An impressively miserable site. So we decided to pass.
Psychologically it's hard to backtrack, but after Rush the only remaining site before our car was an isolated site on Skipper that we figured was too close to the entry not to be taken. We didn't like the looks of the other available site we'd passed, so we decided to backtrack to site 583. This was a mile the wrong direction, but a mile of paddling wasn't a big deal, and we found the site to be available and not too bad. Tucked on a ridgeline, the site was narrow with a small common area and only two very small tent spots, but it made an interesting and scenic place to set up our tent. Hilleberg owners love to post photos of their tents in ridiculous spots, and by that standard this site seemed almost spacious. We had to both use one door on the tent as the other was hanging onto the edge of the drop toward the lake, but the tent pad itself was pretty flat and nicely tucked into the trees.

After our last dinner we had our traditional apple crisp to mark the last night of a trip, watched the sky for a bit, and called it a night.
~Long Island Lake, Cave Lake, Ross Lake, Sebeka Lake, Banadad Lake, Rush Lake