We got a slightly slower start to the morning, but were packed up and in the canoe by 9. After a quick paddle around the corner from our campsite we were at the portage to Fern. The theme for this day was solitude (we didn't see any other canoers until we got to the portage to Little Sag) and overgrown portages that were a little trickier to find in comparison to the portages from our first day.

It was a beautiful morning. All the lakes we paddled across were smooth as glass. It was very interesting to see some of the burn areas and to see the process of the forest recovering. The area was absolutely beautiful. If you don't need tall trees for hammocks or hanging food, it would be a great area to stay in. You would have the area all to yourself. We saw lots of loons and an eagle.

Overall it was a fairly uneventful day of paddling and portaging. The portages themselves weren't overly difficult, a few of the landings were a bit rocky/tricky to get the canoe out of the water but other than that they included some elevation and lots of overgrown branches and weeds to push through along the way. The only excitement of the day was getting attacked by leaches both coming into and leaving Powell.

We had our first human contact of the day when we reached the portage landing on Virgin heading into Little Sag. We enjoyed a quick snack break while we waited for them to finish loading and then we knocked out our last portage of the day and canoed on in to Little Saganaga.

We entered Little Sag a little before noon and began hunting for a campsite. We were hoping for one of the sites on the island at the north end of the lake, not too far from the portage and we were successful. They were both empty so we chose the one with the sand beach (campsite 821), although we didn't actually find the trail through the woods to the sandy beach until later in the afternoon.

We quickly set up camp and enjoyed the afternoon. My husband (the portaging rockstar) took a well deserved nap in the hammock, while the boys and I swam across the bay to one of the islands.

We had planned a rest day for the next day so we enjoyed a lazy night of fishing and relaxing. We had bacon and cheese quesadillas with rice for dinner and then attempted to make brownies over the fire with our jello mold oven. The mosquitoes came out in full force before the brownies were finished cooking so we enjoyed "lava" cake instead, and then headed to the tent to avoid the bugs.

~Gillis Lake, Fern Lake, Powell Lake, West Fern Lake, Virgin Lake, Little Saganaga Lake