Wednesday, July 07, 2021~Malberg Lake, River Lake, Fishdance Lake The weather changed dramatically (90s as highs the previous days to 40s as lows the rest of the week) today and the mosquitoes found our camp this morning! It was about the worst I've ever seen mosquitoes, but they're easy to keep at bay with repellent so they were nothing more than a nuisance. They ended up being mostly gone by Thursday so my hypothesis is that a specific species of mosquito hatched with the change from hot to cool weather and then they lasted only 24 hours.

We had pancakes and then were on the water at 9:20 for a long day trip to the pictographs on Fishdance lake. We took the northeast portage out of Malberg after hearing how bad the northwest portage is. This meant two extra portages, but the Kawishiwi river was pretty and it was a new area of the BWCA for me. With the wind and current were in our favor, it was just over 3 hours to the pictographs from our camp.

Along the way, we mistakenly took an early portage from the river into Fishdance (make sure you go all the way down to the big rocks. One of the people in our group aptly named this false portage "the pivot portage" after the famous scene from the TV show Friends :-) . It reminded me of a few Quetico portages where I felt like I was constantly trying to fit my 18.5' canoe around tight corners bookended by trees.

The pictographs were disappointing after seeing photos of them in other trip reports. It looked like the surface of the cliff had flaked off in places so perhaps some of the pictographs went with them.

My niece tracked the return trip from Fishdance on her GPS watch. It was 9,936 meters and took us 3 hours, 4 minutes. We dragged lines on part of the return trip and I caught a decent Northern - no pizza for dinner tonight.

After stopping to clean the Northern, we returned to Malberg via the northwest portage - it has earned its reputation. If we’d had our canoes loaded with packs it would have been an almost impossible portage. Mud, a mid-portage flooding that needed to be paddled, and a rock ledge at the end of that paddle. Then more mud to walk through.

Sweet and sour northern for dinner. I sautéd fresh red pepper and onion. I cut the fish into 2" chunks and dipped them in tempura batter before frying them. It was 4-5 pans of 10 chunks of fish. We served it over Minute Rice with a packet of Campbell's Sweet and Sour Skillet mix. It's an involved meal, but it's my favorite on canoe trips.

The mud at the west end of the northwest portage out of Malberg:

This is the rock ledge mid-portage after needing to paddle a flooded portion of the portage: