Boundary Waters, Trip Reports, BWCA, Stories

Cummings Lake after reopening
by tsprings

Trip Type: Paddling Canoe
Entry Date: 09/05/2021
Entry & Exit Point: Crab Lake and Cummings from Burntside Lake (EP 4)
Number of Days: 5
Group Size: 4
Day 3 of 5
Tuesday, September 07, 2021 After a night of thunderstorms and rain, and knowing the forecast was calling for more scattered showers and thunderstorms we decided to not plan for much time in the canoes. (BTW, you do get cell service at Cummings. Not something I was really excited about, because we wanted to unplug, but it was nice to quickly turn the phone on and get weather updates). We decided to hike instead of paddle, so we went to the east shore of Cummings and picked up the hiking trail and hiked over 2 miles to Coxey Pond on the hiking trail.

Coxey Pond is beautiful and has some scenic points. Sorry I didn't take more photos. We brought our poles and immediately caught a number of nice smallies from shore but threw them back hoping for some larger ones. That was our mistake because the fishing shut down soon after. We struggled to catch anything over 10". We decided to hike down to Silaca Lake and try our luck there. We pulled in a few nice eater largemouth and smallmouth there and took them back to Coxey for a shorelunch. We brought our camp stove with and we fried the the fish up at the only campsite on Coxey.

Just about the time we finished the skies turned grey and we quickly packed up. The rain came hard and soon turned to hail. We started our hike back in the rain. Eventually it stopped but it tested our rain gear and boots, and unfortunately some of it didn't pass the test.

Back at camp the sun peaked out for a moment. We soaked up the sun while we could because it wasn't long before the storms rolled back in.

And so the rain continued on and off the rest of the night