Thursday, September 01, 2022. Quetico, Conk, and Jean Lakes. 2 portages (120 and 170 meters). 12.75 miles total.

We were up at 6:00 and had a colorful sky with our coffee.

We were on the water at 8:00 and planned to paddle east most of the day with wind at our backs, and it mostly worked that way. Because of the low angle of the sun and paddling east, we hugged the south shore to minimize glare on the water. As we rounded a small point, I spotted a bald eagle at water's edge and we stopped paddling. The bird was wet, and when it saw us it tried to fly but flopped in the water, then perched on a rock as we drifted slowly by. We passed within 15 feet of the eagle, and I was able to get several good shots of the bird. We'll probably never be that close to an eagle in the wild again. When it had dried a bit more, it flew away.

Today's route took us past our Day 4 campsite, where we saw trumpeter swans. Before the bay, we saw a strange, lumpy looking rock, and as we approached it, the lumps turned into mergansers. There were at least 20 birds in the group, easily the biggest raft of mergansers we've seen. We paddled into the bay, hoping to spot the swans again, but they had moved on, only leaving cigar-sized droppings and a few feathers on the shoal we'd seen them share. Down the lake we met the Indiana crew we'd put in with on Day 1; they were headed out. Near the eastern end of Quetico Lake we turned into a channel to the south that would lead us to Conk and Jean Lakes. We had originally planned to camp on Quetico Lake, but it wasn't even time for lunch yet, so we kept moving. We portaged into Conk and back into wind from the west. Our shoulders whined a bit, so we stopped for lunch near the portage into Jean. As we ate, a couple trumpeter swans flew past us and landed just across the bay from our lunch stop.

Again we're seeing lots of evidence of the area's logging days, including an anchoring ring where the portage trail from Conk ends on Jean, and a cable pretzel and part of an old wood-burning stove in our campsite on Jean.

Jean is a big, pretty lake with primarily an east-west orientation, and we again had winds from the west when we got on the main body of the lake, so we took the first campsite we found. The spit just out of the portage is very flat and appears to have been a logging camp area. Shallow pools on the rocks around the site are filled with frogs, and there are corydalis in bloom in a couple grassy spots near the pools.