We woke up at 5am and got our food from the CCO kitchen freezer (they gave us a key, since we would be up before they opened, CCO is awesome!). Packed the food pack, grabbed the leeches, and off we went up the echo trail. We unloaded the car, both of us planned to take one last deuce before we hit the trail, just to find out there is no latrine at the EP (this was a first for me). Neither of us had to go that bad, so off we went, hitting the trail at 6:15am We started off with two fully loaded packs, the big pack with all the personal gear and the tent weighed about 50lbs, with a front pack with the fishing gear weighing another 7lb. The food and gear pack weighed in at about 48lbs with an estimated 25lbs of that being food. Chris took the big pack (machismo) and I started out with the canoe knowing I would pass it to him when I got tired. We started out down the 411rd to 433rd portage depending on which map you look at. I did about 100rd passed the canoe to Chris, he did about 100rd and passed it to me, it’s at this point he let me know he has been going to physical therapy for his knee this year (as thoughts going through my head that we should have done this trip in our 20s). We got to what we thought was the end of the portage loaded the canoe and down the creek we went. We soon realized we put in the canoe too early and were supposed to cross that creek on the portage. But figured it was good practice for what we would encounter in Sterling Creek later in the week. I got out to see if we had to portage around a beaver dam and found a couple a raspberries to take back to Chris, so that was a bonus. We pulled over the beaver dam, and it took us about another half an hour to navigate the creek to the point were the portage would have ended. Spoiler Alert: it only took us 4 min to walk that portion of the portage on the way back. So DON’T put in too early even if the creek looks high enough to traverse.

We continued on the Stuart River, figuring out our portaging plan and learning the best ways for us to pull over the beaver dams. There were 4 pull overs and 6 total beaver dams on the Stuart river.

We got to Stuart Lake and to the PMA portage in a little over 4 hrs, single portaging the whole way, I was pretty happy with that considering we had a mishap early. The landing was easy to find and was marked with a rock cairn. We sat down took a break filtered water, ate lunch (summer sausage, cheese, crackers, protein bar, trail mix), and rested about 1hr before tackling our first PMA portage. CCO told us to go ahead and try single portaging it, we should be able to follow the portage path, and to drop the canoe if we get tired or lost it. So that’s what we did. The trail was easy to follow for about the fist 1/3, but then all of a sudden we found ourselves lost in the woods with no trail in sight. It was so overgrown with undergrowth, the trail just disappeared. We dropped the canoe and the packs and went searching for the trail. After some time, about when I thought we were just going to have to bushwack our way all the way through, Chris found the trail. At this point we just took the packs and dropped a pin on the GPS for the canoe and off we went. Until we lost the trail again. Dropped the packs, searched for the trail a bit, couldn’t find so decided to take a break, get the canoe and bring it to the pack, we did and found the path again and continued on our way double portaging still. We got to the end of the portage with the packs, took the saw with us on the way back to clear some down trees to get the canoe through on the way back. And finally made it to Nibbon, 2.5hrs later on the first 213rd PMA portage.

We had a short paddle through Nibbon and was able to pull over a beaver dam and into Bibbon (we were excited not to have to the 8rd portage). At the end of Bibbon, we found the landing with another rock cairn, we decided this time to double portage this one at 171rds. We found both Moose scat and wolf scat on this portage. This portage had some elevation change and a couple of technical climbs with the canoe, but in all this portage trail was much easier to follow, much less undergrowth, more rocky, and being so, more rock cairns on this trail. Of all the PMA portages around Sterling, this was the one that we probably could have single portaged. We had continued to take turns with the canoe on the last portage, but I could tell Chris was getting tired an his knee was hurting, so I took the canoe on the double portage. We had made it to Sterling, and we needed water (Chris only brought a 24oz water bottle, he said we was defiantly getting a liter Nalgene bottle if he went again). I trolled a husky jerk and caught the first fish of the trip, and a first for me in BWCA, a nice sized sucker fish. I picked up one more eater sized walleye on the way to the island site on the north east portion of Sterling at 3:45pm about a 9.5hr day. We were both exhausted and sore. We set up camp, there was a really nice rock fire grate at the campsite, and we loved the mossy west facing tent pad on the top of the rock cliff. There was a second tent pad in the woods closer to the fire grate, that looked okay too if needed for a second tent. We took a swim, and the water felt fantastic on the surface, but really cold if you went vertical with your feet down which surprised me for a small lake like Sterling that was no deeper than 11ft and only 7 to 8ft deep on the north end where we were. We relaxed and fished with a bobber and leech in about 4ft of water off our campsite and Chris caught a nice eater sized walleye. We made a Mountain House Spaghetti dinner and had a Backpackers Pantry Chocolate Cheesecake for dessert. We knew that there was a 0% chance of rain the first night and clear skys so we got to leave the rain fly off the tent, enjoy a beautiful sunset, have a fire, and enjoy the stars…. Kind of. Though it was cool to see the moon rise over the trees (the next night was the full moon), the sky was so bright and we quickly realized it wasn’t going to be good for star gazing and went to sleep.