Woke up at 5:30am had a quick breakfast of protein bar and bacon, and broke camp by 6:30am. We set off on Sterling but we needed to get water. Our gravity water filter started to drain really slow after a few days in the shallow lake. So I had to filter water while Chris paddled us out of Sterling. He paddled us almost all the way to the 8rd portage before I was finished filling our two water bottles. Lesson learned, don’t be lazy the night before and go get water!

The 8rd portage we had scoped out the day before was rocky, but easy and quick enough. We got to the 139rd PMA portage unloaded the canoe. We decided we were going to double portage this one after all the adventures we had the first day with the PMA portaging. We quickly found some berries, at first I thought they were raspberries, but quickly realized the ripper ones were darker, it was a blackberry patch! And there were a ton! It was early in the day, but I knew Chris wanted to forage for berries and the blueberries were dried up, so we decided we were going to portage the packs and take some time on the return to pick some berries.

We conducted the first half of the portage following the trail with little issues, we got to a big clearing and followed the creek until it went back in the woods. At this point we got off track and lost the portage, it took us awhile to bushwack through the woods before we found the trail again, and eventually finished the portage. Dropped the packs, and headed back. It was much easier to follow the trail heading back and we thought it will be an easy return, it only took us 16min to walk the portage back, then we stopped for 37min (yes I timed it) and picked two bags full of blackberries. We then picked up the canoe for the return to the end of the portage, we made it a little bit further this time past the clearing before we lost the trail again. Chris was about over it and was just plowing straight through the brush with the canoe. We eventually dropped the canoe, searched and searched for the trail. Eventually finding it. That portage back with the canoe took us 45min!!!

9:30am by the time we reached Sterling Creek. I was concerned that this may be the most difficult part of our trip traversing this creek in Aug. Surprisingly we entered with plenty of water in Sterling Creek. It started out pretty open, and was a fairly easy paddle, though it was winding with tight turns. It started getting very narrow and really tight turns, with lots of beaver dams to pull over. The water was close to 3-4ft deep in most parts of the creek. The last 50yrds or so we very tight, very windy, and we did keep getting stuck in the grassy creek vegetation that was choking out the creek path. Again, you stick a canoe paddle down, it went down almost to the handle. We were able to stand on top of the vegetation and pull the canoe through just like the beaver dams, but I was just waiting for someone to go in chest deep. I had to stand up in the canoe at one point to make sure we were going to right direction, we could see the beartrap river, but had to continue to navigate the creek to get there. Once on the Beartrap river it was pretty easy and straight forward. A few more beaver dams to pull over and some rocks to travers and float the canoe around.

The 10rd portage we double portaged and two man carried the canoe, we double portaged the 17rd and 35rd portages. We got to the 110rd portage and again double portaged it. Chris was out of water again, so I had him get out lunch and filter more water at the end of the portage. I went back for the canoe. This being the last PMA portage, it wasn’t too bad, there were too kind of tricky turns with the canoe, but nothing like we experienced on both sides of Sterling.

We ate lunch (protein bar, beef stick, trail mix, and a 3 musketeer bar) at the rock cliff landing at the end of the portage. We left the portage and on iron lake at 1pm. Paddled Peterson’s Bay and arrived at the southern most campsite (1837) on Iron at 1:30pm. 7hr travel day.

I was excited to see for the first time on this trip, and headed straight to the latrine. We set up camp, managed a great bear hang, and ate some blackberries. There were a few tent pads, one looked to have been underwater, one looked rocky, the other was just fine (but not as nice as our last pad). The campsite was a big and really open campsite with tall pine trees. Would be great for hammock campers. With the wind coming out of the south it was perfect to keep the bugs at bay. The shoreline was really shallow and the landing was great. But the best part about this site was the kitchen and firegrate. It was built up really nice, build up a little off the ground, it had lots of space for camp cooking, and even had a little cubby to keep your firewood out of the rain.

We found some old rope up in a tree, from a failed bear hang. I told Chris why don’t you shimmy up that tree and get it down, after looking at it and telling me how he might be able to get it down, he turned and looked at me and said nope, Chaos would do it, but Chris will not. Chaos was his nickname through our 20s. He was known to do…. Crazy things. There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t climb to include apartment balcony’s and such. His wife had a conversation with him before he went on this trip, “Chaos would do this…., but Chris does not do ….”, he has two young kids and is finally putting the Chaos days behind him. Though his wife was a bit concerned with him going on this trip. We continued to work on our bear hang, and had one of the best bear hangs I’ve done in BWCA. It is so much easy hanging a pack of food for 2 people than it is for 9. You can use much smaller branches! The water looked to be down about 4ft from the shoreline rocks, and in the back bay we went for a swim and walked out quite a ways from our campsite. We then proceeded to go fishing, forgot to take the net and it costed us the biggest walleye of the trip that got off at the side of the canoe. We managed to bring back 3 walleye for dinner, we fried them up with some taco rice and tortilla’s and had fish tacos for dinner. It was a late dinner as we were heading back in from fishing as the sun was setting. We cleaned dishes, filtered water, had a fire, and off to bed.