Saturday, May 31, 2025

We awoke to a gorgeous morning on Gun Lake.

Plan for today was to head up to Crooked and paddle until we've had enough. After some cakes for breakfast and a quick pack up, we were on the water around 9:00. I forget which portage between Gun and Crooked, but we came across the always beautiful Lady Slipper. We made it to Crooked and as is usually the case for all canoe trips, we were paddling straight into the wind. We stopped at site 1869 for some lunch, took a swim to cool off and clean up a bit. This site is elevated doesn't have much for tent pads and the fire grate is oddly placed off to the side. It's best feature would be the 4ish or so high rock where you can jump into the lake. It's plenty deep right off the site. From there we made our way up the bay hung a right and headed towards the falls. There was a surprising amount of current. In spots where the lake narrowed, it was full throttle with the solo and single blade to keep it moving forward. The current was easily visable and lots of little swirls and whirpools. If you got turned sideways at all in the more narrow points you would just be swept back down. We paddled until around 5:00 and settled into site 1859. This site had decent tent pads, but it was hard to get comfortable using some of them as a number of them had widowmakers leaning over them. This site also gave me the creeps a bit. Yep I said it. It gave me the creeps. Let me expand: This was my 41st overall BW trip and in addition to that i've spent countless hours and countless other nights in the SNF. In 26 years of spending ALOT of time in the woods, I can count on one had the times I've got the "creeps". In this case, we kept hearing this odd, louder than you'd expect sound back in the woods behind camp. It sounded like either a big stick getting snapped in half or rocks clanking together. After hearing a few times and kind of around sunset, we wandered back into the woods to investigate. We came across an area where the were some large swan feathers laying around and at one point, my son and I were maybe 30 feet apart standing still and listning when we heard the loud cracking sound right between us, with no apparant cause of the sound. We walked back to camp and had a kind of uneasy nights sleep, being woken multiple times by various strange sounds. It was just weird. I had something very similar happen many years ago on Kekekabic...just unusual clanking/cracking sounds that just kind of seemed out of place.