After a 45 minute teardown of the Amok setup (I am either wildly inefficient or it’s way too much work for me), we were ready to head out. With Iron Lake in our sights, we set off to the northwest. The portage at the northeast end of Stuart is really neat with a sand beach. That portage was the most challenging I’ve tackled in 3 trips to the BWCA as there was a ton of blowdown and it’s not a short portage. I would rate it a 7-8 in terms of difficulty because of the combination of length and portage maintenance. The other portages into Iron were easy and short and the lakes were neat. Very little use of the campsites between Stuart and Iron.

We talked with a group at the portage before Iron and they said the island site near Peterson Bay was open so we set our sights on that. The site was still open and boy was it a treat. Huge site with a great kitchen area. Kitchen area had a couple nice staging areas on each side of the fire grate and a “coffee table” in front of the grate. I took a quick lake swim to wash the portage grime off, rinsed out my old clothes and put on my extra set of clothes. I was a bit disappointed to see some BWCA fouls- Bubba, nobody cares that you were there so there’s no reason to let us know by writing on the fire grate. I also spent about 15 minutes scouting a good spot for a hammock hang and after finding a nice spot west of the kitchen area and setting up my tarp, I noticed a walleye carcass on the rocks right in front of my setup. I decided to dispose of the carcass but move my setup as I didn’t have a lot of desire to sleep next to the scents that were inevitably leftover.

We fished around the mouth of Peterson Bay and caught some walleye for dinner. I also caught a perch, which made 4 species on the trip for me, a personal record - Perch, walleye, smallie, and pike. We fileted the walleye and had that as an appetizer to add to our dehydrated sausage and Hot Cheeto Mac & Cheese. With the breeze, we decided against having a fire and cooked our walleye and mac & cheese over the jet boil with a makeshift stove setup. Great weather for the day with a high of 76 and sunny skies, but some smoke from the Canadian wildfires degraded the visibility.