Up at 7:00, but, boy, was I stiff! Everything was tight and I had a hard time getting up off the ground. I popped an Aleve and was better within 15 minutes.

Since we had such a nice site, Jim and I decided to turn this into a base camp trip. So we had breakfast, packed our day packs, and left for Hazel Lake at 8:00 a.m. The Phoebe River is beautiful. The portages were easy and not too long. In fact, they seemed shorter than what the map said they were (How often does that happen?). All the portages were around beautiful rapids. What a great, little river to paddle!

Jim and I spotted the healthiest, largest fox I have ever seen. I don’t think either of us got a good picture, but this fox looked like it had its winter coat still and appeared to be the size of a dog. The foxes in my area are skinny little things the size of a house cat. This was a beautiful animal and it looked like a classic fox, except big. There was no doubt it was a fox. Spring comes late and the animals are big up north.

We got to Hazel at noon and grabbed an empty campsite to have lunch. There are 3 campsites on Hazel. All appeared to be vacant. We were on the western-most site (#1068). Hazel is a nice lake, but doesn’t appear to be popular.

The wind had kicked up as we reached Hazel and we fought it all the way back to Polly. The Prism handled the wind great, so it was still a very enjoyable paddle for me. We were back to camp at 4:30 pm.

The day was, again, very hot, way too hot for June! There were no bugs, however. We saw no other people on our entire day trip to Hazel and back.

We had Jim’s Damn Good Chili for supper (Excellent) along with some marginal corn bread I made in the reflector oven. The wind was causing problems with the oven (I think). One down side of using a reflector oven in the BWCA is that there is only one place it can be used – the opening of the fire grate. Other places you can move the oven to take advantage of the wind, but not in the BWCA. The wind was just too strong and from the wrong direction. It was blowing the heat out of the oven. However, this was the only trip I had problems with the oven. The corn bread was still edible, just a bit crumbly.

When 10:30 pm rolled around, I was off to bed. This time I took a bottle of water and an Aleve with me to stash in the tent’s vestibule.