Day 5, Wednesday, September 2, 2026, Our 54th Anniversary. Mora L, Little Sag L, no-name, Elton L, Makwa L, 4 portages, 7.3 miles (6.6 paddling, 0.7 portaging).

We woke to a calm beautiful day, our 54th anniversary. Mora Lake was a mirror as we had our breakfast of coffee and loaded oatmeal, and we were on the water before 8:30.

Our portage into Little Sag was a perfect start to the day's travels: both landings were nicely graveled and surrounded by an array of wildflowers. Between Mora and Little Sag the water tumbled through a rocky gorge, and the well-worn portage path above the gorge offered near-constant opportunities to appreciate the beauty of the cascading water. Tia said it's a portage worthy of a name, and suggested Glorious Gorge; she said she'd do the portage again just for the beauty.

Little Saganaga is a big lake, but crossing its southern end offered lots of islands to provide wind shadow if the wind picked up. Wind was never an issue though—the day's paddling was perfect. We had to look a bit to see the portage into the no-name before Elton. At the portage end we met six people/three canoes who shared a lot of information about the route ahead of us, including rave reviews of a couple sites on Makwa, our destination lake for the night. We ate lunch on Makwa's first site, then moved on to evaluate the second and third sites. While the bald rock third site was very tempting, we elected to return to the middle site. It's better suited to our bear hang needs and the desire to clean up a bit. After sponge baths and afternoon coffees, I prepped a lime cheesecake for the dessert we'll have after our 54th anniversary dinner of shrimp chimichurri, an interesting recipe Tia found online a few weeks before our trip. Tia looked up some of the plants we saw on the Glorious Gorge portage, and we reviewed our route plans for the next few days—we don't want too many or too few miles between us and our exit. We decided we have the time and energy to drop further south, then turn back toward Ensign Lake and our Newfound/Moose Lakes exit day paddle.

We've moved south of the burn areas, and have enjoyed seeing the big cliffs lining lakes the past couple days—we thought that might just be a Quetico thing. Dinner was the shrimp recipe mentioned above followed by cheesecake, then played Farkle and read more McManus stories. We were also entertained by a couple beaver swimming past our site and slapping their tails when they spotted us. We took an anniversary photo, then enjoyed a nice sunset before retiring to the tent.