Monday, July 16: We get up, fix breakfast, break camp, and get ready for a long paddle east across Winchell. Fortunately, the slight wind is at our backs. Winchell is not a particularly good lake for a variety of fishing, lake trout and northerns almost exclusively. We tried to catch some of the trout the night before but came up with skunks. It really is a pretty lake, albeit a long one. The south shore has the impressive hills, remember Minnesota's highest peak is only a few miles to the south, and the north shore offers some really nice looking campsites. As we get to the east end of the lake, it appears that either the leaves on the trees are changing, or the trees appear to be dying. As we get closer, we notice that it appears the trees had caught on fire near the bases and burned over a wide area. The portage into Gaskin confirmed the presence of a recent fire. Did the Ham Lake fire spread this far to the south? Once we got into Gaskin we found some more area of the fire, but it seemed OK on the eastern half. We found a number of open sites, but eventually settled on the site that is the second one from the east end of the lake. This turns out to be the best site I have stayed at in 5 years of BW travel, a most accommodating site for our large group of 8. It has log steps built up from the edge of the water to the elevated site, a large area around the firepit, yet plenty of trees to hang hammocks and a tarp from. There is water on three sides of the site, and a path through a birch forest leads to the latrine. Another interesting feature of this site is a mushroom shaped rock on the water's edge. While swimming in the early afternoon, we spotted a moose grazing along the shore of an island about 200 yards off from our site. Supper that evening was steaks, baked potatoes, and for dessert cake, that my nephew Brian has perfected with the Outback Oven. Here you see nephew Josh, our "keeper of the fire" guarding the steaks and spuds. Later that evening at dusk, my brother Tom, Matt, and I were fishing off the island where we spotted the moose when we heard it come off the island and graze in the shallows about 50 feet away from us, and then swim back to the mainland, coming within 20 feet of our knoo. The picture shows the silhouette of the moose's head poking out of the water with the sunset behind it. We didn't catch much for fish, a couple little smallies, but what a sight that moose was.