We arrived in Ely around 9pm Friday night. With a stop at Cranberry's for a burger basket and pitcher of ice cold Summit, we were at the trail head by 10:30pm. The drive up Fernberg Rd was a dark one. Overcast and New Moon, not the best time for a night hike in, as a Full Moon would have been better but it was the only weekend that worked for us to get in our almost annual winter camping trip to the BWCA area. Even though we weren't "technically" in the Boundary Waters this trip. Once we got out of the car and shut the lights off, I've never experienced dark like that before...It was BLACK! We thought about just camping at the car and making the hike in the morning. But we checked out the trail and it look fairly recently traveled and by the map it only seamed to be a mile in so we packed up our sleds and headed in. It was dark the trail got steep and lots of ups and downs. We wished there was a moon as we couldn't even tell if we were near the lake standing on these huge bluffs. After two and a half hours of numerous ups and downs and some so steep that we actually had to rappel our sleds down one section of the trail we came to the conclusion that apparently the person or persons that went in ahead of us must have just been day hikers and weren't even going to the lake or we missed the access point due to not being able to see. So once on top of the high cliffs we were able to make out that this must be the lake and started unloading our gear and tossing it off the side of a cliff and shimmy down to get to the lake. We find a place to camp and we had our tent set up by 1:30am and hit the bags for the night!