FEET!!: Moose Lake to Vera

View Day 1 in a larger map

Day 1 started off bumpily enough. After waking up to the beautiful (if a little cloudy) vista down from our campsite, we got on the road back toward Ely for breakfast. I think we drove around half the town looking for Brittons, a well-reviewed diner, and when we finally got there, a loud hissing was coming from the front passenger tire. We called Enterprise and started canvasing the nearby shops asking for a tire shop. The diner lady looked at me like I was crazy and asked what a "Firestone" was, but the real estate lady next door called ahead to the dealership to clear stuff up. (The rental place said that paying us back would be easier than towing us halfway across the state.)

Superior Forest Fall Lake Campground

Just Down From our Campsite

We walked back over to have breakfast, and it was a very fitting pre-adventure meal. (Read as: HUGE.) The stuffed hash browns were delectable, as was pretty much everything else there. As soon as our car was ready (not one, but two nails in the tire), we hopped back in and headed off for Canadian Border Road. It was a bit longer of a drive than I was expecting, but the sun decided to come out just as we got into our (motorized) boat. We rode all the way to Ensign, though our map showed that as impossible.
We did have a short but pleasant portage from Splash Lake over to Ensign. The guy who drove us over hauled one of the canoes for us, and then we were finally on water.

Moose Lake, by the outfitters

The first bit of business was to get the other couple situated in their canoe. We tried a little of instruction first thing, but with the distance we had to go, they swapped bow/stern positions pretty quickly. We passed a fair number of fishers on our way out, and there was a low-flying Forest Service plane running a grid over us. (We thought it might be search and rescue, but we found out later that a fire closed our entry point the day after we started.) Oh, and did I mention otters? Yup, we hung out with a group of 4-5 otters for a bit. It was awesome. We did a good amount of fair-weather paddling with the wind at our backs to get down the length of Ensign. Unfortunately, some rain started pushing in around the time we missed the first portage. There was a campsite that we matched up with the map to start our portage-hunt, but we just missed the spot thinking it was too marshy. We paddled a while in the wrong direction before turning into the wind (and eventually rain) to correct our course.

Ensign Lake, finally at a portage!

Though we had to use a different portage than the one originally intended, we finally found one way to get across to Vera Lake. At around 200 rods and with full packs (my food pack was heavy and Ali had almost all of our camping stuff), this was one of the more difficult walks. Blood sugar was also a bit low, but we fixed that once out of the rain on the far side of the portage.

After some hummus, tabouleh, and a break, we were home free for the last bit of the day. Though we had put on pretty late, we were also off around 4.

Lunch time

Once in camp, we got a bear line and the tents up, and everybody got some down time. We had a later dinner of angelhair pasta with cheese, garlic, and sundried tomatoes. There was a pasta-draining issue, so we lost half our pasta. In an attempt to dispose of it properly, we canoed across the lake to look for soft-enough ground to cathole it. Unfortunately, the area is darned rocky (also causes non-freestanding-tent problems), so we ended up trying to scatter it out in the woods. This also failed catastrophically, and I'm certain that some bear has since found our spaghetti-instead-of-tinsel Christmas trees.