Vera Lake to Eddy Lake

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Starting out the second day, we knew we had some miles to make.  (10.7, as it was, to our decision point.)  Eddy Lake was the last lake where we could either cut back toward Lake One (via Kekabic, Fraser, Thomas, and Insula) or continue outward to small lakes and long days (out to Ogishkemuncie, Gabimichigami, and Little Saganaga).  If we made Eddy (or, better yet, even further), we might be up to the longer trip.  If not, we would need to shave the extra 10 miles and turn back toward Ely.
We got up at a reasonable time, and had some awesome ha-bros with peppers, onion, and cheese.  And though breakfast and packing up took us a little while, we were at our second huge portage (of the trip) in no time.  After 200+ rods of some rugged travel, we got to the lake we were going to spend all day on, Knife Lake.

Isle of Pines

Home of the Rootbeer Lady and the first we saw of the forest fires that have gone through in the past decade, Knife Lake wasn't half as bad as it could have been.  When we got there, the sun was out, and we were feeling pretty toasty from the hike over.  Ali and I got our only swim of the trip in, and after a couple handfuls of snacks, we were off.

We were lucky enough to have an awesome tailwind, which meant that Ali had a good half hour's worth of lounging in the first third of the lake.  We had some nice fluffy clouds and blue sky for that third, but it didn't last long.

The wind picked up just as we were getting to the North/South branching of Knife Lake - also right around the time we got into the burn area.  Giant grey clouds were rolling in behind us, and though we were paddling reasonably hard to stay warm, we probably didn't even make it half a mile before the rain caught us.

The rain itself wasn't too bad - nothing pelting or stinging, but the wind made it somewhat uncomfortable none the less.  Shortly after the rain started, one of our buddies got a little hungry.  We pulled off at this small island and found some shelter on the leeward side.  Nutella, flatbread, fruit, and veggies were on the menu, and we left just as I was starting to get chilled again.

We had a pretty overcast remainder of the lake, with maybe a break or two in the clouds while on the South Arm.  Just before the beach for the portage, the sun came through again, and stayed out pretty well for the rest of the evening.  The bay the portage was in looked like the prettiest thing ever, though I'm willing to admit that that may have just been due to the sunlight.  I don't think I'm used to such dramatic improvement of landscapes with the addition to sun.  The Smokies look pretty decent/misty even with rain, but the Boundary Waters' rocky outcroppings with really reflective water get rather stark/grim when the clouds darken.

Anyhow, the portage between Knife and Eddy was short (20ish rods), so I tried out the whole portaging thing minus my pack.  It was still pretty early in the day (3:00 maybe); after we shuttled our gear, we went back to find/check out the waterfall on the portage.  Eddy drains through a small creek into Knife Lake, and there was a pretty sizable falls right in the middle

We grabbed some pictures and headed a short way to our campsite for the night.  After putting up the bear bag line and tents (on pretty rocky ground - we had to tie some of our tent attachment points out), we started pouring over the maps and prepping some fry pizzas.  The shorter route looked best since (a) we were pretty inefficient at clearing out of camp and portaging and (b) there was still some illness going around in the group.  It wasn't the happiest of things for me to agree with, but it was the right decision.  The trip still was fantastic, and having only the shorter mileage to worry about, I relaxed a lot more the next few days.

Our fry pizzas were delectable.  All but the first held together well, though there is something to be said for the size and lid of a fry-bake.  The evening fire kept the bugs away (not that there were many), and I turned in pretty worn out.  I slept pretty lightly, thinking that the bear bags were awfully close to the trees.  In the middle of the night, I woke up to either the actual snapping of a branch or from a noisy dream.  Poor Ali had to come check the food with me, and while we did wake one of our friends up by stomping around, we didn't make him get out of the tent.  The food was safe, of course, and so we went to bed again.  I slept much more soundly the second half of the night.

I will give you that this was really pretty, if really dark and gloomy

Near our portage to Eddy 

Bringing us to Shore

End of Knife Lake (for us)

View of Knife Lake from the Portage

Top of the Falls

Portage + Falls

View from Our 2nd Campsite

Moose Lake to Vera

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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.

Flowers near our campsite

Anyhow, we had some time to watch the sunset, fish, and finally tucked off into bed.

Home Sweet Home

Purifying some H2O

Evening

Governor Dodge Camping

Governor Dodge is probably my favorite Wisconsin State Park.  It is large; the campsites aren't directly adjacent to large roads; there are a couple of nice lakes and even some nice forests/prairies/mini-canyons.  It's pretty spectacular by WI standards.  (I might even say midwest standards if it wasn't for Michigan).  This past weekend, as a prelim-writing-is-mostly-done reward, Ali and I headed up there with 4 other folks from our class.  Campsite availability was pretty tricky to find, and we ended up in the "backpacker" loop (hooray!).  We drove in to the less-visited side of the park and dragged all our car-camping supplies in the 1/2mile trail.  We might not have needed the two coolers and three cords of wood, but I was feeling rather accomplished once we got them to the campsite.  It was also awesome having a proper backpack that I could use to carry all of our personal/shareable gear (2 sleeping bags, 2 tents, 2 sleeping pads, 2 people's clothes, stove, pots, bowls, bug spray, sunscreen, etc).  Thankfully, we put our 3L of water in the daypack.  From there, we settled in for some good campfire cooking and gossiping.  Though we hadn't planned the date based on the Perseids, several of us did realize it would be happening.  After about 10 or so, we wandered into a nearby opening and caught some really fantastic meteors.
Saturday, we got up reasonably early and got breakfast going.  My whisperlite was sputtering something awful and could barely hold a flame.  Thus, everything took 2-3x as long to cook, and anyone trying to use the stove after our cheesy eggs were done was out of luck.  I disassembled the stove, wiped off the carbon build-up, ran some water through, and needed a fair amount of help getting the thing back together.  After that adventure, we split up into the fishing-folk and the hiking-folk.  T-, Ali, and I headed for two hikes - one through the mini-canyon and one circumnavigating the smaller of the two lakes.  Did I mention that the weather for the weekend was perfect?  Because sunny with 70s/50s is pretty perfect.  I've done both the Lost Canyon and Cox Hollow hikes before (in the fall/winter), and they're equally stunning in the summer.  It took us a couple of hours to do both loops; we were headed back up to our campsite by 4.  Encased meat and s'mores served for dinner, and Ali and I went for a second night without putting up the fly.  You could hear coyotes in the gulch again the second night, but I didn't bother staying awake to track their progress.

Cox Hollow Lake

Lunch Buddy

Sunday, we woke a little later, had breakfast a bit slower (with a sputtering but high-flame stove), and eventually packed our stuff out.  The day was getting cloudy, and there was a tiny bit of rain that hit our car on the way out of the park.  I've since figured out how to properly unclog the stove (way easier than I was expecting), and I really wish that I could get some more camping instead of prepping for my second prelim.

This is our local "whitewater" run

 Seriously.  This is where the outings club takes people to train them on pushy current.  Yes, it's just the Prairie-Du-Sac Dam on the Wisconsin River.  To be fair, it is waaay closer than the other beginner-friendly runs.

These are the kinds of monster consequences you have to face if you take a swim.  (Granted, there are some pre-historic-looking paddlefish that call the Sac home.  Those guys have been known to hit a kayaker in the head before.)

Biking to New Glarus

A few weekends back, Ali and I took a break from Hoofers-ing and writing to go for our second (pitiful, I know) bike camp of the year.  We took the Badger State trail down past Paoli and Belleville and then took some lovely backroads over to New Glarus Woods State Park.  We got in pretty early, so we went down to New Glarus to look for a swimmin hole.  Though that endeavor failed, we did get some really tasty coffee and pie for our troubles.  That evening, we cooked on my fancy alcohol stove (about time), stayed up for as long as possible (maybe an hour), and turned in (to a tent within spitting distance of a state highway).  Unfortunately, I was up most of the night thanks to some critters - my bet is a fox early on and then definitely a racoon later.  Ali got a similar amount of sleep thanks to my rustling and her deflating sleeping mat.  The next day was pretty exhausting, but we finally got on the Sugar River State Trail.  (As such, I'm pretty sure we've now been on all the rail trails within a day's bike of Madison.  Don't worry - there are more further north, west, and east of town.)  Thankfully, while the stupid racoon did scatter our trash and unbuckle my panniers, it didn't manage to unzip our food bag.  I guess I'll have to start considering a bear bag while bike camping.

The first 11 miles are beautifully paved

Lunch in Belleville

Long, dark tunnel - at least we had good headlights this time!

Freshly paved backroads - can you ask for anything more?

Just down from the campsite - that's New Glarus in the distance

Best post-ride choice thus far in WI

Post-Racoon