Tuesday, October 6, 2009

BWCA re-cap...

So everything went really well for the first 12 hours or so of our BWCA trip. We got our canoe at about 9am and got loaded and were on the water at 930am. We headed due north up Sawbill Lake. The goal was to make it to Cherokee Lake about 10 miles away. We made it to our first portage and that was fine, in fact we made it to Cherokee found a nice campsite and got everything set up with no problems. Our tent site was awesome, up on a rock out cropping 3/4 surrounded by trees. We went back out in the canoe and got water for drinking and cooking and headed back in. We were tired and were hungry so we decided to have an early dinner. I fired up the stove and got some dinner cooked. Melissa and I sat down by the lake and enjoyed our dinner and enjoyed each others company. We then gathered wood for a campfire. We finally got a small fire going, we had a tough time finding dry wood but finally gathered enough to get something going. The fire turned out to be great. All of this time we noticed that the wind was picking up little by little. By the time we called it a night and hit the tent which was around 8pm the wind was blowing hard. I would guess 30mph for sure. We sat in the tent and played cards and talked and listened to the wind. The next day when we woke, it was blowing even harder, raining, there were white caps on the lake and it was cold... Ugh. We decided to just lay around and see what happened and hoped it would clear. Nope 5 hours later, same thing, 10 hours later same thing, 15 hours later same thing. At some point in the morning I ran over and got our food bag out of the tree because it looked like it was going to be a long day in the tent and we had to eat. And at that point I did not care about bears or anything, it couldn't get much worse. We ended up sitting in our Mountain Hardware tent for a total of 37 hours. It was horrid. I became an expert at cooking in the vestibule of the tent which was good. The weather was so bad and the wind was blowing so hard that I was actually a little nervous about the tent a couple times. I restaked it, early in the morning on day 2 to tighten everything up which helped a lot. After that she weathered the wind perfectly. That was a rock star tent. Melissa was a great sport through the whole day and in fact the whole trip. We sat around, played cards, read, talked and joked about being trapped. Finally Friday night I looked at her and said, "if the weather breaks at all tomorrow we are outta here." Well Saturday morning we got up, it was gray, drizzling and a little less windy. The bonus was the wind changed direction and was now blowing out of the north and we had to travel south, so the wind would be at our back if we left. I looked at her and said, "what do you want to do." She looked at the sky and said, "lets get outta here while we can." I laughed and like a well oiled machine we packed up camp perfectly and systematically. Got everything into our packs and loaded the canoe and shoved off. We had the wind to our backs and the paddles were flying. We paddled the first mile in about 20 minutes, knocked off 3 portages another 4 miles of paddling in 2 hours, did an 80 rod portage in 5 minutes and made it back to the landing were we left Thursday morning 4 hours and 15 minutes later. We checked our canoe back in, spoke with the girl about our weather trouble, and slammed two Isle of Pines Root Beers. We found out that most of the area was with out power due to the storm. Melissa and I were bummed. It was our first trip in the BWCA and the weather sucked. We couldn't do anything. The lake we were on had tons of islands that we wanted to check out, but couldn't because of the dangerous winds and the waves. So the trip just turned out to be a dud... We did decide to spend our final night in Duluth. So we stopped at our favorite place to eat on the way back to Duluth, we had a great lunch and more laughs. We got a nice hotel room in Canal Park, had nice hot showers, and went out and about down by the little shops that we like to look in. We had a great dinner, a good night sleep and got up Sunday and headed home. The weekend turned out to be great. The camping part was what it was and it was a bummer that the weather couldn't help us out but all in all it was fun. We are going to try again next year, same time, same place. We are going to go a different direction but it should be interesting to say the least...

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