Nym Lake to Olifaunt Lake and back, Quetico--June, 1993.
Friday, 6/18/93 After months of fantasizing, burning up the phone lines between Iowa and Minnesota (this was before e-mail), a frantic week or two of last minute purchases, preparations and job-related anxieties and an hour or so of trying to stuff all the gear into the Dodge Caravan, my 13 year-old son N, friend C and I finally got away from Cedar Rapids, Iowa at 7:30 PM in a dark and dismal downpour (this would become the wettest year of the millennium by the end of the summer). We drove in the pouring rain all the way to Minneapolis where we were greeted at 1 AM by my brother J, his family and Cinnamon, his golden retriever. My other brother P had backed out at the last minute. The plan had been for 13 year-old N, who had never been on a canoe trip, to ride in the middle with brother P and I. Now N was going to have to take the bow position.
Saturday, 6/19/9 Plans to depart Minneapolis at the crack of dawn rapidly deteriorated as the intrepid travelers were slow to rise and dawdled over J's pancakes & bacon breakfast. Packing and re-packing (at least 50 pounds of mixed nuts and dried fruit, among other things) took forever, what with two neophytes on the crew, and we didn't make our getaway until 11 AM, in the rain of course. Stops along the way included dinner at Tobie's in Hinckley and subsequent stops for photo ops of the GIANT CONCRETE BLUEGILL in Orr and the GIANT CONCRETE WALLEYE near Kabetogama Lake.
We broke through the overcast near International Falls, crossed the border uneventfully and arrived at John Mulcahy's Morris' Camp about 7PM. John was a big Irish-American guy; a philosophy major from Notre Dame, who worked for years as an administrator at a private boys school in the States (which J suggested helped when John presided over his barroom) and an avid basketball fan, as we later discovered. (the NBA finals with Da Bulls and the Suns, Jordan vs. Barkley was in progress). He also had a kennel of bird dogs and guided bear hunts in the Fall. We had hoped to be in Quetico Park by this point, but that wasn't going to happen. For $15 we pitched our tents on the lawn by lovely Niobe Lake, drove into Atikokan, ate pizza in a fatigue-induced stupor and collapsed in our bags with the song of the resident loon in our ears.
Sunday, 6/21/93 It turned out that John and his wife were great cooks, and they bucked us up with a magnificent lumberjack's breakfast of hash browns, bacon and eggs, pancakes, toast and coffee. John rented us two livery- (ie: heavy) weight Alumacraft canoes and delivered us to the Nym Lake HQ which was packed with voyageurs checking in and out and consequently we didn't get on the water until 11 AM (now a day-and-a-half behind schedule). Nym Lake was as calm as a mill pond, which was great because I wasn't sure what to expect from my 13 year-old bowman, who up to this point in his life had shown little interest in outdoor activities. The first portage into Batchewaung Lake was long (this would be the longest portage on our route) and steep, but dry (unlike the return trip) and the mosquitoes were ferocious.
Amazingly enough it took us forever to find the passage between Batchewaung Lake and Batchewaung Bay, the first of more than a few navigational miscalculations, most of which could be blamed on poor maps and poorer compass-utilization, sibling rivalry, shifting perspectives, fatigue-induced hysteria, DEET poisoning and numerous other factors, some of them beyond our control. We caught a few smallish northerns while we cruised the shore for a campsite in Pickerel Narrows, hoping for a fish dinner, but lost the stringer on the way in. Along about dusk we made camp near the west end of the Narrows, across from Mosquito Point. While J, N & I set up the tents C, a newbie who was still approaching this as some kind of a lark, built a rather alarmingly large bonfire. We made some coffee which helped revive our spirits, and I caught the first nice smallmouth on a little floating plug (¼ oz. Zara Pooch) with a large Dobson fly, still flapping its wings, attached to the lure. A veritable plethora of insect life, ubiquitous gulls, inquisitive loons and the resident painted turtle entertained us. We hung up the food (reports of marauding bears in the neighborhood), sipped cognac, ate the smallmouth and christened the spot Pickerel Narrows Flying Fish Camp.
Monday, 6/21/93 (longest day of the year, literally and figuratively) Early sunshine was followed by a thunderstorm. We packed up and sat out the lightning. After the storm cleared we fished our way east in Pickerel Narrows in pretty weather, got some strikes, netted some bass and pike and portaged in and out of Pine Portage Bay.
Pickerel Narrows
Worn out from from all the driving, paddling, fresh air and sunshine we took a break to eat cheese and summer sausage on pita bread in the company of several hundred thousand mosquitoes, then swam in Doré Lake. Refreshed, we crossed Doré to the Deux Riviéres portage. In the little bay at the Doré portage head we saw the old submerged logging barge and some nice smallmouth moving into the shallows to nest. Such a pretty setting for such a difficult portage, steep in places, swampy in others, it follows a lovely little stream which flows into Twin Lakes. Someone had built plank boardwalks over some of the worst stretches, but it was still a muddy, ankle-busting back-breaker.
Twin Lakes/Deux Riviéres is a very lovely and intimate place, with a more remote feel than the lakes we had crossed earlier: sheer redstone cliffs rise out of deep, clean, tea-colored water, a place that always seems enchanted. The temperature has been in the 70's all day, 40's and 50's at night, a very late summer (witness the smallmouth just moving into the shallows to nest at least two or three weeks later than normal). This day is not over yet, J wants to push on into Sturgeon tonight (and ultimately Chatterton Falls), and we are tired, sore, bug-bit, hungry and desperately sunburned. Eye-burning haze has begun to develop from a forest fire northwest on Red Lake. We press on through the gap between the two small lakes, past a magnificent beaver lodge and an even more magnificent bull moose, into Deux Riviéres. We slide over two beaver dams and drift with the current through pools of blooming water lilies and tall stands of wild rice, into open water again for the final long paddle to the island at the north end of Sturgeon Lake (between the Ram Lake and Olifaunt Lake portages). The campsite is quite nice and we are inspired to break out the steaks, and, revived by two pot-fulls of Kona coffee, we toast ourselves as the blood-red sun sinks into the smoky haze.
Tuesday, June 22, 1993 Nice weather, although still hazy. J&N paddled out for clean water and then around the island. Several big groups of canoes passed by, mostly young girls, singing cheerfully. N&C hiked half-way around the island, fishing as they went, and discovered another campsite and caught a few bass and pike. After a big, leisurely breakfast of pancakes, steak and eggs we packed up (a major production each day) and paddled across the bay to the portage into Olifaunt, having abandoned our plans of going all the way to Chatterton Falls. Me and 13 year-old N were having trouble keeping up with J&C and we were falling further and further behind our planned itinerary. There were a lot of people coming out of Olifaunt and the portage was nasty, steep, muddy, treacherously slippery and dense with blood-crazed mosquitoes. We were all physically tired and it had come to the surface that one of our party had decided a canoe trip into the wilds would be a great opportunity to quit smoking cigarettes and was starting to go into withdrawal. This has spoiled more than one canoe trip. To make matters worse we took off in the wrong direction on Olifaunt and consequently had to backtrack the width of the lake against a stiff headwind. We finally arrived at the campsite at the head of the rapids flowing out of the lake, where I had camped before and had good fishing luck. J&C want to paddle further, now starting to get anxious about the trip out (and needing a nicotine fix), but the campsite looked as good as remembered, and the fishing proved to be just as much fun as it was in earlier years. The smallmouth and walleyes were hitting everything we threw out. They were hanging out in the potholes and swirls on the edges of the whitewater. N caught his first bass and walleye ever. I had embarrassingly good luck with my fly rod and a wooly bugger fly with an orange body, over-wrapped with black hackle, and a neon green tail (the only fly like it in my box, of course), which both bass and walleyes were hitting, until it finally got lost. C caught a BIG female smallmouth with eggs, which he released. I caught a big smallie on a yellow jig. It was dark by the time we got organized to eat by flashlight. The wind was still blowing, making cooking a challenge, but we built a nifty little fireplace in the shelter of a Volkswagen-sized boulder and ate walleyes, smallmouth and macaroni and cheese. Later, after the nightly ordeal of washing dishes and hanging the food, we sat out on the rocks and watched the satellites tracking across the sky. Sometime in the middle of the night N woke me up. In his sleep N could hear the nearby rapids, and thought that I, in my blue sleeping bag, was the river flowing through the tent.
Pickerel River flowing out of Olifaunt Lake
Wednesday, June 23, 1993 We hated to leave such a great campsite and hot fishing, but the wind was worrisome, so we broke camp early and headed down the Pickerel River, portaging around three sets of rapids. Along this enchanting stretch we saw a mother merganser with 12 chicks riding on her back, the better to avoid being eaten by a hungry northern. At the last portage, a very pretty double rapids split by a small island, a group was camped and fishing. As we watched one of them pulled in a lunker walleye. After yet another navigational miscalculation we found the mouth of our old friend Deux Riviéres, hidden in the reeds (it's interesting how unfamiliar things can look when you approach them from a new direction). We re-negotiated the first low beaver dam by paddling hard, ramming and jamming our way over, but the second one upstream was more formidable, a 2' barrier, which J&C negotiated by clambering out of their canoe in waist-deep water and dragging it over the top. At this point J, standing on top of the dam with his trusty high-top Converse All-Stars embedded to their ankle patches in muck, estimated his feet hadn't been dry for three-and-a-half days. As luck, or possibly prior planning, would have it N & I arrived just then under a full head of steam and J&C propelled us up and over. We paddled right by the portage from Twin Lakes, probably out of dread, but having done it once and survived, and being so much tougher than we were two days ago, we backtracked, found the portage and trudged uphill to Doré. At the trailhead, before shouldering our loads, we watched in envy as a couple of solo voyageurs trotted their 40-pound Kevlar canoes effortlessly uphill.
Also, on the trail we met a couple schoolteachers, women from Massachusetts, who were in the park for the tenth time, out for eighteen days. They were taking it easy, in contrast to our slam-bang approach, and it was obvious that they were enjoying the experience more than we were. (Our theme song was Monty Python's We are lumberjacks and we're OK..., I wondered what theirs was.) At Doré we downed a quick shore lunch consisting of the moldy remnants of the summer sausage, cheese and pita bread, washed down with warm Gatorade. A troop of intense Explorer Scouts on a High Adventure expedition hustled grimly through in tight formation, dressed from head to toe in military gear. We looked like homeless bums in comparison. There were many bass in the inlet where the old barge is sunk. I hooked and played a nice one on a Mepps Black Fury.
(This was before we learned that it was probably unethical to target smallmouth bass on their nests. It seemed to us in 1993 that there were so many bass everywhere that you couldn't possibly make a dent in the population. To this day N, who learned how to fish catching smallies on top-water lures on this trip, refuses to troll or jig, so spoiled was he from his first fishing experience.)
13 year-old N has been holding up remarkably well, almost always cheerful and positive (and covered
with mosquito bites). He has actually been gaining weight over the course of the trip, and by remarkable coincidence, all the cookies and candy bars seem to have disappeared and the pile of wrappers in the bow of his canoe threatens at times to overwhelm him).
After an uneventful crossing of Doré we crossed Pine Portage against traffic (several big groups of surly-looking youths led by fat, red-faced old men) but we had Pine Portage Bay, hot and glassy under the late afternoon sun, to ourselves. We drifted and photographed each other in all our crusty glory. By the time we crossed the short portage back into Pickerel Narrows we were feeling the miles, but decided to push on since the lake was calm, a rare occurrence on Pickerel. We paddled and fished west into the sunset, with a gentle breeze at our backs. As terminal fatigue set in we headed for the nearest campsite, a rather grim place, as clouds rolled in and rain threatened. Trash, wads of used TP, flies and the filleted carcasses of many large lake trout littered the place, but J spotted a smallmouth setting up housekeeping in the shallows, and I went out at dusk and hooked him with a white foam spider popper on the fly rod. A great fight ensued and entertainment for all until the ancient leader broke. A dinner of bratwurst, Ramen noodles and coffee was interrupted by rain, driving the weary campers to their tents for a steamy, restless night (there was a party later in one of the tents, and two of our intrepid voyageurs appeared to have quite possibly over-indulged and polished off the rest of the cognac.)
Thursday, June 24, 1993 dawned gray, but the sky finally cleared. N observed a dragonfly emerging from it's nymph stage exoskeleton while the rest of us broke camp for the last time. After a cold breakfast we hit the water earlier than usual in hope of beating the wind. The decision had unfortunately been made to head out a day early, everyone was beat and anxious about the weather and the paddle across Batchewaung and Nym. N and I stopped at the Flying Fish camp to search for my missing tripod, while J & C pushed on into the gap leading to Batchewaung Bay, by the time N & I got back on the lake it had started to rain, the wind was up and it was a struggle battling the waves to get into the shelter of the gap. J was teasing a smallmouth when we arrived, and everyone shared some fruit and nuts, tea from the Thermos and a Toblerone and pushed off across Batchewaung Bay with a stiff tailwind. Sails were soon up as rain-gear came off and was rigged to paddles, a brief but welcome interlude from paddling. We stopped for a shore lunch just inside Batchewaung Lake, taking shelter from the rain under a big white pine and firing up the Gaz stove for some ramen and coffee. A veritable flotilla of teenage girls, in some disarray but singing and laughing, passed (we would see them later on the killer portage into Nym Lake, several of them in tears). The sun popped out for a minute and with full bellies and a false sense of security we paddled around the point and into the main body of Batchewaung Lake, trying to ignore the popcorn (whitecaps) visible farther out and the groups of canoeists bivouacked on the near shore, observing us with idle curiosity through their binoculars (and probably placing bets as to how far we would get before we swamped, and how long we would subsequently last in the rough, cold water before hypothermia sent us all to to the happy hunting ground). Driven by anxiety (nicotine withdrawal) and the desire for hot showers, cold beer, cheeseburgers and pie, we had thrown caution literally to the wind and quickly found ourselves in SERIOUS TROUBLE trying to paddle into a rapidly developing squall, one of those freak straight-line wind gales, with the waves actually breaking over the bowmen. SCREAMING at each other over the roar of the wind and rain, both canoes managed to make the precarious 180 degree turn downwind, taking on copious amounts of cold lake water and we were driven onto the rocks of a desolate stretch of shoreline, soaked, chilled and scared to the bone. We dragged our canoes out of the shore-break and scrambled for shelter over the rocky shoreline, hurling curses into the howling wind, and stumbled into the treacherously mossy woods (yes, even the moss was out to get us!). Trees were actually blowing down around us! I stripped down and re-dressed 13 year-old N in dry clothes, he was shivering uncontrollably, while C & J tried in vain to start a fire.
The wind died down, the rain stopped, we re-loaded (everything we had tried so hard to keep dry all week was now soaked), and stroked hard across the expanse of Batchewaung Lake, praying intently. The long, muddy portage into Nym Lake was anticlimactic, alone among many freaked-out, bedraggled voyageurs on the path, 13 year-old N stood out: an old hand now at these life-and-death experiences, nonchalant in his grandfather's vintage WWII Navy watch-sweater, Desert Storm boonie hat and Teva waterman sandals. When J & C were out of hearing on the portage he suggested to me that we should let J & C go in and then head back out for a couple more days. The paddle across Nym was into the wind, fatigue hung over everyone like a wet blanket and the landing was hard to find, but the sun came out, the lake looked lovely and when we finally did find the landing the Ranger Lady was waiting with my tripod and beloved Levi jacket which I had left on the first portage the first day out. The kitchen was closed at Morris Camp, so we headed for Quetico North. (On one trip we got back late and Bernie, the owner of QN at the time, plunked down a case of Molson's, threw some moose steaks on the grill and proceeded to show us a good time). C was convinced that he was literally starving and had not one but two humongous Quetico burgers and drank three large glasses of Pepsi. N, J and I topped off our meals with enormous slices of homemade coconut pie. The intrepid voyageurs broke down and rented a motel room from John at Morris Camp, showered, had a few beers at the bar and collapsed once again, albeit clean, full, and apparently out of harm's way for at least a few hours.
Friday, June 25, 1993 commenced with another great breakfast accompanied by John's play-by-play of the NBA Finals (the Bulls won clinching their "three-peat" with John Paxson's game-winning 3-pointer that gave them a 99-98 victory in Game 6). We enjoyed a lovely drive over Canada's #11 to Thunder Bay where we stopped to buy some Ontario amethysts at a roadside stand; then Kekebeca Falls where the original Voyageurs took the Grand Portage, down along the beautiful North Shore of Lake Superior, Split Rock Lighthouse at 5PM (where we returned to rainy weather), a great dinner and more pie at The Rustic Inn in Castle Danger, stops for photo ops at the Baptism River, Lou's House of Smoked Fish and the Giant Concrete Voyageur in Two Harbors.
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