7/20/2020 Last week Sawyer, Nora, Ema and I went on a four day trip in the great BWCA. We entered at Kawishiwi slightly after 10 am for what would be the longest day of our trip.
With fresh arms and high spirits, we paddled our way to Koma in great time and stopped to eat lunch at a quaint site on the north side. After our delicious snack and much needed rest time, we made the quick paddle to Malberg where we stopped again to marvel the gorgeous rapids that run alongside the 24 rod portage. It’s places like this that remind me how incredible lucky I am to live with this in my backyard. We continued down the river into Fishdance where we made a slight detour to see the pictographs before our last portage of the day. (Click here for a past post about the pictographs) After 10 hours of Paddling we settled on the first site as home for the night. We ate dinner and watched the sun slowly drop behind the tree line before we all quickly slipped into a deep sleep.
We woke up later than expected and took our time eating breakfast and breaking down the site so we didn’t get on the water till about 10 again. We had hoped to paddle east to get as close to Little Saganaga for the night as possible, but we only made it to Shepo where a storm delayed us again. With roaring wind and some booming thunder, it forced us to bunker down under our tarp on the portage while we ate our bean and cheese tortillas. It quickly became apparent that we would not make it as far east as we had hoped so we collectively decided it would be a much better decision to change our route entirely and go south to Addams lake. We waited for the storm to die down before paddling through Shepo, Sagus, Roe, Cap, Boulder, and finally, Adams. We originally hoped to stay on the island site but after discovering it was occupied, we decided to take the site just to the east. The site is set back a bit on top of a sloping cliff. A stunning elevated view of the lake, a rock slab table near the fireplace, and a perfect rock to swim from greeted us and we made quick use of them all. We set up camp while taking turns swimming in the warm waves. We feasted on Pad Thai and Creme Brûlée with our feet dangling over the edge of the rock while watching the sunset again. We sat around the fire until the mosquito became unbearable before retiring for the night.
Our third morning was much more efficient than the last as we were all eager to get a good site on Polly to relax for the majority of the day. We set out with the early sun and quickly found ourselves back on Malberg where we again stopped at the little waterfalls to eat lunch and cool off the in the stream. We paddled south again and arrived at Polly in the early afternoon where we relaxed and ate to our hearts content on the sloping rock for the rest of the day. We slept with our rain fly off, the bright Milky Way spread across the ceiling served as our nightlight and the loons sang us a lullaby for our last night in the wilderness.
-Matt
