10/1/09 – More big changes around Sawbill. The New Mobe, a storied former crew housing unit, and hallowed former Hansen housing unit, has been demolished. It has been standing empty for almost two seasons, ever since the day the crew moved into new digs, waiting for the day the backhoe and roll-away dumpsters would show up. It stood as a visual reminder of many seasons of Sawbill history, and will be sorely missed in some circles. There’s rumor of a new fire ring being built to fill the space, no doubt a glimpse of new traditions in the making. – Lee

Our friendly backhoe operator prepares for work.

Bringin’ down the house.

The backhoe compacting the pile of scraps.

The roll-away dumpsters and the truck that hauled them.

9/30/09 – Frost! Last night was the first hard frost of the season. We had some nips of frost way back in August, which were followed by almost a month of warm, calm weather. Now, after a wicked windstorm a couple of days ago, this morning dawned crisp and cold. Until now, we haven’t seen much color in the trees. That should change quickly now. – Bill

A sure sign of fall. Frost on the ol’ canoes.

9/29/09 – Another big walleye! Sawbill camper Ellen Freiberg showed up at the store the other day holding this big fish from Sawbill Lake. Still recovering from the shock of seeing her biggest walleye yet come up on her hook, she told us it took her fifteen minutes to land it. It measured just longer than 25 inches, and more than five pounds. Nice catch, Ellen. – Lee

Ellen Freiberg and her big walleye.

9/24/09 – I spotted this ghostly white flower growing in the shade of black spruce trees during a recent trip through Cherokee Lake. The Indian-pipe flower, monotropa uniflora, grows in deep shade under conifers. It gains nutrients from decaying wood and by latching onto the root systems of living plants, thus, it doesn’t need chlorophyll and grows up white instead of green. Other regional names are ghost flower, corpse plant and ghost pipe. – Lee

Indian-pipe flowers.

A gathering of Indian-pipe flowers, also known as corpse plants.

9/21/09 – Witness the birth of a new era. Of outhouses. And potty humor. The Forest Service decided to upgrade the rest of the outhouses in the campground after installing a super-duty concrete, handicap accessible two-holer near site four last fall. One near the picnic area went in this afternoon, amid a clamor of engines growling and laborers standing around waiting their turn. The rest are set for installation tomorrow. The new fixtures appear bomb-proof and are designed to weather 200 seasons. The Caesars would be proud. But, wouldn’t you know it, the days of our beloved 40-year-old wooden toilet sheds, with the spring-loaded doors that slap shut and just enough elbow room for a penguin, have come to and end. – Lee

Recognize this spot? Neither do I. It’s where the outhouses on the way to the landing used to be. The guys are digging the hole for the outhouse vaults.

These concrete boxes are the vaults for, well, the deposits that Sawbill campers will soon be making.

This is the rig it took to drop the load in place.

That’s teamwork. Hope nobody’s in there.

Worker installs exhaust pipes. Thank goodness.

The old outhouses uninstalled, taking a victory lap around the parking lot, ready to ride off into the sunset. Adios amigos.

9/20/09 – This is the time of year when mushrooms are common in the boreal forest. A couple of old birch stumps that are right in front of the store entrance have developed an impressive brace of fungi over the last few days. As you can see from the pieces on top of the stump, the squirrels find this species a tasty treat. – Bill

These appeared overnight a couple of days ago.

Red squirrels store mushrooms in the branches of spuce and balsam trees for consumption during the winter. Old-timers used to say that you could tell how much snow we were going to have by how high the squirrels stored their mushrooms.

9/19/09 – The leaves seem slow to change this year. Amid an unseasonably warm September, with local highs for the first nineteen days five degrees warmer than last year, some of us are wondering where the fall colors are. At this time last season I accompanied a visiting friend on a nearby “leaf peeper” trail and the maples were practically burning with brilliant reds, oranges and yellows. Yesterday I stopped near that trail to take a picture of the turning leaves, and it left me hoping, more than anything, that the best may be yet to come. – Lee

The hillside in the background is just beginning to be shaded with red.

This vista of the Temperance River valley shows just a spark of the colors that will brighten it soon.

9/18/09 – The big news at Sawbill today is that we have a new golf cart! We’ve had a golf cart for years that we use for tooling around the campground. Homer and Roy love to ride in the golf cart. When they hear it start up they come running and jump in. When the new cart arrived today they piled in to give it a test ride. – Bill

Homer and Roy are excited for riding in the new cart.

9/16/09 – From Suckatash, Ryan Suffern’s blog (used with permission):

This shot of Sawbill Lake is particularly special for me. While it’s probably been over a decade since I took the pic, I’ll never forget that morning – getting up at the crack of dawn and going out in a canoe with my little sister, Whitney. The lake was eerily fogged in that morning, and the water was so still, you could have easily imagined walking across it. And besides the sound of our paddles in the calm water, there was hardly a sound to be heard. It was such a beautiful moment reserved only for those willing to get up so early, and oh, what I wouldn’t give to be back there in that canoe right now.
It was up in the Boundary Waters that I think I first got the bug for taking pictures. Year after year and summer after summer, I would return with my family to these cherished lakes, and over time, I found myself trying to take better and better photos of the beauty to be found up there. And while I was crazy for catching fish (and we certainly did a lot of fishing), I also noticed that I was becoming just as interested in “catching” a good pic to bring back home. So in no small part, I know I owe this place for having been the catalyst for my first creative love.
The above photograph also means a lot to me because it was one of my first images that I ever had blown up and framed, which I gave to my Grandma & Grandpa Kielhorn. I cannot think of Sawbill and of the many, many trips I’ve taken there without thinking about my grandparents, and specifically my grandpa. Always in pursuit of finding the fish at just the right time of day, he would so often wake me up in my tent from a deep-summer-vacation-sleep, and the two of us would go out and see if they were biting. Some of my fondest memories of my grandpa are those early morning fishing trips – just the two of us out on Sawbill and not a soul in sight.
In the past couple of years, unfortunately, both grandparents have passed away. I guess that’s just life, or as Kurt Vonnegut might say, “So it goes.” I miss them both terribly, but it at least makes me happy to know that for the last several years of both of their lives, this photo was proudly on display in their bedroom. That everyday, my grandpa would wake up and that this would be the first image to meet his day. That maybe this photo might just make him think of those early morning fishing trips, and perhaps even put a smile on his face. – Ryan Suffern

9/14/09 – A few minutes ago, I was walking between buildings when I heard the gentle sound of woodpecker tapping overhead. It turned out to be a three-toed woodpecker working on a dying mountain ash tree. There must have been a good number of bugs, because the relatively rare three-toed was joined by a downy woodpecker and a brown creeper.
While I watched the woodpeckers working, a red squirrel was dropping hard, green red pine cones from a height of over sixty feet uncomfortably close to my head. The squirrels seem to deliberately drop the cones on the racked canoes behind the store where they strike with a satisfying and resounding bonk. – Bill