the dharma blog

The standard elevation profile for a Boundary Waters portage is a hump. It rises from the lake, goes a little ways, and drops down to the other lake. It was really weird to climb and climb up this portage and then suddenly be at Eddy Lake, with no descent. It felt like Eddy was perched above the South Arm and could suddenly burst through the ridge and rush down the hill at any moment. Maybe someday it will.

After heading back down the hill for our second load and then climbing back up, we set off across placid little Eddy Lake to the call of loons from the west end. We were suddenly able to see a lot of evidence of the 1999 windstorm that flattened nearly half a million acres of forest in the Boundary Waters. Though it had been seven years and the forest was already well on its way to regenerating and regrowing, the catastrophic effects of the blowdown will be in evidence for many years. The westerly shores of Eddy Lake were lined with trees laying in the water. It was nearly solid along the shoreline. Looking inland, the forest was blanketed with these down trees, all laying at an eerily uniform northeast angle. We would get a better look at this on other portages and lakes over the next three days.

The portages and ponds leading into Kekekabic Lake slid by. It was very good to be on such small water after a couple days on big Knife Lake. The water was silver and almost utterly flat. The surrounding hills were carpeted in blowdown, exposing occasional rocky knobs and shoulders. It was an area of wilderness very different than most of the other areas I’ve been to.

The portages between the ponds were short, from liftovers less than 5 rods to 20 or 25 rods along flat trails. It was through this section that we were really amazed by the extent of the damage still evident from the blowdown and that my respect for the Forest Service crews that reopened the portages grew. For long sections of trail, anywhere between two or 10 trees, each 12 or more inches in diameter, had been knocked down in a few feet of trail. Using nothing but hand tools, the crews must have had to really fight their way along, rod after rod, to clear the trails. If they hadn’t, the portages would still be nearly impassable.

I also couldn’t imagine what it must have been like for those people who were camped in the area during the storm to fight their way back out. The Fourth of July weekend is one of the Boundary Waters’ busiest times of the year and this popular area of the wilderness must have been full of people. That only one person died as a result of the storm and that so many dragged themselves over these miles of decimated portages back to civilization is pretty amazing.

We arrived at the last portage of the day, into Kekekabic Lake, and found a nicely-constructed landing where some rough-cut logs had been laid down in a rectangle in the water and filled with rock so there was an easy place to pull up and unload. The portage itself was almost a liftover and we just took the packs out of the canoe, carried them right over and set them down, then reloaded on the other side.

The wind had picked up while we’d been hidden away on the ponds and was now coming pretty strong down Kekekabic from the west. We were both sore, but didn’t intend to go far into the wind this day. We had heard of some nice sites on the east end of the lake and we headed for one of them. After a little paddling in circles trying to make sure we got the right site (as we were planning to layover the next day, we wanted a better-than-average place to spend the time) we finally came around a point and paddled back into a bay and up to a gorgeous site that rose up from the water on shelves of rock. Across the bay from the site stood a giant rock face maybe 150 feet high. It was covered in a patchwork of orange lichen and autumn foliage and its dark gray mass dominated all views from the site.

It was sometime late in the afternoon and we set about making the place home. The biggest drawback to the site was the lack of suitable tent pads. We ended up pitching ours a ways back in the woods. We set up a cooking area closer to the water behind a little “wall” of shrubs that we augmented with a wall of Duluth Packs to help our stove in the strong wind that blew in off the lake.

The rest of the afternoon evening passed slowly. The wind blew and it was chilly. We read, wandered around the site and hung out in the tent. The forest all around the site had been flattened by the wind storm and I again wondered what it must have been like at this site on that infamous night.

The day had been productive. We had covered 11 miles or more, including several portages, and we were back on schedule. We had seen much and I felt in harmony with the canoe, the portaging, the wilderness, and with Rosie.

Technorati Tags: paddling, bwcaw, boundary waters, canoeing