Day 2, Wednesday September 2 and we woke up on Lake Saganaga at our highly rated 5 campsite on the south end of Englishman Island. We had done some research on www.BWCA.com before our trip to figure out our route and discovered that the campsites had ratings that previous campers had gathered. Campsites were rated 1 through 5 on size, location, good tent pad (gtp), and scenery. Our site was a 5 and seemed to have everything we needed.
With started each day with hashbrowns, bacon and scrambled eggs, coffee and hot chocolate. Such a big breakfast meant we didn't even eat lunch all week, just a snack of trail mix when we reached camp each afternoon. That meant we were not consuming the large amount of food we brought like peanut butter, nutella, banana chips, tortillas, cheese, pepperoni, and crackers. We just toted this food around all week. Like at least 15 lbs of it, and we gave it away when we got back to Minneapolis.
After breaking down camp, packing our gear, eating breakfast we were ready to start our second day of paddling. We had a good idea of where to go since we were a little more familiar with the terrain now and knew to keep the map at hand at all times on the water. We had several choices on route and they involved going around islands and not getting fooled into going into what I called fake rivers, or dead ends. And despite our determination to not get lost, it happened a couple times, but we quickly realized our errors and corrected our route without too much extra paddling. We didn't even need to pull out the Garmin GPS on day 2.
So Red Rock Lake was pretty nice and peaceful, again we had a nice calm overcast morning with the water like glass, smooth and clear to the bottom. I was trying to figure out why they didn't call this lake White Rock Lake since that was mostly what we saw, until we saw this one rock that you could maybe get away with calling a Red Rock. So there it is.
The volume on the video as always is soft, so you need to turn it up on your device. I can't remember exactly what this was, but I think it was the portage from Red Rock Bay to Red Rock Lake which was only 10 rods (a rod is equal to a canoe length of 16 ft), so 160 ft path where you have to "portage" your gear between lakes on a foot path. Generally the foot paths are rocky, muddy, steep, trees may block the path and they are difficult terrain even without carrying gear.
Day 2 we had two portages, the 10 rod easy one and the 48 rod portage between RRL and Alpine Lake. A portage adds a lot of work to your day and takes about an hour to walk and carry your stuff and go back for more. Ideally, you would get a nice light Kevlar canoe that weighs only 42 lbs and pack your gear lightly so your Duluth pack was less than 50 lbs, and a real he man could carry both the canoe and the pack in one trip. We did not do that. Maybe next time.
You can see in the picture that Alpine Lake (as was much of the BWCA) really scorched by the fire in September 2011. The Pagami Creek wildfire spread over 100,000 acres and the BWCA was essentially shut down. It has begun to recover but a large portion is still littered with dead trees and just small trees. The wildlife has returned as there were loons chattering all day and night on Alpine Lake, but no big mammals were seen. Just more of those speedy little chipmunks or gophers, not sure exactly. We also saw some eagles and grouse.
Fishing was not so hot in Alpine Lake since it was the wrong moon phase, but it was still a nice way to relax. We need to eat our other food anyway.
We had our sights on getting the best campsite on Alpine Lake, but it was taken, so we took a 3 ranked site that was nearby the first night on Alpine. We were planning on staying two nights on Alpine with a rest day for day two to just paddle across the lake to Jasper Falls for a day trip without all our gear.
If you're just joining in the adventure, read previous posts below links:
BWCA1
BWCA2
BWCA3
BWCA4
BWCA5
