Buckskin & Noah in The Boundary Waters...

Buckskin and Noah headed to Ely, Minnesota on May 24th for 5 days & 4 nights of canoeing in the Boundary Waters. 

The weather was a mixed bag over the 5 days--everything from torrential downpours, 20 m.p.h. winds, thunder and lightening, to beautiful sunshine.  Here's a shot from the canoe on day 1. This is what we got most of the day. It was cloudy, overcast, rainy and very windy. 

And here's a picture taken from camp on day 2. What a difference a day makes! 

So...we fell into a pattern of paddling every day from about 9 until 3.  Then we'd find a nice campsite, set up camp, and relax.

Here's Noah at our night 1 camp...packing up and getting ready to head out for the day.

And me washing my face...gotta look pretty when you're out in the wilderness!

Here's Noah cooking up dinner on night 2.  No!  It's not fish...it's potatoes & corn.  We didn't catch any fish & we were trying to eat up the heaviest food items to lighten the packs for the portages.  Noah did all the cooking, since he knew how to work the bunsen burner...

I was in charge of the campfires...I've always enjoyed building fires...just ask my mom!

Here's the little girls' room...very fancy!

Camp life was pretty relaxing....here I am on night 4 kicking back after dinner.  Note the excellent lounge chair...complete with hand-carved cup holder!  Oh, yeah...you probably noticed my fashionable headgear...there were a few mosquitos flying around. 

This trip was a bit different than the river canoeing we've done in the past.  We had to do several portages:  taking everything out of the canoe & carrying it along a trail.  We did about 15 in all.  We were getting pretty good at it, too, by the end of the trip.

Here I am carrying some of the gear...including a very heavy Duluth pack on day 4.

And here's Noah with the canoe on his shoulders.  It was a light-weight Kevlar canoe...but still!  I'm glad I didn't have to port it!

This is the end point of one of the portages where we'd put the canoe back in the water, re-load it & head back out onto the next lake.

We saw some cool wildlife.  My favorite were the loons:

This is my best loon photo.  The crazy guys were mating, so there was a LOT of screeching, warbling and splashing at night.

I also spotted my first wild turtle:

This was the best shot I could get of him before he jumped into the water and swam away.

We also had a red squirrel at one camp & a mini-bear at another.  These guys were NOT afraid of people in the slightest.  I think they would have eaten out of my hand if I'd offered them something.  Here's the mini-bear (the squirrel wouldn't pose for me!):

On the good days, the scenery was quite stunning:

We did have one really tough day/night.  We had a 20 m.p.h. headwind, the light Kevlar canoe was blowing all over the place, it was raining hard & we got lost!!  By the time we were able to find a campsite, we were so exhausted, we couldn't paddle another stroke, but the site was burned out, rocky & devoid of trees.  We decided to make the best of it & tied a tarp to a couple of dead trees to make a rain cover.  We got it up just in time, because it started raining on us again.  Here's Noah in the shelter:

We tried to wait for it to stop raining to put up the tent, but it never happened, so we put it up in the rain & crawled inside to wait things out.  I didn't get any more photos that day because it never stopped raining & we never came back out of the tent.  The next day was much better, however & our last day was the best of all.

This is me getting ready to pack up on the last morning.  It was a beautiful, calm day...the perfect way to finish our trip to the Boundary Waters!!

Oh, yeah...I almost forgot:  here's a shot of the rapids where we almost died!!

That's another exciting story...I'll tell you all about it next time I see you.  Hope you enjoyed reading about our little adventure.

Look for more here soon...it's going to be a VERY exciting summer.  Until then, I'm...

Yours truly,

(Wet) Buckskin Lily