by Angelfish

We woke up 7-ish to a gray day, with rain threatening, at Trail’s End Campground. We loaded up one car with gear and Cynthia drove Angie over to the Gunflint Lake put-in to babysit the gear while the others loaded up the remaining car for a car shuttle. Angie sat in the wind watching the whitecaps on the lake and examining the maps, while the others wrangled with the campground folks about not paying enough for an RV and extra car. Josh saved the day with some excellent bargaining… and a slight miscommunication. When we all met up, we discovered that a piece of the sorry-excuse-for-a-rental-car was missing. Oops! We’ll deal with that when we’re back in the Cities.

We finally got loaded up in the two canoes, with Angie, Josh and Marci in one and the Marshall sisters in the other, and set off into the waves. At first, the 3-person canoe barely seemed to move – the waves and wind were so strong, and we were headed almost directly into both. And it started raining. But with all three people paddling (with Marci as Super-Duffer), we made slow but steady progress for the mile-long crossing. Cynthia and Emily struggled more, with just two people paddling, and the two canoes got pretty far separated – not a good idea. C & E felt like they were going backwards part of the time, but singing “the Bean Song” and “What do you do with a drunken sailor?” helped them along. The wind seemed to die down when we were most of the way across, and we all finally met up at the narrow inlet to Magnetic Lake for a much calmer (phew!) mile-long crossing of that lake. We then entered Pine River and had our first (short – 13-rod) portage, followed by another 30r portage (“Wood Horse”) and our longest, 100r Pine Portage, which was quite lovely with lots of changing maple and birch trees, if you could ignore the pain in your back. At one point paddling on the river, a mink swam across our path. We finally entered Clove Lake and camped at the far end. The campsite had a sandy beach and Cynthia and Angie went for a quick swim – very cold, but oh so refreshing! We had a great campfire and ate gado-gado (peanut soup). Yummm…