I took a week off before the long Labor Day weekend for a trip up north for some kayaking, fishing, and hiking with the ol' high school crew. A few of us did the Au Sable River two years ago. We were up in the UP of Michigan this time in the Hiawatha National Forest. The first three days we spent in the Big Island Lake Wilderness at a sweet island campsite among some secluded lakes. Then five of the eight of us did a two day kayaking trip on the Indian River. We all met back up after that for a relaxing day at another campsite on another lake.
We packed up the kayaks and our gear and left Ohio at 11pm on Sunday the 30th. We arrived at Big Island Lake Wilderness at about 6:30am Monday a few minutes before sunrise. Most perfect timing. We unloaded our gear, hauled our stuff down the small trail to Big Island Lake, and were welcomed with the most perfect scene shown in the pic above. The plan was to camp on the island on Big Island Lake. Big Island Lake, incidentally, ain't so big. It wasn't tiny, we were in smaller lakes, but being not far from two of the largest lakes in the world this one wasn't so big. It was pretty cool though. Wilderness areas are designated by congress and have tight restrictions to prevent any impact to the natural habitat. For example, no motorized equipment or vehicles are allowed. In fact you are not even allowed to use some mechanical equipment such as the wheel! When firefighters have to fight fire in wilderness areas they have to hike in many many miles and use cross cut saws to create fire lines. The areas are not so remote and large in the east but they are extremely remote out west. Groups can not visit wilderness areas in parties larger than ten and you can't have more than six people at a campsite. Somehow we ended up with eight for two nights.
We were happy to find the campsite on the small island free and quickly established ourselves. It was quite the cool site. Nothing special in terms of facilities, its a wilderness site, but it was a sweet location. The only facilities were a fire ring and an outhouse without a house. If you haven't sat on a toilet isolated in the middle of the woods completely out in the open then you have not enjoyed all that nature has to offer. This was literally a toilet seat in the middle of the woods over a hole with no cover. You sat in the open with your pants down enjoying the wilderness around you. Nothing like a red-cockaded woodpecker doing its thing 20 feet away while you do your thing. We relaxed, napped, and did a bit of fishing that first day after the long drive. At dusk Adam claimed to have hooked a 30 - 40 inch pike, I have a video of him with it on the line, but he failed to bring it up.
On Tuesday we did some fishing and explored the lakes around us. Big Island Wilderness is basically a series of small lakes with portages in between. Some short and some long. After dropping a line for a bit in Big Island Lake Adam, Brett, Matt, Tony and I went on a little excursion to the neighboring lakes. After a short portage we were in Mid Lake. This was a murky lake compared to the clear water of the others. We quickly made another short portage to Townline Lake. Townline Lake was decent size and we explored it a bit later but we were on a mission to go further. The maps don't show it but Townline Lake actually connects to Upper Lake so no portage was necessary there. We hung out in Upper Lake for awhile and explored some small hidden coves. On one side was a small cove that a den of beavers were attempting to dam up. This was no stream or river. This is a freakin' lake. But the beavers didn't care they were going to dam it up anyway. It appeared this cove would have merged in to a marsh land but the beavers had a little barrier up. This had to be over 100 feet wide and they only had about one layer of the dam established but that was enough. It was just a few inches high but it might have done the job and gave them a place to habitat. I've seen some absolutely amazing work done by beavers in my day. I saw a series of dams on a small little stream while at school in SE Ohio and holy crap was that a feat of nature. These guys had created huge ponds with dams 18 feet high stopping what was at the beginning of the year a very small stream. How they held that much water and weight with sticks is beyond me. And they did it about a half dozen times on this stream I saw back in the day. On this occasion in Upper Lake I got to see a bit about how they build since it was only a few inches high. Other than logs, which were cut down everywhere, they used mud, moss, and rocks. The moss and mud was of course used as mortar but they also placed rocks every foot or so. It was interesting.
After hanging out in this little cove created by the 3 inch beaver damn we paddled over to another cove and found a two foot opening to a small pond. The water level must have been high for the year or something because this pond, just like the water between Townline Lake and Upper Lake, was not on any map. There were dead tree trucks everywhere coming out of the pond. Lilly pads covered the area. Matt and I got out to check out the land and found a series of beaver paths. Humans didn't use these paths; it was beavers only. You could see branches and shrubs undisturbed that were just 3' over the path. And at one point was some downed logs over the path that were covered with claw marks from beavers running over them. Cruising out of this area we ran in to a turtle that was moulting or something. The scales on his shell were peeling and for some odd reason he was balancing on a log on his "chest" with his hind legs stretched out in the air. He was obviously in a precarious position as he wouldn't move as I paddled right up to him.
Other than beavers and turtles we say tons of frogs, a few bald eagles, and a few hundred daddy-long-legs. I'd wake up in the morning with about 10 on the outside of my tent. If you put any gear down on the ground you would pick it up with a daddy-long-leg on board. I only saw one bald eagle but there were quite a few sightings during the trip. Woodpeckers were heard often. And they were slow meticulous woodpeckers, not the machine-gun type pecking I've heard in the past. We didn't see any evidence of bears. Evidence of beavers were everywhere but I didn't actually see any. I think we heard them while hanging out near their dammed cove. And unfortunately no trophy fish were pulled out of the water. I was looking forward to some fresh flesh but everything that was caught was under the rather large size limit.
After we explored Upper Lake we checked out Townline Lake a bit. Townline Lake was a bit larger than the others. The campsite on the lake were rather nice. We debated moving camp that night to this new spot. Being at least three portages away from any road the lake was quite secluded. I ended up catching about six bluegill in Townline Lake in a short period of time and that was all the fish I caught that week. The other more experienced fisherpeople didn't do much better even though this was supposed to be excellent fishing waters. Apparently there were some huge fish but not so easy to catch.
Also on Tuesday we ran in to a Forest Service volunteer who was out in the wilderness and asked to give us a visitor survey. We answered questions such as where we were from, what our goals were in the forest, and if we were meeting our goals. Of course he was recording this on all paper. I spend over 40 hours a week trying to equip these guys with mobile devices so they don't have to record data on paper and require some lackey after the season is over to enter hundreds of surveys in to a computer. This causes all kinds of data issues such as errors from misread hand writing, lack of real-time data, data not being entered due to lack of resources, and all the time it takes to do duplicate data entry. I was going to talk to him about his technical requirements but he was a bit too friendly and took too much of our time already.
On Wednesday the same group of us that explored the lakes the previous day drove down to another lake for some more exploration. Ned's Lake was only a mile or so drive away with a bit of a portage. We hung out for the day and Adam I and did some fishing. At the end of the afternoon it was back to our campsite on the island at Big Island Lake. It turned out that it was Brett's birthday and much alcohol was consumed that night. Well actually much alcohol was consumed every day and night. On occasion we had to make a run to the small little general store in the area. One of the guys working there had all of about 10 teeth. As much as we thought of ourselves as hard-core campers it was nice to resupply with beer and ice. Oh yeah... water was important too. One of our two purifiers broke.
On Thursday Adam, Brett, Matt, Tony and I took off for a two day river run. We tackled 10 miles of the Indian River the first day in a little over five hours. It was quite the challenging river. About every 100 feet there were a series of downed trees. This required you to move from one side of the river to the other and then back to the other. This had to be accomplished before the current pushed you in to the downed logs which would clothesline you in the water. No beginners allowed here. Other than dodging tree trunks we also had to negotiate narrow paths through cut logs and paddle over logs that were at water level. There was only one rapid run which was easy but had high water so most of us got a bit wet. The end of our 10 miles was right at the Indian River campsite and we stayed there for the night.
The next day we did about 7.5 miles. The first third was again very challenging, then it got a bit normal, and then opened up a bit with less woods and more open marsh. Normally we were always on guard and didn't have any time to rest, fish, drink a beer, eat, or whatever else one would like to do during the many hours on a river run. I very much enjoyed this challenge, but it was also nice to relax and float a bit without worrying about being taken out by a series of downed trees. At one point we came up on a series of down trees with the lowest one being about 14 inches off the water line. This required us to strip our gear from the straps on the top of our kayaks and crouch down inside the kayak as much as we could. Two of the five of us wimped out and actually portaged around. This was more my style of vacation rather then sitting in the sun all day with a line in the water.
Here are stats on the river run. If you click on the "splits" button on the top right you can see the river run organized in three laps. The first lap was day one, the second lap was an accident, and the third lap is day two. The calorie info is way off because it assumes I was biking. I don't trust the max speed either, no way we went 15 mph in a kayak. I assume it is a miscalculation between plotted GPS points.
We got done early on the river the second day and drove a short distance to the third and final campsite on Nineteen Lake. On the way Adam had an emergency stop at some random outhouse at a campsite or trail head. We decided to drive the car up to block the outhouse door and honk the horn just to make sure Adam knew we were there for him. At Nineteen lake we were to meet back up with the other three guys the next morning on Saturday. Adam and Matt drove in to the Forest Service headquarters before our river run to reserve the campsite for the weekend. It is a good thing as every campsite but the one we wanted on Nineteen lake was full that Labor Day weekend. Ours was not because it again required you to paddle across a lake to get there. This was ideal for us. That Friday afternoon after setting up camp we did a bit of a hike around the lake and next to other lakes (stats). We found a short portage to the neighboring lake. Adam had us hiking to a small shelter at Rim Lake and for some reason he really dug this wooden partial cabin. It had a bird's nest in it along with a family of mice, not exactly where I would set up camp, but Adam dug it. There were many interesting shroom varieties around the forest. Again Adam was all about the shrooms and wanted to pick the eatable ones but none of us trusted him.
On our last day the other three guys joined us around noon. Most of us made the quick portage over to Ironjaw Lake. We did some unsuccessful fishing for a bit and enjoyed the sixth perfect day in a row. Two of the guys took off on a long drive to civilization to watch the first college jockball game of the year. The rest of us thought they were crazy. Later in the day we went on a small hike with some of the guys that weren't there the previous day. We were supposed to tie up our food and garbage each night to keep the bears away. We didn't do this on the island assuming the bears weren't in the mood to swim while we were there. We didn't do it at Nineteen Lake either mostly from laziness. Matt's method was to take his small amount of berries and nuts (he is a vegetarian) and hang them about seven feet off the ground on a stick in the middle of our campsite. This is exactly what not to do when trying to keep bears away. We all got quite the chuckle out of him. I'm surprised his food didn't get eaten by varmints. I kept mine in a water proof bag in my tent. Those bears were going to have to go through me to get my food!
On Sunday we woke up, broke camp, and drove home. No breakfast even. Tony had to get back by 6:00 for a fantasy football draft. We were right behind them and I got home around 6:30. It was a great week in the wilderness. It's nice to get away from work for awhile. Also, as much as I'm dependent on the internet it was nice to be disconnected for a week. I came back to a lot of local news, sports news, national events, and of course work to catch up on. It is late now and I'm still catching up. Good times though and looking forward to the next trip.
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