The rules are that you must make and spend 24 hours on the entry point lake.

There are good reasons for this - dispersing all the visitors coming through the ranger station and minimizing human impact is the best reason.

Besides, visitors get to see other parts of the park rahter than keeping to their favorites. This isn't to say that asking for your favorite is bad thing, but diversity is nice at times.

The entry point decisions are tough on the visitor at times. We've had to accept the park's options on several of our 12 trips - but is there a "bad" part of the park? I have my favorite places as well, but I keep finding more favorites as I spread out.

The only bad thing about accepting the park's options is that:
We're getting older (but not necessarily wiser), and we've tried to avoid major portage routes on some of our trips. Seems that every time we try to avoid portages, the only available entry for our preferred time is Agnes. Fortunately, we've been able to make a trade for an unused permit available only from the ranger station - somebody doesn't show up or cancels (God bless their hearts) on most of these occasions.

Posted by Skip Guyer on February 25, 2000 at 06:24