Adventures... West of Quetico
by Bryan Whitehead
This time we entered a series of small lakes, with hills and towering pines - still we kept up the pace, pausing only when a shear pin broke on the hardworking motors. Jim, one of the other fathers and a skilled carpenter by trade, had the most shear pin infractions. Fortunately he and his son were cheerful enough in making these repairs while standing in still cold spring melt water.
The next portage and rapids was reached .. and there was no magical wooden skid built. Instead one by one the fathers and older boys waded waist deep into the rushing stream and hauled and dragged the canoes up stream, over rocks, small waterfalls and fallen and trapped logs. At one point we lost one of the smaller boys to the raging current but retrieved him at the bottom of the falls, wet and shivering but cheerfully unhurt.
I decided that this canoe camping was decidedly different than backpacking!
Finally we reached Lake Kishkatina and set up base camp on a medium sized island. First we engineered a huge blue tarp roof. Old and aged plastic sheeting had previously been stretched horizontally between trees to block the gusting North winds. Generations of fishermen had pounded in nails, now rusty and corroded, in exactly the right locations to hang pots and tie off lines to control our flapping blue tarp roof. The kids had been struggling to carry up the packs from the canoes - when opened these packs discharged their load of tents, sleeping bags, pads, nested pots and pans, a cast iron five burner stove with attachable legs, a 5 gallon propane tank, and full sized chain saw and food. Apple boxes and banana crates were opened to display bags of potatoes, canned food, frozen steaks in oversized Coleman coolers, two liter bottles of soda, bags of candy, fruit, dozens and dozens of eggs, bottles of oil, pancake mix, butcher shop sliced thick slabs of bacon, loves of bakery bread, butter... and this is just what I could see on the top of the boxes. I was astounded. This looked more like a rustic cruise ship than a camp! This was certainly a far cry from the stoic backpacking trips where I huddled over a small stove fixing Raman noodles for dinner carefully rationing my food!
