Quote:


I would but I'm in Washington State and flying out to the Phillippines in the morning.

Intrepid Camper on Brule Lake.

I.C. snapped this shot of me portaging my solo stripper.

CanoeFly

Canoefly,  how do you portage that kayak?  How much does it weigh?  I know they make some very light kayaks but still, it must be tough.

Here's a short re-cap of our Group Solo:

The September group solo trip was interesting.  The two fellows I went with were both very nice guys, and about as far apart as they could be on the spectrum of personalities.  NcountryBen is solid, quiet, deliberate and CanoeFly is very type A and had a hard time sitting down at camp and always out in the lead on travel days.  Ben brought a 4 yr old Chesapeak retriever along which was a very well trained and quiet dog.  She loved to fetch sticks out of the water and they had to be BIG sticks; she just turned her nose up at any stick that wasn't at least 4 feet long and about as thick as your forearm.  By the end of the trip I had her helping bring the firewood up to the fire pit from the canoe when I would go out and find some...if we told her "It's firewood" she would deposit it in a pile, if we told her it was her "stick" she would play with it.  CanoeFly totally fell in love with her.
The weather was overall pretty good.  It only rained on us the first full day out on the water and we were about to make camp anyway so took refuge under my big purple tarp.  We had some cloudy days and many windy days but we lucked out with being in small lakes or on portages on the windy days.  The mornings and evenings were very chilly, especially for CF who had just come from 90 degree weather out East. 
The portages were hard; long distances and lots of steep uphill stretches where the crews had actually built a series of rock steps to scale them.  In general the paths were pretty good and fairly level, not a lot of ankle turning rock in them.  The campsites were beaten BEYOND death with most tent pads just dirt, no grass what-so-ever!
It was surprising that we ran into so many people on the lakes at this later time of year.  However there weren't so many campers that it was a problem finding a campsite.  The larger lakes had many nice campsites and some interesting old lava-flow rocks which erroded at the wave line on shore into small caves just above water level.  We ran into some blow-down areas and a little burnt over area on the trip.
We started at Brule and went west to Cherokee, north to Long Island Lake and east to Winchell, then south back to Brule.  I would recommend going the opposite direction on the loop which would make more of the portages going down hill with a load instead of uphill.
Saw lots of different birds, large and small, maybe migrating considering the flocks.  Saw no large animals but heard a moose one evening.
It was my fifth trip for the year and unfortunately the last till next spring.