Basswood to Kett ? If you add in the leg to Tuck Lake I'd have to say it is my favorite, NOT  !! Did that in '05 to try and save time to Robinson. Basswood to Kett was partially flooded by beavers. What a misstake ! It was hot and by the time we stopped at Tuck Lake I was all in.

I don't know if it's my fav or not, but it certainly was memorable.  It's the one between Mack and Munro Lakes.  It's a pretty good up/down, but that wasn't it.  It was the ticks.  I had the canoe, so I really couldn't stop, but I could see them all over me, and even on the bushes.  At the end of the portage I had to strip buck nekked and wound up picking something like 70 or 80 of them off me.  The zip offs on my pants worked well as tick traps.  The flaps stopped some of them and there were 15 or so trapped there on each leg.  Apparently I'm a tick magnet...

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True be that! Holding the canoe on my shoulders with one hand, grabbing a tree root and pulling myself up a muddy hill in the rain with the other? Priceless.

But for me, nothing -- NOTHING -- compares to the Bon Homme and Sauvage portages south of Fern, which we did that same trip. 400 rods and 291 rods, back to back (and double portaged each one). First time we did those I had a 70-plus pound aluminum canoe with NO YOKE -- just some foam wrapped around the middle thwart.

A storm had recently come through, and trees were down across the trail all over the place. In one place, three trees fell on top of each other. And you couldn't go around. I spent a lot of time pushing, pulling and lifting that canoe through the mess.

In addition, there was "the bog". I was walking in two inches of water, a canoe for a hat, when suddenly I was waist deep. They said it was like a cartoon -- half my body suddenly disappeared. Then my foot got wedged under a root in that muck, and I had to be pulled out. Another guy had to "dive" down and get his sandal.

So, "favorite" portage? Hmmm. Certainly one of the most memorable.

(We took the long Fern River portage on the way out.)

-- kypaddler

Years later, we retraced our steps with a slightly different group. We tried to warn the "newcomers" in the one canoe what was ahead, but they laughed at us. After Bonhomme and Sauvage, they didn't talk to us for two days.

Oh, I forgot to mention the guy we thereafter referred to as "The Soothsayer" or "The Prophet."

Driving on the way north on that trip (it's a 950-mile trip), we stopped to get gas. We were running late, so when this ancient-looking guy saw our canoes and tried to make conversation, we gave some short answers, thinking he was just being polite and not realizing he was genuinely interested. We weren't exactly rude, just less friendly than we typically are. In a hurry, you know.

He asked if we were going to Quetico, said he had been there in the spring, couldn't wait to get back, and then asked: "You doing that mile-long portage with the waist-deep mud?"

We had no idea what he was talking about, but just answered "um, sure ... yes" so we could get going. We felt kind of like someone finding out you're from Chicago or New York or somewhere like that and being asked, "Really, well do you know so-and-so?"

Quetico's a big place, you know. Lots of portages.

Lack of engaged responses sealed our fate, I guess.

Because a couple of days later, there we were in waist-deep mud on a mile-long portage.

He must of "sent" us there.

Because what were the odds that we'd be headed to Quetico, entering the park at the same point and taking the same route and ending up on the same portage and finding conditions the same in late fall as in early spring?

-- kypaddler

In the BW, got mesmerized by the hike from Hanson to S. Arm last May.  Traveling solo and doing two trips, I wasted so much time taking pictures of waterfall, etc., I overcooked my exit and stumbled into camp on Carp at almost midnight.

In the Q, most memorable was on our first trip. On the way back to PP from Sarah, we stumbled from an unnamed pond S of Side Lake to Nest Lake.  It was 25 yrs ago, and I still have the maps with the skull and cross-bones drawn over that one.  A true swamp with large hussocks of grass and tight trees, no trail, for a mercifully short distance.  We "surfed" the canoes gunwale side up as best we could.

Will never forget the look of horror on the face of one of my partners when he, walking backwards, lost his balance, let go of the bow of the canoe and landed up to his armpits in muck the color of a pig sty.  He had on what were, up until that moment, white painter's pants.  Guy hasn't signed up for a trip since...