Hey hey hey! That's one sturdy looking pic-a-nic-a-table in today's POD. 

In the eighties when I took a trip in the Brule lake area I was impressed that the Forest Service had equipped the sites with such behemoth picnic tables and had deemed it necessary to chain the things to a trees (three portages in).

My husband wore those wheat jeans cutoffs on trips (and other places) until they were worn to shreds.  Basketball players didn’t wear shorts back in those days either.   

Thanks.  It served us well.  Of course we used our "Spartan green" Bell for a table, too!   

When we made our 22-day trip in June of 1992, a couple of mornings that water pot was frozen solid on the top of that Grumman.

This particular campsite has some vivid memories.  Probably the most notable was watching the planes fight the fire at the island campsite right in our view.  The only time we ever got to experience that activity.  A bit scary, a bit exciting, and a bit sobering all at the same time.  And I really, REALLY wish I had had a better camera to record it all.

This group of photos was during our "orange period."  Orange nylon tent, orange frame pack that was our main food pack.  We never had orange life vests, though.  Late 70's and early 80's--orange was "in".

The planes came over several times and dumped their load, then went out over big water and filled up, then dumped again.  It  went on for a couple hours.  We stood out on a point and watched the whole thing, and on about the sixth and final trip, he flew over us and dipped his wing.  We waved, or course.

After they battled this little fire on the island and got it controlled, the fire people came over and talked with us.  ("Ontario Fire Control".  Orange suit.   )  We had known that it was super-dry so we had been extremely careful on our trip with fires.  We were six days into our trip and had no stove.  He asked if we'd seen anyone at the campsite, said the fire was started by a campfire, and told us to be "very careful" of our fires. 

The firefighter's pump ran until about 9:30.  It was a very exciting evening.  At this point we were on the sixth evening of our ten-day trip.

The next day we paddled over and looked at the island where the fire had taken place.  It was still burning down low.  It had burned up a really nice-looking campsite.

After this experience we entered the Namakan River and spent three days going down "memory lane" on the route of our first canoe trip in 1971.  And on our eighth evening, as we were camped on an island in Namakan Lake we noticed smoke smells and a heavy haze once again.  As we were out looking around for the source, a boat pulled up and a man in an Ontario Natural Resources Uniform (I didn't note in my journal if that one was orange or not  ) came up to our hilltop camp.  He told us that the smoke was from an extensive fire sixty miles away at Thunder Bay that was out of control.   "There is nobody left to fight a fire."

He said "NO SMOKING or FIRE!"  If we have no stove, we should just get out.  We ended up cutting our trip a day short, as we were nearing the end of our food supplies that could be eaten dry.  My comments the following morning are "too smoky for a photo", and I wish I had taken one just to see what that meant.  The sunrise photo I took at 5:45 doesn't look that terribly hazy.

How on earth can 1980 seem like not  that long ago??