1999/11 Family and BWCA trip - Hog Creek |
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Hog Creek |
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Of all the things I expected to do in life, lying in a tent listening to a wolf pack howling was low on the list, but that’s what we were doing last weekend. Sandie and I took off for four days in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. This is an area of a thousand lakes and rivers between Lake Superior and the Canadian border. North of the border there’s the Canadian park Quetico, which is much the same.
During the summer, the area is plagued by mosquitoes and blackfly, and there’s also a reservation system which limits the number of people, so they all get a wilderness experience. Every party gets its own area of wilderness, including its share of the bugs. However, in October the bugs are all gone, and so are the park rangers, so you can go wherever you like, no reservations needed. The downside of this is that you’re definitely on your own, no one is looking out for you.
This trip took a fair amount of planning as we had to pack all of our gear into the kayak, including winter survival stuff, as 
we expected to be camping out for a few nights, and the weather can get ugly there at times. We also had to pick an area that we could get through. I think I mentioned in an earlier letter that the area had been badly hit by a 4th July storm. Straight line winds had knocked over about 25 million trees and destroyed a number of campsites, so I had to pick an area that had relatively little damage and had already been cleaned up. 
On the Friday night we stayed at Jay Cooke State Park, sleeping in the back of the truck. Saturday was a real surprise as we’d expected the leaves to be all gone, but the St Louis River valley was just a mass of colour. As a result, we spent too much time there and were going to be rushed on the rest of the trip. We had to get to Tettegouche Park and then head north up the Sawbill Trail to the tiny town of Isabella and then 30 miles over forestry roads to Hog Creek. There we assembled the kayak and hauled everything down to the creek. We had food in the bow,clothes in the stern, and tent, sleeping bags, stove, lights, etc. on top of the kayak, plus a lot of stuff crammed in around Sandie. Despite all this, the kayak still felt quite stable.
A couple of hundred yards down the creek we heard this roaring noise, and realized that we were heading into a rapid and some serious whitewater. On my map, rapids are marked with a red dotted line, but the border of the BWCAW is also marked with a thick red line that overlapped the rapid, so I’d missed it. We barely missed what turned out to be a waterfall, fun to run in a solid canoe perhaps, but not in a fabric kayak with all the gear on board! Instead, we had to dive into the portage exit in a hurry, unload most of the gear, and carry the kayak around the rapid. This lost us even more time.
From there the creek ran through high grass beds, winding around in all directions, a real maze, with a few downed trees across the creek to test our steering ability. It was actually very pretty, because the few bits of solid ground were lined with golden coloured tamarack trees, a kind of larch. They’re conifers, but not evergreens: they lose their leaves in winter. With all the turning, we covered about ten miles, not the five we expected, and were relieved to reach Perent Lake just about sundown.
We headed for the first island that had a campsite as that seemed our best chance of spending the night on land rather 
than in the kayak. The island turned out to be ideal, and we pitched the tent just a few feet from the shore, and got the lights and stove going. We didn’t do all the other stuff like hoisting the food pack out of bear reach, as Sandie had covered the entire island in the dark looking for the camp toilet. She almost walked into the lake a few times before she found it on top of the only hill, and she reckoned that if we had a bear on the island she’d have stepped on it by now.
All we had to contend with was mice and squirrels, but even then Sandie got into a confrontation with a mouse over cookie rights. This was probably the same mouse that chewed a hole in our blow-up sink that no longer blows up. The toilet was very scenic with a panoramic view of the lake: no walls!
Shortly after we got to the island, the wind came up, with waves crashing into our little harbour, and we just had time to 
cook dinner before the rain started. In the early hours, I woke up and was surprised that I could see quite well inside the tent. There was no moon: the light was actually coming from the northern lights, a mass of light on the horizon and big fingers of greenish light reaching up to the stars. Awesome! It was then that we heard the wolves on the north shore of the lake. Although no one has ever reported being eaten by wolves, it’s still a spine-chilling noise, even when there’s a mile of water between you. They were still at it after dawn. Rather like camping next to a Welsh pub.