Campsite: R-40
The Turtle-Flambeau Flowage is located in Iron County, WI – pretty close to our usual stomping grounds in the NHAL. It’s maintained by the Wisconsin DNR, and has 66 remote campsites that are water-access only. Like the BWCA, each official site has a fire ring and a pit toilet. Unlike the BWCA, the sites have small signs marking their presence and helpful signs pointing down the correct trail for the toilet. We’re getting married in September and received a new REI Half-dome 2+ tent as an early wedding present (thanks, Dad!), so we had to field test it to make sure it was ship-shape, right? Right.
Day 1: Friday, July 22, 2016 (Madison to Turtle-Flambeau)
Due to a paucity of vacation days, we often opt to leave a little bit early on a Friday for our weekend trips. It’s about a 4 hour drive to most places we have been choosing to go in the northeast part of Wisconsin, but with the longer days in summer that means we are usually okay to drive up, get to a site, and set up while it’s still light out. That’s what we did this time, and it worked well. We got to Murray’s Landing, which is on a very well maintained road just outside Manitowish. The signage for the road from Highway 51 is very clear. The landing is very nice, too. There are dumpsters for garbage and recyclables, and a latrine. There’s plenty of parking, and there were a few cars with trailers already there. The water near the landing is very shallow and does not gain any depth until a few feet out, so be prepared to wade a little bit in order to launch if the water is up.
We got underway about 7:30, and made it to the first campsite, R-40 (I think the R stands for “rustic”). Since it was empty and it was getting late, we snagged it. The site faces west, so there’s a nice sunset view from here. There is lots of open ground at this site, but we chose a pad farther back in the woods, in a more protected spot farther from shore.
Really, the only downside of this site (and this area in general) is that it has an extremely persistent and numerous deerfly population, which we discovered at Murray’s Landing. These things were just everywhere, doing their deerfly thing and circling in droves around our heads. It was a still night, so there was absolutely no breeze to deflect them a little. They are utterly unphased by repellent (we practically bathed in Natrapel). Since it was just about bedtime, we set up our new tent and tucked in for the night just as the mosquitoes descended. Since this site is on a slow-moving body of water and right next to a boggy patch, there are plenty of mosquitoes here. Don’t forget your bugspray on a trip to the Turtle-Flambeau. We did manage to enjoy the sunset for a little while as we tested out our other early wedding present – REI Flexlite chairs. They’re definitely better than sitting on a log. I’m a larger woman and am just near the weight limit suggested by REI, but found that the chair worked well for me. It does sink in soft soil, but generally will settle okay. They fold up and pack down pretty small.
It was a hot night and we hadn’t seen anyone. Sometimes bullfrogs sound like human voices to me when I’m half-asleep, so I thought I was sort of dreaming when I thought I heard a guy talking. It must have been around 11:00 when a man and woman passed through on a boat, having a pretty loud conversation. They sounded so close we thought they were planning to land, but they seemed to just be passing through. After the BWCA, I’m not used to hearing people at remote campsites in the dead of night, so that was pretty unnerving for a few minutes!
Day 2: Saturday, July 23, 2016 (Turtle-Flambeau)
At about 4AM I had an annoying realization. I had forgotten to grab my driver’s license out of my wallet, meaning I was lacking my fishing license. After sleeping in a little after a night of pretty poor sleep, we scraped ourselves of our (roomy! spacious! ventilated!) tent and put some breakfast together. We had a few leftover dehydrated meals from the BWCA trip, so breakfast was salsa, eggs, and beans plus a nice dose of strong coffee. We saw a few fishing boats passing through while we ate. Although Sean says that this is a voluntary no-wake zone, it didn’t seem like the motor boats were really abiding by that. There were plenty of people speeding through pretty quickly.
After stopping back at the car for my license, we decided to explore a little bit. The Turtle-Flambeau is a huge area, and we canoed for about 45 minutes past our R-40 site before finding site R-38, which is on a point. We decided to stop there for lunch. The breeze was up on Saturday, and the site was open enough to catch a nice breeze and take care of the bugs for us! The other fantastic thing about this site was the abundance of thimbleberry bushes, along with plenty of red raspberry bushes. If you ever get a chance to eat thimbleberries, friends, go and get ’em! I love them even better than raspberries, and they are pretty much impossible to find unless you stumble upon a wild patch. They just don’t keep well, so they’re generally not commercially available. The bright red ones are ready to snarf.
The unfortunate thing about this site was that its previous occupants had not been great to it. We discovered a mostly-used roll of electrical tape, along with an entire loaf of store-wrapped bread (!?) and plenty of root beer and beer cans in the fire ring. Plus the root beer box. Come on, people. However, if you don’t have ridiculous trash to take care of this would be a nice site to camp on. Plenty of shelter, yet enough exposure to be breezy. There are landings on both sides of the point. I would suggest the landing without the sign on it on the northern side of the point as the better of the two landings – more room, less weedy. There are a couple of decent tent pads.
After a lunch of potato stew, the weather started looking iffy. Upon consulting our phones (there is decent reception in this area), we found out that a pretty significant storm was rolling through Minnesota and heading toward us. We decided to turn around and stick closer to our site in case the weather turned nasty. We had been trolling all day with no luck, but on the way back Sean caught a very fat 15″ smallmouth on his husky jerk lure. That ended up being our only fish caught on the flowage this trip. July is probably not the ideal time to fish – or we may go to the known crappie areas next time we try to fish up here.
Back at the site, the flies were unbearable. We strung up our hammock – a Kammok Roo, which has a bug net that has saved my sanity – and I read/took a nap without bugs to bother me. Sean busied himself with improving the crayfish trap and baiting it with a couple of worms, as we were bereft of other suitable crayfish baits. Turned out a large snapping turtle in the vicinity was also very interested in worms, and poked his head up at us many times to see what we were up to and wondering why we were making it so hard for turtles to have some gosh-darn worms for dinner.
Our own dinner was salsa, rice and beans, plus beef, which I would make again. It started raining gently just after dinner, but with little wind. We had the aerial tarp set up, so we just tucked in underneath it with our chairs and our books. The flies did not bother us under the open tarp. I read later that they are attracted to the highest point, so perhaps us being underneath a higher point helped. I also read advice that you can stick a tall fern or feather in your hat and they’ll circle that instead of your head, which I’ll try to keep in mind to try for next time we deal with deerflies.
This night was muggy and sticky, but drizzly enough that we decided to close the vestibules of the tent’s rain fly. I had a really hard time sleeping, but we did wake up to a nice little thunderstorm around dawn. It tested our new tent a little bit, but we came through just fine with no water leaking in. The area under the vestibules stayed dry, and the fly kept out the water. We put our packs and spare gear under a tarp just outside the tent that was just staked out on the ground, and that all stayed dry too. We’ve made a habit of keeping Emberlit fuel under the tarps as well, in case it rains. There are lots of small pine cones at this site, which make excellent fuel. That and a dry sheet of bark from a downed birch tree, and we didn’t have to use our fuel stove at all over the weekend.
Day 3: Sunday, July 24, 2016 (Turtle-Flambeau, Starrett Lake Campground, Blueberry Lake, Frank Lake)
We slept in again, and packed up slowly after breakfast. Our aerial tarp and rainfly dried out pretty quickly on this breezy day. After packing up, we headed back to the car and headed toward Starrett Lake for lunch. Our last leftover BWCA meal – couscous with pine nuts and veggies – was a nice meal to end on. We grabbed some water from a campground pump, and went to check Blueberry Lake to see if there were any more blueberries available. It seemed that they were all pretty much over/picked already, so we headed out without even getting out of the car.
We decided to check out Frank Lake, which is near Starrett. There is a small craft landing at this quiet lake, but we opted to just shore fish at the landing because it was late in the day. We were down to one bobber, so I fished with our nightcrawlers while Sean cast with various lures. The area near the landing at Frank Lake is just infested with tiny bluegill that grab worms as fast as you can pitch them in the water. Even when they’re tiny, they’re a lot of fun! I did catch a couple of keepers, but with only two decent sized fish at the end of the day we decided to just let them go. The water at the landing is shallow enough to just wade in and stand, and it was very nice to fish and wade in the cool water on a hot day. We will have to come back to this lake another day and fish it more extensively with the canoe. Sean didn’t have any luck with his lure from shore. We decided that my tiny bluegills altogether might get up to the weight of Sean’s smallie from the day before, so we caught equivalent fish by weight.
After a dinner at the Minocqua Brewing Company (who were really not on their best service game that evening, not sure what was happening), we headed home. Of course, we did have a hankering for some ice cream on the way back, so we made a brief detour at Belts’ in Stevens Point on the way back to Madison. They do not mess around with the size of their small brownie sundae! We were both defeated.
With the wedding coming up and summer weekends now at a premium, this is probably my last trip northward for the summer. Sean is heading toward the Manitowish River with some friends in late August. The next trip report probably won’t be till this fall.
Tippy Canoe Tales 