Well hello! We are in fact still camping and canoeing our little hearts out. We still go to the BWCA or Quetico annually (sometimes both!), with many smaller trips in between. It’s been a minute since I updated this site, though. Sean is away in Northern Wisconsin this week in the NHAL, meeting up with old friends and making friends with new fish. I am holding down the fort in Madison with our cat Billie, and preparing/dehydrating meals for our upcoming Quetico trip in early August. Sean’s in charge of packing all the gear, I’m in charge of the meals.
Over Memorial Day weekend, we headed to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to the Big Island Lake Wilderness. This small wilderness is in the Hiawatha National Forest. It’s comprised of a handful of small lakes, connected by portages, and most lakes have at least 1-2 nonreservable campsites on them. It’s a bit over 5 hours to get up there from Madison, and since we didn’t quite know what to expect we left early in the morning in order to have as much daylight as possible.
The parking lot for the wilderness has a few spots, but it’s not huge. We had taken our Subaru Outback because we weren’t sure of the road conditions, but our VW wagon would have been okay – the roads are mostly paved with some potholes, nothing too bad. There’s a handy latrine and an info board, and a short-ish and level walk to the landing. We noticed right away there there were a lot of insects, so we didn’t linger. Big Island Lake is, appropriately, home to a big island, and it became clear that the campsite there was occupied. We had already decided to go further in, though. We made the very short portage over to Mid Lake, which had quite a steep downward slope and a very mucky landing. After swearing a bit, we got going… and then realized that the portage we took was just around the corner from the real portage, which was much more level and actually had some infrastructure/stairs. Whoops. It became clear that there are all sorts of unofficial spots in this small area where people have blazed their own paths, and there are not really any official maps. Sean had printed a USGS map and marked it up. Luckily it’s also not a huge place, so it’s not super easy to get lost.
After noticing that the site on Mid Lake was unoccupied, we considered stopping there while a large bass circled warily on its bed, just off the site landing. However, it was pretty low and very buggy, so we decided to press on. The next lake, Coattail, had one site that was occupied, so we portaged on to McInnes, which also has one site. We figured we could turn around and go back to Mid if we had to.
The site on McInnes was empty, and up on a small rise. We decided to make it our home for the night, and unloaded. As soon as we started moving around the site, it became clear that the blackflies and mosquitoes were incredibly terrible – and it was still full daylight. In all our years of camping, this was one of the worst swarms we have ever experienced. On a whim, I had purchased a bug shirt at Canoecopia in March. I put it on and looked like a weird astronaut, but I was so grateful to have it. Sean put on a bug net for his head and assembled our other new purchase, a Eureka bug tarp. This is one of those things that we always thought was a little too extra (c’mon, you’re going to have bugs when you’re camping! Suck it up!), but it has turned out to be a real game changer. It does great in moderate rain (possibly even heavy rain, we haven’t tried yet but I think it’d be fine), as a sun screen, and it’s awesome at being a bug shelter. We of course had to kill plenty of bugs that came in with us, but we could actually relax, play cards, read, and cook without being bombarded. We used to dive for cover in the tent around dusk to avoid the mosquitos, but with this we can actually hang out and avoid them.
The next day, we fished McInnes and didn’t have much luck. We eventually made it over to Klondike lake, where we saw that the site there was also taken. We were glad that we had been able to claim our McInnes site, since this little wilderness seems to get pretty busy. We were able to catch some bass and panfish just around the corner from the site, and spotted the next portage. We decided not to take it, but it was a nice day of fishing. So, although we didn’t quite make it through the entire wilderness, we enjoyed the parts we saw. The real challenge was the insects, but with the right gear it was tolerable.
After coming out on Monday morning, we drove around a bit to explore the various trailheads that lead to the small scattered lakes on the edge of the wilderness, and then pointed the car toward home. This was a fun little trip – I think this spot would be particularly lovely in the fall.
Tippy Canoe Tales 