We took a bunch of weekend trips this month, two of which were camping trips to the NHAL. The earlier weekend, we camped on our usual site on the Manitowish River, and the second weekend we camped at the Starrett Lake campground next door to Sean’s brother and his family.
Our first weekend was June 2/3. The Manitowish was actually a little bit busy when we were there, with sites 14 and 15 occupied. We headed for our favorite site and found it empty (save for a beaver who had just then felled a tree at the site and went charging into the water when we startled him!), so we set up camp for the night. I was a bit concerned about the forecast of rainy weather and thunderstorms for Saturday, but we only got a short drizzle in the morning while we were fishing for crappie and then a really brief storm in the afternoon that made for great napping weather in the tent. The crappie were mostly only active in the early morning, and we caught a few on our micro-perch rapala lures. They seemed to be more interested in the fire tiger pattern, not too surprising in that dark stained water. We had visitors in the form of a flock of about seven trumpeter swans, who Sean once said sound like middle school band practice. We also saw the tiniest snapping turtle near our fire ring, whose shell was only about the size of a quarter. On Saturday morning we saw a pair of otters swim by as well. It’s a fun stretch of river where you can see a lot of wildlife.
The next day I was really feeling the urge to catch a whole pile of panfish, so I suggested that we go check out Frank Lake. We had shore-fished from the landing the year before and had a lot of fun with small bluegills. Frank is a very pretty, larger lake with no development on it, and only electric motors are allowed. Its parking area is uphill from the beach landing and there’s no way to drive all the way to the landing, but it’s a very easy portage to the shore from the car. Because of this and it being fairly tucked away, we’ve not seen too much traffic on it. Frank Lake was FULL of spawning beds when we got out on it, but I think we were a few days too late and they were all abandoned. However, we decided to try our luck, and started exploring since we had never been on Frank with Old Ironsides before. I was casting along the shore with a worm and bobber, when something much bigger than a bluegill hit hard! It ended up being the largest smallmouth I had ever boated, so that was pretty fun! Sean was casting wacky-rigged soft bait worms for smallmouth and ended up with a very nice keeper-sized walleye, which we decided would be coming back with us. So, we never did end up with those panfish, but we had a pretty fun couple of hours out on Frank.
My big smallmouth bass.
The next weekend, June 17/18, we were car camping at the Starrett Lake campground. We brought some extra luxury stuff that we don’t normally bring, like our big comfy folding chairs and the big cooler. We were in walk-in site #10, which is smaller, but nice and isolated from the main camp and has a spot right on Starrett Lake to park your canoe. My in-laws and family took #9, which is their favorite. Site 11 was overgrown with knee-high grass and no lake view. We were blanked on Starrett during our morning fishing jaunt on Saturday, but we have had good luck there in the past catching northern pike with spoons. After breakfast, we decided to head over to Frank Lake again, because it’s right next door to Starrett. We ended up having it to ourselves and a family of loons the whole day, and it was beautiful weather with only a light breeze. The loon pair on Frank Lake had chicks, which was amazing! We did accidentally get between them when the adults swam under our canoe – they let us know how much they did not like that, and we worked fast to get out of the way! We fished in the morning and caught both largemouth and smallmouth bass on soft baits, and then found a good spot to eat a shore lunch. Clearly there are a couple of spots where locals frequent. Since it was getting kind of warm, we grabbed our snorkeling gear from the car and explored a bit under the water. Lots of fun sights to see under there!
We had hot dogs for dinner and tried fishing out at the Plum Lake pier, but a rainstorm started coming in and the wind got nasty, so we gave up fast. The whole night stayed rainy and then it stayed gloomy and rainy the next morning as well, so we went into Boulder Junction for breakfast at the Granary (very busy, but good food). It didn’t clear up, so we decided to pack up wet and hit the road.
A classic Wisconsin photo of a man and his boat and his fish.
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.
Like I said, nice sunset.
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.
Thimbleberries galore!
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)
Our site, R-40, from the water. Surprisingly you can’t see all the deer flies from here.
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 