We had our first BWCA trip together this past weekend. It was quite the adventurous weekend!
Friday morning we were up at 6am and packing up the food and car to head to Kevin’s where we were dropping the food off at for them to bring up Saturday. (I was the food packer, spent 4 hours the night before grocery shopping, prepping, and repackaging food for the 4 boys for the whole week and for Nathan and I for the 3 days we were there). Left Kevin’s at 7:30 and headed north.
We arrived at the Tofte Ranger Station to pick up our overnight hiking permit at around 2:30pm. We had the privilege of watching a BWCA educational video, where we learned that if a bear comes into camp you should throw rocks at it. We also learned that the BWCA is supposed to be uncongested, and people sparse; which is not true in all cases, more on that later…
The Brule Lake Hiking Trail was calling our name, but we were not calling its. We had decided on the way up we wanted to do the Eagle Mountain Hiking Trail, which was half the length of the Brule Lake Trail, but the Ranger was not able to let us change our permit and a new permit would have been $32. Lesson learned, don’t book a hiking permit online, wait to book one in person- they never sell out anyway. So at 4pm we headed out on our 16 mile round trip hike.
The Brule Lake Trail was not much of a trail. It was a strip of land that was cleared of trees but covered over in brush, bushes, weeds, and small trees; all of which were covering rocky, muddy, and boggy terrain. It was quite the adventure to hack our way through 7 miles of brush to Whale Lake, where 2 campsites awaited us. 7pm rolls around and we finally arrive at campsite numero uno to find that it was a beautiful site right on the lake and, much to our dissappointment, was occupied by 2 couples. So we headed to site 2, which we could not find, after much backtracking and scratching of heads we finally found site 2 set far back into the woods well away from the beautiful lake. The seclusion ended up being nice. We were exhausted after our 7 miles of bushwacking so dinner was quick and no fire. We headed to bed where we passed out before 9pm.
Saturday we were up and at em at 7am to hike the great Eagle Mountain, we were told it was a 3 mile hike each way, we were not looking forward to this but we were looking forward to standing on top of Minnesota. We grabbed some oranges, granola, and our water bottles and headed out. A short mile later we were at the top! How relieved we were to have a shorter hike than anticipated!!! The summit was actually set in among some trees and brush, but a 100 yards south was a cliff edge that had a pretty sweet view of the BWCA. We enjoyed our oranges and the morning view before heading back down to pack up and hike out to meet the boys at the Brule Lake Parking Lot at 2pm.
More to come later…