On day three, we did our best to dry out all of our gear, and did some shore fishing, firewood finding and processing, and made a new BWCA meal – Naan pizzas! Since we didn’t have enough firewood or good wood for coals, we opted to fry them in our stainless pan with a stove. Mini garlic naan with some Contadina pizza sauce, Sargento string cheese, and Hormel pepperonis really hit the spot. We were able to fry the naan just long enough to get most of the cheese to melt, though we burned the naan a few times, which just added a little realistic pizza oven flavor obviously!

Curiously enough, with the heat, there were many bees out at our site, some of which were not content to leave us alone after initially investigating. I managed to swing somewhat gently at an oncoming bee which must have been positioned perfectly, and I got stung right in the wrist. I haven’t been stung in quite some time so I was careful to monitor my breathing and heart rate just to see if I developed any sort of allergic reaction. Thankfully I had nothing but some swelling, and later some itching.

To cool ourselves down on this hot 80 degree humid day, one person decided they were going to swim, and we all followed suit. I donned my PFD, undies, and sunglasses, and hopped in the water. There is a nice ledge to climb on to get in/out of the water so I was fine going barefoot, as I didn’t want to wear my Boundary Boots, nor my dry camp shoes. Otherwise I do like wearing shoes when swimming, but it turned out fine. The cold, maybe 55-58F water, was just what I needed. I stayed in for probably 15-20 minutes, really letting the water soak up a bunch of heat, and got out and moved slowly. Still, after going shirtless and putting a shirt on 30 minutes later, I was almost uncomfortably warm less than an hour after going for a swim. I had a day like this on Cherry where we day tripped to Lake of the Clouds. The humidity was almost suffocating that day.

Another night of whiskey by the fire was just what we needed. Curiously we saw a few mice, which I’ve only ever seen once before in the BWCA. Then something fell on one of our buddies, possibly a small pine cone, but it really freaked us out as he thought it was a mouse climbing on him or something. Well, give it another few minutes of chit-chat and staring into the fire and it was like it never happened. We headed to bed around 10pm knowing we had a long travel day to Gebeonequet tomorrow.

~Gun Lake