Epilogue, Final Takeaways, Gear Notes, Final Stats, and Other Geekery
Broken gear: The prussik knots on my hammock tarp guy lines have deteriorated the rope. The drawstring on my Ursack came out at the end of the trip rendering it somewhat useless the last couple days.

Food: This year’s increased portions meant a few pounds more weight, but it was worth it. In spite of eating plenty, I still lost over 10 pounds over the course of the week. The dehydrated tomato soup was a fantastic addition, as was the whey powder. Bringing over a pound of summer sausage was a bit much, and bringing only a half pound of cheese was a bit short. Cheez-its, Rx bars, hot sauce, homemade beef jerky, and corn nuts are still great snacking options, and black cherry limeade powder is still perfect mixed up in a Nalgene after a long hard travel day.

Fishing gear:

Especially for solo travel, I find trolling to be the easiest way to go. Rapalas troll well…spoons and spinners are far more prone to snagging. So those will be the mainstay of my BWCA tackle box.

My steel leaders have awful swivels on them and are difficult to use. They’ll be replaced.

I will always fish with barbless hooks both at home and in the BWCA for safety. Fishing barbless certainly saved me some pain when I got hooked in the thumb on Grandpa. I don’t plan on dragging live bait along anytime soon, it’s just too much of a pain for me.

Other gear:

The Bic lighters worked well, but I am going to add more of those mini torches next year. The one I brought this year earned “most valuable cheap gear” honors after its clutch lighting of my stove in terrible conditions on “The Rock” on Alpine.

I paddled with my new carbon paddle on the last day of travel and it felt fine, though the 50” length still probably fit slightly better in the Northwind solo. In a tandem, I expect my carbon paddle to be perfect.

I used about 20 ounces of stove fuel. More than last year.

Binoculars didn’t get used much, they’re just too large to keep accessible while paddling and portaging.

Taking the tarp was the right call, but I have to figure out an easier rigging system for it. Planning on using some Dutchware bling to avoid the hassle of tying time-consuming knots in the wind and cold.

I faithfully applied liberal amounts of “bag balm” to my hands each night before sleeping with cotton gloves, and my hands, especially my fingertips, still got pretty tender. I’m going to attach simple zipper pulls to every zipper I find that doesn’t have one, and I’d also like to find a suitable glove with good dexterity to wear when paddling or working around camp. Mechanix gloves perhaps?

Second place in the “most valuable cheap gear” contest goes to the two large IKEA “tarp bags” I brought along to haul firewood back to camp.

Bug spray is fine, but a headnet combined with long pants and sleeves is the best option.

For late May travel, my clothing is right at the bare minimum: Wool baselayer top/bottom, wool flannel, fleece jacket, 2 t-shirts, 1 pair of shorts, rain shell and pants, 3 pairs of underwear, 4 pairs of wool socks (2 would be ok), Crocs, Astrals, stocking hat, sun hat, and bad weather insulated hood/facemask. After my chilling experience on Alpine, I will forever have a specific set of perfectly dry clothes ready to go in a dry bag in my pack so I can always get into dry clothes and warm up.

Using a compression style dry bag for my hammock was a huge improvement, eliminating lots of bulk.

The new Voyageur maps were awesome! The only hiccups were self-induced, mistaking a line demarcating a burn area for a portage thus leading me down the dead end northwest bay on Mora, and mistakenly interpreting the large red triangle of a campsite on Agamok for being on Gabimichigami, which aided in my disorientation there when I couldn’t find the site that looked to be right next to the portage I was looking for.

My portage notes document was helpful, but I need to be more diligent about reviewing the notes as I travel during the day to refresh, as it would have limited the time lost looking for the re-located portage on the Frost River, and prevented me from my mishap when I missed the Ogish-Kingfisher portage.

I forgot the charging cord for my Garmin InReach, but perhaps that was a good thing because it helped limit texting while in the park. I nearly forgot the charging cord for my phone/camera/alarm clock.

I vowed to sleep more after last year’s travel-centric trip, but was only marginally successful. There’s just too much I want to do when I’m out there. I did have a day or two where I was able to sleep in until 6 or later, and snuck in a couple solid naps, though.

Once home, I had four days to recover before going back to work on Friday, due to pushing really hard through the early part of my month at work. This was a huge plus. Even still, my gear sat in a fermenting pile in the living room for three days before I finally was able to take care of it on Thursday.

For a future trip with 1-2 sons:

I have to figure out the sleep setup, ASAP. I love the comfort of sleeping in my hammock too much to go back to a tent. So I’ll need to acquire and properly set up a hammock for my son, and then try a few practice sleeps in the woods during cooler weather. This requires significant investment of brainpower, money, and time.

Fishing is important…and I need to do all I can to ensure we will catch some fish. Investing the time to travel to Grandpa and fish a lot helped, but I still have a long way to go here. Maybe I just need to hire a fishing guide for the day before we enter?

Limiting camp setups is required. I’m always amazed at all the energy one must expend to set up a campsite after a day of exhausting canoe travel. With someone else along needing my help, I need to cut the travel length by half or more most days.

High point of the trip: Catching/eating fish on Grandpa. The campsite on Little Sag. Low point: “The Rock” on Alpine. Struggling to find the portage on Gabimichigami in awful weather. Most beautiful: Mueller Falls, Mora-Little Sag portage. Best birdsongs: Bittern on Frost. Hermit Thrush on Grandpa. Veery on Missing Link. Close calls: Getting too cold on Alpine. Final paddle on Seagull.

The big takeaway: On the drive up, during my first phone call to my friend in Seattle, I said that when I go on to the Boundary Waters, I feel like God is spending the whole time saying “I love you” to me, and that I spend the whole time saying “Thank you” to God. This connection with God, as well as with my deep, inner, most-real self, is the best answer I have found to the question of “Why do I make all the effort to take to this big trip to the Boundary Waters?” When I am up there, I feel loved, in the deepest, most natural way I know. In directly interacting with nature, one of God’s love letters to us, I have a greater sense of God’s nearness, and his realness. The only natural response to this nearness is to say “Thank you” and “I love you” back to God. Even though I spend the great majority of my year intimately familiar with my own weaknesses and failures, when I am in the Boundary Waters, a very necessary acceptance and appreciation of who I truly am deep inside takes place. While humility and recognition of one’s limitations is required of any solo paddler, so is appreciation and confidence. Each small task I complete has a clearly sensed payoff, a small means of saying “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

Grand total stats for trip—>Lakes: 32 (30 lakes, 2 rivers)|Portages: 38|Rods: 2330 (7.3 miles, 21.8 total miles walked on portages due to double portaging)|Beaver dams lifted over: 5|Beaver dams run: 14 + 3 very small dams|Rapids run: 2|Lost: 3 (Snipe, Mora, Gabimichigami)