During the 12th – 17th of June I was busy canoeing up in Northern Minnesota. Let me begin by stating that canoeing isn’t easy if you’ve never done it before.

We put in on Moose lake near Ely, MN on the 12th and canoed for about 4 hours with one portage to get to our campsite on Splash lake. If you don’t know anything about canoeing, a portage is basically where you move from one lake to another across land. You also have to carry all of your stuff across it. Once we were on Splash, we camped for 2 nights while relaxing, fishing, or looking at birds.

It began to rain our second night and continued raining for nearly 30 hours. During which we canoed across 5 lakes and 4 portages. One portage was somewhere in between 1/2 to 3/4 of a mile. Not bad to walk in normal conditions, but it was raining and I had a 75 lb. canoe on my back. Neddless to say, we made it to our second campsite on Jordan lake. The rain let up enough for us to set up camp and eat dinner.

The last couple days were absolutely beautiful and sunny. I finally caught a fish (a walleye) the last night so I didn’t feel like such a failure. Our trip out took about 8ish hours covering the same ground in one day we had previously done in two. My arms and back were very sore when we were done.

I had lots of fun and want to go back. I just need to work on my camping skills so I don’t suck so much.