Continuation Three:

Ghostly early morning fog on Bass Lake

Getting up just after four, practically still in the dark, had by now become „de rigueur“ for each new day of my water voyaging. The inhumane slavery of a fight with a headwind, or risking an upset of the canoe in whipped up huge waves by a side-wind, had forced me to extend the productive part of the day before ten o’clock in this way, the time when the winds awakened. Early morning hours yielded the lion’s share of the distance traveled during every day. The Voyageurs waited out the middle part of the day on land, whilst after the winds died down towards the evening, they resumed paddling until dark. They, however, already knew the places, where they were to camp every evening and the collective work sharing in the camps made a quick process of completing all the necessary chores before sleeping. I had to find a campsite between four and five. Still, it took me until dark to complete all the required chores and duties before laying my exhausted skeletal frame onto the sleeping bag in the tent. This was typically sometimes around nine in the evening. The combination of eleven-hour paddling marathons, interlaced with stumbling under heavy burdens on the portages, as well as the constant bending down to lift miscellaneous, often heavy objects – all from the ground level – in the evening camp, turned the moment of the final reaching of the horizontal position in the tent a real feeling of being liberated from slavery. The idea of an evening paddling sounded absolutely unreal to me.

I reached the portage into Basswood Lake really early, practically still in darkness and in a fog. Just then, fast motor boats of outfitters from the USA were converging to it, as they were bringing their clients, mostly for fishing. Their headlights beamed through the fog, some of them carried up to four upside down canoes on an overhead pipe rack. They were in contact with the clients by radio and in this way, they could pick them up and “rescue” them from situations, where they had requested it due to a headwind, or a bad weather. The one time waterfall into the lake was now replaced with a small concrete dam. On the Canadian side of it, was a foot portage for canoeists, while the American side had a road for a truck, which loaded motorboats with a winch and transported them between the lakes. The truck’s headlights had been visible from a distance. The entrance beach of Basswood Lake was covered with tatters of dirty foam from a surf that had been whipping it since the wee hours. It did not serve as an encouraging sign. Gone were the cigar shapes of the lakes’ outlines, elongated from east to west, which I had passed before the crossing of the divide. The large lake Basswood spills into a torn up, complicated shape and the water route weaves through it in several giant zigzags. A strong, west-south-west wind thus asserted itself in them depending on their direction either as a strong side-wind, or a merciless headwind. When moving northward, I had trouble stabilizing the canoe in large side waves, moving westward, I was bronc-riding big waves straight against the wind. Should I ignore the hard, as well as risky labor of fighting with the headwind, Basswood Lake and its surroundings were very scenic and romantic. The adjacent ridges were treed predominantly with tall pines that spilled their rich greenery over granite crags all the way to the water of the lake. From the lake surface up the gullies and ravines of in-flowing creeks and streamlets, yellow-gold of the birch, aspen and alder foliage, starting to turn autumn colors, dissolved into the green. Here and there, a lonely maple screamed with a splash of fiery red. A few times, a “V” of migration-ready geese carried across the blue sky above a distant horizon, its point aiming south. The motor boats and the canoes of the outfitters, dispatched onto the lake with their clients, in time dissolved into its vastness and I paddled alone, forsaken in a deserted wilderness. Around ten, the sun started blazing in the clear sky. Sweating from the searing heat, as during most days up to now, I stripped shirtless and paddled like an aboriginal nomad. The wind cooled the sweaty muscles and was bringing the aroma of coniferous resin to the nostrils. Around two o’clock, I rounded a sharp point of a wooded shore on the inside a giant bend of the lake into its next segment aiming westward and directly into the wind. There, I suddenly felt that any further battle with the wind was pointless. Seeing an empty campsite on a granite cliff of the American side, I traversed the width of the lake, to land at it and inspect it. It turned nice, but I was reluctant to unload the canoe yet. I felt sorry that I would be losing a significant part of the day in an early stop of paddling. I reclined on a sun-warmed patch of grass high on the crag, from where I had a nice view of the lake ahead of me. In the distance, I glimpsed a reflection of the sun on a wet paddle and, focusing on it a bit sharper, I discerned a trio of canoes, engaged in a battle against the wind, seeking advantage of the coastline protrusions and of little islands. This prodded me to an instant decision to continue a little further. After a few kilometers of a slow progress against the waves and the wind, I at last arrived into the vicinity of a group of islands, topped with a growth of tall pines. One of them, according to the map, was to have a campsite on the Canadian side. As I was rounding the high granite edges of its shoreline, nowhere I could see any campsite. It was not until I had touched at a high bank, scrambled upon top of it and surveyed the island’s crest. There was a gorgeous site here on a high grassy plateau among thin tall pines. A rock fire pit certified its official status as a campsite. Only from here, I could see an access along a slanting granite ramp from a small notch of the rock shore on the opposite side of the island. Right away, I returned into the canoe and, after rounding the island, I disembarked again in the newly discovered harbor. It was one of the “Pine Islands”, on Basswood Lake, which already the Voyageurs used to love and which were particularly praised by the explorer of the Northwest Company, David Thompson. The evening sitting by the fire on the platform of the high island camp could not have more relaxing atmosphere. The sceneries in a beautiful panoramic view of the lake with its multiple silhouettes of islands and shorelines, each spiky with the tips of the coniferous trees, receding one behind the other into the back drop of the long shadows and colorful reflections of the evening light on the mirror of the water surface, as well as in the lacework of clouds, blushing with reddish-pink hues above the western horizon, was not to be the last reward for me from Lake Basswood. All this would be up scaled by the performance of the awakening morning lights from the very hint of dawn up to rising of the low sun diffused in a dense fog over the lake surface. By then, I had already paddled for some while towards the portage around the outflow of the lake in the form of scenic Basswood Falls. Etheric outlines of islands and points of the shoreline kept emerging like ghosts, suspended in a milky, seemingly weightless space in front of the canoe, film-fading in in the last moment, as I quietly paddled along the coastline. The fog first thickened and I moved through it practically by memory, in which I held the shape of the shoreline, orienting myself by the lightest spot in the diffused light, which was signalling the position of the morning sun. Only when the sun had moved higher above the horizon, and its reinforced rays started to burn through the fog from a higher angle, it commenced to thin up and uncover lines of the landscape surrounding the lake. It was still only around six, when I was passing by an American campsite with many small water craft lined up on shore. I faded in from the fog like an apparition to a man, who had just sleepily stumbled out of one of the tents and clad in long underwear with a woolly toque on his head started to look around. It was apparent that he got spooked, when he noticed a soundless phantom of a mist-shrouded figure in a hat, with an aura of a sun glow penetrating through the fog, as it was just moving by in a smoothly gliding canoe. The group was moving in the opposite direction and his colleagues were still sleeping, when on my question, he confirmed that the start of the portage was to be found just beyond the nearest point.

The first, higher drop of the Basswood Falls was followed by a series of smaller drops and rapids, which curved in a long ark to the left between banks of granite outcrops overflowing with forest growth. The portage around this natural obstacle was significantly long. Its name is “Horse Portage“, which may indicate that during the time of the busiest traffic along the water highway, horses might have been used to help with the carry. The Portage is about two kilometers long, but after two thirds of its length from upstream, it has a short detour to the water. Those, who travel upstream, obviously absolve the whole length of the portage. But the more courageous of those, who travel downstream, can shorten the walking Calvary by some seven hundred meters by launching the canoe at the detour and shoot the remaining length of the river rapids in it. With shaking knees and a vise-like grip on the paddle, also I did this. A person in my situation, who is forced to absolve the length of each portage five times, naturally profits from this kind of a risky operation the most. All went well, and with a new injection of pride, I continued on in the voyage. The Basswood River then led me to its end in magnificent Lower Basswood Falls. The portage trail offers a nice view over the roiling rush of the hurtling waters, where I took time, to strap my camera onto a trunk of a young spruce and to take a self-timer selfie. I had hoped that it would enliven my future slide presentations. I even took a short video footage here of me carrying the canoe.

Crooked Lake, which followed and first appeared more like a river due to its narrow width, revealed another interesting curiosity. Not too far below Lower Basswood Falls, vertical rock walls, lining the narrow stretch, display native pictographs from the historic past. Red paintings in vermilion exhibit here wild animals, like moose, pelicans and human figures. For a long time, also colorful feathered ends of arrow shafts jutted out of a horizontal crevice high up on a rock cliff overhang that were shot in by members of a Sioux war party at one point, as an intimidating proof to their foes of their deadly mastery in the use of bows and arrows as weapons. By now, though, the bottom rock part of the crevice had already fallen off and with it also the relics of the arrows. At least this kind of danger no longer threatens the intrepid canoe passer of today.

The Canadian side offers here another splendid campsite on top of a sharp high rocky point, around which the lake breaks its shape to enter into narrows toward the north. The grassy platform of the site with a thin growth of mature pine trees spreads on the flat crest of the point’s ridge, on a level of some ten meters above the surface of the lake. The late sun-drenched little meadow, to which I had climbed along an incline of granite, kept a surprise here for me. As if prepared just for me, right in its middle, rested a large single eagle feather. I accepted it as a reward from Mother Nature, who must have appreciated my resilience and endurance in the dreadful toil of the tests, which she had subjected me to. To me, it was a coup of a special achievement by her redskin worshiper. I treasured this trophy and guarded it as an eye in the head. It traveled with me all the way home to Edmonton.

Crooked Lake possesses an indeed crooked, complicated shape. It zigzags in turns to the north and the west, aiming in average toward north-west. From my camp with the eagle feather, I still had its main length ahead of me. Admittedly, the strong southwest wind, which was blowing after noon, while I paddled on its last segment leading me to the north-north-west, did not act against me, but it tried very hard, to overturn my canoe with wild side waves. I had bravely resisted its vile intentions for quite some while, before I finally rounded the last point and reached the sheltered refuge of a bit of smooth water just before the rim of Curtain Falls. Another portage to bypass the obstacle had its start here. I chased the prow of the canoe up onto a coarse sand of a small notch in the granite, right next to the edge of the waterfall and I stepped out from the boat onto shore. Welcoming me here was a beautiful scenic setting. The lake water was throwing itself smooth over the granite lip, before it shattered on a ripped up rugged rock incline into a thundering white lace work, spreading like the bottom of a richly ruffled crinoline. All this was framed in a healthy forest greenery of pine limbs, combing through moisture-filled scents of a sunny day with azure sky. The fine long tufts of the white pine needles, as well as the rough resiny tassels of the red pine needles saturated the ambient atmosphere of the warm autumn day with an intoxicating aroma of resin. Right when I stepped closer to the Nature’s wonder, to absorb its beauty, a young man approached me, also traveling solo, who had rested here before the portage, sipping tea from a metal cup. „How are you? Nice seeing you again! “He claimed that we had met on some of the previous portages, which I did not remember, but we warmly shook hands. Brad had a very light, short canoe and with it also very light baggage for a shorter expedition. He was able to carry his canoe together with a backpack and consequently, he went only once on each portage. His canoe was too narrow, however, and Brad thus suffered stability problems in side waves. I could tell from his wide open shaking eyes that he had just experienced long moments of terror in the side wind on the last stretch of Crooked Lake before the falls. Below the end of the portage, it was still necessary to shoot a short series of mild rapids. Also here, I could see that Brad for a long time prudently hesitated, kneeling in the canoe, deciding how to pass through the first chute of the rapids. I hollered encouragement to him, but the rumble of the water drowned my acoustically dispatched injection of bravery into nothing.

The sun of the ripe afternoon saw me wrestling with waves and a headwind in a battle for meter-after-meter in the south-westerly direction on Iron Lake. Following my passage through a rocky narrows into the small Bottle Lake, this was already the gaze of a late sun that watched me start the portage to a mighty big lake Lac La Croix. The portage on the Canadian side had several stretches of deep liquid mud here, which together with rough chaotic rocks elsewhere made the life of the lonesome exhausted voyageur here very hard. The sun had already sat, when at last, I pushed off again and paddled into the lake and wind. A campsite on an American island, which I hoped to use, proved to be unfortunately occupied, which I could see already from a distance by two canoes drawn up onto shore. Fortunately, however, not too far from the main route, there was situated another island campsite, which was empty. Having found it already in half-darkness, I only disembarked, erected the tent and supped on a couple of protein bars. For cooking that evening, there was no time left.