I'm sorry about the blackflies (https://www.nfb.ca/film/blackfly/), and looking forward to the details!

What a fantastic TR! It must have been very gratifying to resolve the mystery of Wolfgang. I count 12 days all together. (I am not a good counter.) Does that mean you scaled the 87 blowdowns on Day 2 with 10 days' (= ?? pounds) worth of food in your pack?? The note card is an excellent idea! Bulleti...

This is a long way from recent, and it's speculative: When I walked the E Chickenbone trail about a month ago, signage from last year warning about blooms was still posted. It was very careworn and frazzled: clearly a relic of the previous season. I wonder if that's the source of the report you ment...

Just_kyles wrote: ↑Wed Jun 15, 2022 7:53 pm Thanks for all of the suggestions. I returned from my trip this past Saturday, 6/11.
All in, I did about 70 miles from Sunday evening to Saturday morning.

I hope there's a trip report coming!!

This has been a terrific adventure to follow along! I'm looking forward to more installments! As we approached the junction to Little Todd Harbor, damper sections began to appear until we met the dampest one of all: a stream with nothing but a log to cross it. Until about now, I thought perhaps this...

And your season pass will cover your fee! (Probably those of your companions, too, provided they're not too numerous. The letter of the law is that everyone in the "vehicle" (which is clearly assumed to be a car at an NP entrance gate) with the pass holder is covered.)

+1 on the pre-filter. IR sources can be mucky/gritty, which can clog a BeFree in a hurry. While I admire the multiple use aspect of the t-shirt method, I use a coffee filter: I keep my cookpot handy, and use it to scoop from the water source, then pour the water through the coffee filter into the sq...

Note to self: consider a 10-ft pole to assist with the LTH-vicinity creek crossing if water levels are high........ When I walked the Minong in the other direction, exactly three years ago, this crossing wasn't an issue. I mean, given the rickety bridge, there was a significant chance you'd have to...

If only the webcam had caught the perpetrator in the act!

All the shelters are creekside. I've never coincided with the moose reputed to flock Washington Creek, so I don't know if some shelters are better situated to appreciate that than others. For what it's worth, the moose watch team who were my neighbors last week, and who probably knew what they were ...

backwoods doc wrote: ↑Sun May 29, 2022 7:46 am
Regarding campsite overcrowding, I think it's time to bite the bullet and institute a reservation system.

while sacrificing the capacity to revise itineraries on the fly would be a crying shame, I agree!

Fonixmunkee! I am ashamed to have omitted--I'm doing 82 things at once right now---one of the highlights of trip, which was taking advantage of the relative quiet that prevailed at Chippewa Harbor when the Voyageur called there to interrogate you about the lighthouse. Folks, an exceedingly cool aspe...

This is a question I didn't fold into my trip report, due to the sour note (radically incongruous with how I felt about the trip) it struck. tl;dr: does anybody else feel like the NPS has begun blowing off IR backpackers? in more detail: I'm wondering if others have the sense that, over the last few...

May 21: McCargo to Rock Harbor via East Chickenbone, GRT, Mt Franklin, and Tobin Harbor trails The sun finished rising and devoted the day to making up for brilliance lost to the rains over the last few days. The rainscrubbed air was the clearest I'd ever encountered on IR: textures on the cliffside...

May 20: Little Todd to McCargo The steady rain that commenced around 7 last night continued into the morning. With extreme deliberation---both because I was trying to kill time and because the undertaking amounted to playing a three-dimensional game of tetris, sometimes involving flaming objects, in...