Categories
Samuel Traveling

Remote Camping Trip To Boundry Waters.

Last summer I took one hell of a camping trip. Not the kind of camping trip that your thinking about, where you have a grill and you drive to a campsite, you drink some beer with your friends and hang. I’m talking about the kind of camping trip where you suffer, you have 0 access to phones/technology or the outside world…. you hike and camp in sometimes miserable conditions, and you learn a lot about yourself while doing it. What we did is we flew a bush plane into the remote wilderness and canoed/hiked our way back to civilization for 8 days…. it was fucking awesome!

Here we are leaving on the plane:
255230_10100989625000520_1985960402_n

We sent out from the this general area (http://goo.gl/I7gcJr). We took a seriously old sea plane, like super sketchy 0 electronics kinda plane, here is a picture of the Dash controls:559084_10100989625130260_788841897_n

If you have never been to the Boundry waters area, it is an amazingly beautify place… full of shitty mosquitoes, bears and just about everything that makes it hard to live… and when I say full of mosquitoes I literally mean so many mosquitoes that when you go to sleep at night you hear what sounds like a train off in the distance… there are that many mosquitoes flying around they create this kind of insane constant “buzz”. But as the view from our sketchy plane can atleast, it is beautiful: 432047_10100989625180160_974988064_n

The trip was absolutely amazing. We canoed around/over waterfalls, we caught fish, we grilled our own food, we portaged canoes for miles, got more than 100 mosquitoes bites, saw wild moose, saw a bald eagle that was literally perched in a tree on the dividing line between Canada and the US… like he was guarding our border… it really was a once in a lifetime kinda trip.

The 2 “biggest” things I remember from the trip are that on day 2 our tent flooded, and I caught the biggest fish of my life. The tent flooding was both hilarious, and horrible at the same time. The horrible part was that everything we had with us, everything (our sleeping bags, our extra clothes, our shoes) everything got wet. And it never fully dried for the rest of the trip. 418442_10100989625035450_1963478222_n

The funny part was the way it happened. So the sleeping arrangements were 4 of us in one tent. Each night before we go to be we half hook up the tents rain fly, then fold it back onto the ground so its not so hot. Well its about 2:30 a.m. and I wake up first, I feel rain hitting my head…. for some unknown reason I just kind of sit there for a while kind of half asleep. I finally decide that the best course of action is to tell my buddy Doug that is raining… so I shake him for a bit and tell him its raining… by this time its starting to rain pretty hard…. he takes a few seconds… probably 30 or so… then decides that he is going to wake his brother and tell him its raining (if either one of us would have just quickly ran outside and put the tent fly on we would already be dry). For some unknown reason we don’t do that and I just wait while he tries to wake his brother… it takes a while… probably 1 or 2 mins (all the while its starting to rain harder). He finally wakes his brother, who then rolls over still half sleeping and goes “Dad it raining”…. his dad shoots up out of bed like a rocket and is out the door trying to put on the tent flap… by this time though its already too late. Its been pouring down rain for a solid 2 mins on us, all 3 of us for some reason just acted like little kids and kind of waited for his Dad to wake up before we did anything…. to this day I laugh and am puzzled by the way we acted.

The story of how I caught the fish is really one of my favorite stories ever. It is the last day of the trip, we are ~2 miles from where we are set to meet up with a park ranger and take our canoes out…. now a little back story, I am a terrible fishermen. I mean embarrassingly bad at fishing, plus I have really bad luck catching anything. So Doug goes to me and says just toss a line in the water, its our last chance to fish. So I grab my pole, my lure is tangled up and doesn’t even cast right. I throw a few cast’s and Doug looks over super disappointed in me… and says something to the effect of “come on man at least untangle the lure…” I tell him I don’t really want to so he grabs the pole and untangles the lure….. while making fun of me…. I take 1 cast, literally the very next cast and get a MONSTER bite. At first he thinks I’m joking, but then he sees the pole bending like crazy… we start whooping it up so excited because we can tell its a huge fish…. I start to battle the sucker… its smart and goes under the canoe trying to break the line… so I decide no way is that happening. I stand up (in a canoe full of 150 lbs of our shit in the middle of a lake) and reach out so I can get the line up and over the front of the boat… the fish does this 2 more times and I repeat my ill-advised stand and stretch manove (with Doug’s dad in the background yelling at me to not flip the boat and loose all of our belongings)…. with some coaching from Doug, I pull the fish up next to the boat and he nets it…. the end result is this beauty:

313522_10100989625150220_831316142_n