Northern Tier Canoe Base Expedition

July 10 - July 20, 2002

Thursday, July 18, 2002
The Home Stretch

Everyone was pretty quiet at the beginning of our last day on the water. We got up, consumed and dealt with the remains of breakfast, bid farewell to our island paradise, and headed for home. Death Swap was only a short paddle away and truthfully I was curious to see what it was going to be like the second time. The difference turned out to be significant. We were about half way through it, or so I thought, when we ran out of swamp. We were done. Death Swamp? This time it had been more like Mild-Pain-In-The-Neck Swamp. The food packs that had started out so murderously heavy had gotten so light that we could practically throw them from one portage to the next. Even our last portage, the one that had been our very first way back on day one, seemed to have shrunk. My last stroll with "Jezebel" was downright enjoyable. We arrived once more on Scout Lake and headed northeast on the water. In what seemed like hardly any time had gone by when, "Aluminum Ho!" We could see the cache of canoes that lay just behind the floatplane dock. The adrenaline and the excitement kicked in and we probably could have pulled a skier back to the dock. It was our last time to paddle, last time to unload the canoes, and our last time to set up camp (but not before we took photographs at the dock and then all went for a swim!). I said goodbye to Jezebel, then it hit me. I was TIRED! It seemed to take forever for us to unpack and make camp, then I crashed for a nap the rest of the afternoon and only barely made it up in time for dinner. After dinner we decided to try our hand at baking a couple of cakes. They turned out reasonably well enough, if you avoided the burned edges. At dusk the surface of the lake became as smooth as glass. Many of us at different times spent some quiet moments at the dock thinking about the experience we'd just completed. We'd done it, and we were all justifiably proud.