Northern Tier Canoe Base Expedition

July 10 - July 20, 2002

Friday, July 19, 2002
Pick Up Day

Pickup day! The floatplane was supposed to arrive at 10:00 AM. All week long the only records we'd been setting in the mornings were for being the slowest crew all summer, not the fastest. This morning was no different, but we did manage to get everything done and packed, ready for the plane, in plenty of time. Then we waited. The we waited some more. When we were done with that, we waited some more. We sat near the dock and listened intently for the sound of propellers. We heard several come and go without stopping, and I began to wonder if I'd made the reservation for the right day. Not even out of the wilderness yet, already I was returning to the cares of civilization. Earlier that morning about fifty yards from our campsite I'd noticed a large pile of fresh bear droppings that had most definitely not been present the night before. Perhaps civilization might not be so bad after all. We heard another engine and this time the sound didn't fade. We watched the Otter land on the lake and taxi up to the dock. The time it took to load the gear and ourselves into the plane and then fly back to Bissett seemed very brief. It was almost as if one moment we were at the dock on Scout Lake, the next moment we were unloading gear at the Bissett floatplane base. We hiked back to base camp where we unpacked and pitched the tents in order to hose them down to clean nine days worth of swatted mosquito remains out of them. We all then set about the various tasks of showering, reclaiming our personal gear, contacting loved ones and family back home, and visiting the trading post. We had lunch down at Wynne's Place, the same spot where we'd taken our meals before leaving on the trek. It felt a little strange to have so much time on our hands with nothing to carry or paddle, but we made the best of things. For dinner that night we went to the Hotel San Antonio for what tasted like the best cheeseburgers on the planet. Some of the guys spent time playing a game at base camp that involved two people standing opposite each other on a section of square timber about thirty feet apart, picking up a rope lying on the ground between them, and each using it to try to manipulate the other into being the first one to step off his timber. We visited with Ryan and with the other staffers who happened to be in base camp, and just generally tried to soak up as much of the place as we could before retiring. We had a brief campfire and afterwards some of us enjoyed some time in the hot sauna followed by yet another shower. Our beds for the night were only wooden bunks with thin foam rubber mattresses on them, that night they felt great and we all slept like babies.