Murtle Lake - Day One

We woke up to a clear blue sky - awesome weather to start out this part of the trip! Packing up and driving to Murtle Lake went just as planned (although the gravel road was a lot worse than we expected - the picture doesn't really show it). We reached the parking lot at 12:00 - and quickly got ready to head down the 2.5km portage to the lake.

Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse at that point. The cart that we had been so excited about failed us :(. Martin had tested it at home pulling the canoe over rocks and bumps and all kinds of things - and everything was fine. The only thing we didn't do, was test it when it was full of our gear. We expected that the PVC glue would hold. We were wrong. We took about five steps with the loaded canoe on the cart and one of the glue joints gave... we had a collapsed cart. Figuring we could fix it and carry on, we spent a long 2 hours making several unsuccessful attempts to fix it.

At that point, we decided to just walk everything in. First our gear, then the canoe. That was another long (and awkward) 2 hours. The canoe is HEAVY! And the portage trail was not level as the brochure said. In hindsight, we should have just gone back down to Blue River right away (1 hour on a gravel road) and rented a cart. But we didn't. Oh well. We finally got the canoe in the lake at 5:15.

We paddled about 15 minutes to the first campsite we saw, and decided to just stop there so we could set up camp and make supper while it was still light. It was a bit of a disappointing start to the trip, but we did our best to not let it get us down. We did have a beautiful day - and this was a beautiful place!