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Today was a long day. Not bad, just long.I cooked eggs for breakfast and got out of Buffalo Lake Campground at 7:40. I rode south on County E and east on County D past many a lake and woodsy resort. I kept going through the hamlet of Sugar Camp and ten more miles on County A to Three Lakes, where I took my first real break. The sky was fair with scattered clouds and the wind was light.
Three Lakes was a charming little Wisconsin resort-area town. I found the local library and borrowed their notebook computer for a few hours to catch up on all the internet business I needed to do. I got done around noon, and despite my hearty breakfast I was feeling rather hungry, so I sat on a shady bench outside the library and ate a good sized lunch.
After lunch I felt super-charged riding down highway 32 and County S to highway 55, bypassing Crandon and stopping after 30 miles in Mole Lake. This community is the seat of the Mole Lake Sokaogan Ojibwe. This tribe played a rather heroic role in defeating the Crandon Mine proposal by buying up the mineral rights to the land where the sulfide mine would have been after a 20-year struggle against it. Had the mine been built, it would have poisoned the Wolf River with sulfates, acid and heavy metals, killing off its invaluable wild rice stands and possibly its ancient sturgeon population.
The afternoon had become a warm one. After Mole Lake, the road got hillier, slowing my progress. It was interesting, though, a pleasant mix of forest and pastoral farms, and I entertained myself by taking pictures of the barns I passed. I stopped after ten miles in Pickerel to munch on a wild apple and find a county map with campgrounds on it. The nearest campground was about 14 more miles away, just past Hollister.
The map didn’t make a distinction between public and private campgrounds, so while I thought I was looking for a national forest campground on Sawyer Lake Road, it turned out to be a private bar and RV park. I passed up this establishment and went down a big hill looking for the “real” campground, and finally stopped a mile off the highway to ask a resident of one of the lakefront homes along the lane where it was. He told me that the only developed campground was the RV park, but there were three very pretty primitive campsites maintained by the forest service on Jesse Lake, about a mile further on. The right choice was obvious. I found the dirt track that led to the primitive sites, which turned out to be fantastic. At a parking area, a trail led down to a large site tucked into a beautiful grove of hemlocks right beside the marshy lake, with a metal fire grate, rough-hewn log benches and a “wilderness throne”-style privy. The only downside was that the lake was not swimmable, and it was even hard to filter water from the one-plank dock without getting vegetation in my filter bottle.
I set up camp and cooked dinner on a wide upended cut log. After a hearty meal and clean-up, I went to hang a bear bag from the sturdy limb of a young hemlock about 12 feet off the ground. I got the rope in perfect position on only the second throw, and felt pretty proud of myself until I tried to hoist the packs and realized I hadn’t tied the rope adequately when it slipped off my mini-beaner. I managed to retrieve the end of the rope using a long stick, but I still didn’t have the right kind of knot, so it happened again! This time I had to pull the rope down and start over. Of course, after several unsuccessful throwing attempts, the mini-beaner got hopelessly wrapped in a knot around the limb.
I already lost one good caribeaner. I was bound and determined not to sacrifice my mini-beaner as well. I tried several times to haul myself up the nearly limbless lower trunk, and only ended up scraping myself up in the process. I even tried to screw an eye hook I found lying around the site into the trunk to stand on, which didn’t work. I felt like that guy Bill on the Red Green Show, who is always trying to demonstrate a new way to do things, only to be hopelessly defeated by his own cockamamie schemes. Finally, though, I found a scheme that worked: I made a makeshift ladder by stacking three cut logs of different diameters, flat end to flat end one on top of the other so they were fairly stable, which got me high enough to untie the knot and retrieve the beaner. Having finally learned my lesson not to use a beaner as a throw weight, I tied some sticks on the end of the rope and managed to get it over the limb in a god spot, then hung my bags.
The twilight is long finished and I’m tired. Tomorrow I’ll continue down 55 along the Wolf River to Shawano (pronounced Shawno), then cut south to Shiocton, where I’ll likely camp. It should be a shorter day if I stop there, which would still put me in easy range of Fond du Lac Wednesday.
