Mauthe Lake Camping Trip

Day 16 & 17 (8/5&6/09)
I put these two days together because they are our first tent camping trip in more then twenty years. I will cover the Bicycle part of the trip more completely in the “Dolmen Project Blog”. Our first night at Mauthe Lake we went for a short kayak trip but we had already biked over twenty miles earlier. The almost setting sun was also kind of hard on the eyes and the fish didn’t seem to be biting so we only stayed out for an hour or so. We decided we would go to bed early and get out early the next morning. Well, we went to bed early and we didn’t get up real late but by the time we made breakfast and coffee, especially coffee, it was starting to get late. We didn’t sleep all that well. Apparently in twenty years we had become accustom to softer sleeping accommodations, especially after a long bike trip. Maybe it was the raccoons trying to get our food that kept us up all night. We were glad we didn’t store anything with food in it under our rain fly wings like we had first intended. We woke up to another beautiful day and after a breakfast of egg sandwiches grilled over an open fire we set out with our kayaks to explore the lake and the north branch of the Milwaukee River. We started by crossing the lake and going up the river. We had started the night before but the sun had been in our eyes so we decided to wait until morning. The trip up river was all very cool but the highlight had to be our run-in with a baby deer. As we came around a corner Eileen spotted a fawn standing on the edge of the river eating water lily leaves. To a fawn they must be the ultimate in good eating because it wasn’t going to leave for anything. We probably spent ten minutes or more paddling around watching it before it kind of hid in the weeds and ate its leaf. Even then you could see the leaf bobbing up and down as the baby chewed on it. We then moved upstream. You could go quite far up stream before you ran into obstructions. About the time we were going to turn around we heard a couple of very noisy paddlers making there way up stream. We figured that would ruin any chance of seeing more wildlife on our way back down but when we got to the spot with the fawn it was still there. A couple of young girls in a canoe had been watching it to. This time he ducked into the weeds a little quicker. I had tried a little fishing on the river but it was pretty weedy for the one lure I had taken along (minimalist fishing). When we got back to lake however I snagged three fish in a half hour. Two were small Northern Pike and the last one was kind of a nice Large Mouth Bass. By then we only had an hour to tear down camp so we thought we had better head on back to Bowlegs.