Generally, we'd keep the same camp two days and use it as our base to explore. On our day trips, we'd travel light - just our canoe, camera, binoculars, lunch and a couple of quarts of sweet lake water. Those lightweight portages required only one trip to carry the canoe and daypack. We spent our days exploring islands, fishing, looking for wildlife and checking out distant lakes. The landscape is generally flat, but rocky.
Several lakes have sheer palisades that lichen has splotched with orange, green and brown.
Rainfall brings a wealth of ferns, thick moss and wildflowers. We saw beavers that were bold enough to swim about in daylight, elegant loons diving for fish, and ducks like mergansers and teals. One day trip to Winchell Lake was the week's best. We saw a pair of bald eagles sharing a tree limb, and a baby otter scampering on shore. We took our outfitter's advice and climbed Winchell's rocky southern shore, scrambling our way up huge granite boulders until we stood 500 feet above the lake.