In July we did a fly-in job out of Pickle Lake, a small town about as north as you can drive with its motto "The Last Frontier". It took 5 1/2 hours of driving, mostly north, to reach NorthStar's base at the airport. With six of us: Katarina, Ruth, Veronique, myself, (sisters), and Ryan and Jeremy, the trainees, plus all of our gear and two canoes, we had quite a heavy load. Luckily the turbo otter can handle that.
The water level was really low this year, which meant we had to land a long way from our destination. We had planned on one boat with a motor and one canoe. At this point, we were wishing we had three canoes. We were rather overloaded with gear and people.
Four of us started staking, while Katarina and Veronique were to set up camp. At least that was the plan. They were going to try to paddle or portage into the next lake. The "river" ended up being a rocky creek. So they portaged everything around and brought the canoes up the river. There was no trail for a portage and we had not planned on a long hike. We had a huge cooler and lots of luxurious - in other words, heavy - food.
