Sometimes Lake Superior feels like an inland sea, and sometimes, just a lake. In this muddy campsite, hemmed in tight by pines, maples, and birches, it felt like the northern Wisconsin lakes that Sophie and I had canoed when we were growing up. Superior is usually separated from the forest by yards of stones or sand, but today a thin, pebbly beach only a few feet wide separated our little clearing from the roiling lake. Paddling along the shore, we had seen a narrow gap in the trees and suspected it might be a pathway to a campsite. Beneath the tangle of undergrowth, clayey ground had turned soupy with mud. We found a little cleared patch in the woods with a stone fire ring and a few stumps for sitting. A short pathway led from the clearing down to the water.

Sophie stretched out her back after the first day we had spent padding from breakfast until dinner. We bunked down here on a tiny spit of wooded land near the Brule River in Wisconsin. There was a rest area just through the trees, and we could hear cars occasionally whizzing by on the county road. This little beach’s wealth of firewood would have made a fantastic bonfire, but we intended to keep our presence under the radar.photographs by Uma Blanchard and Sophie Goeks

Sophie stretched out her back after the first day we had spent padding from breakfast until dinner. We bunked down here on a tiny spit of wooded land near the Brule River in Wisconsin. There was a rest area just through the trees, and we could hear cars occasionally whizzing by on the county road. This little beach’s wealth of firewood would have made a fantastic bonfire, but we intended to keep our presence under the radar.

This meager clearing was where we would have to weather the first big storm of our 1,200-mile circumnavigation of Lake Superior. Sophie Goeks and I, like idiots, had set out on May 25, 2016, from Little Sand Bay on Wisconsin’s Bayfield Peninsula, only a week or two after the ice had cleared. We had finished our final papers and exams in college during the early days of May before putting in. Now, 10 days into this journey, we prepared for the windy hail and rain storm the weather report said was coming our way. We pulled in around 10 a.m., just before the weather got nasty. We set the tent up in the middle of the scrubby clearing and ate a few handfuls of fatty nuts before crawling into our sleeping bags in our tent to try to get warm. Temperatures were in the low 40s, and it had been drizzling since we retired to our tent—I was chilled to my core.

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