Boundary Waters - Winter Trip to Duncan Lake (aka One Fish Lake)

"You guys might not know this but I consider myself a bit of a loner. I tend to think of myself as a one man wolfpack. But when my sister brought Doug home I knew he was one of my own. And my wolfpack, it grew by one. So there were two of us in the wolfpack. I was alone first in the pack and then Doug joined in later. And 6 months ago, when Doug introduced me to you guys I thought, wait a second, could it be. And now I know for sure that I just added two guys to my wolfpack. Four of us wolves, running around the desert together in Las Vegas looking for strippers and cocaine."

Made a 4-day/3-night journey into the Boundary Waters 27 February - 2 March with my brother Ben and Mark Janosy.

Pile-up at the entry point. We shaved about a mile off our hike into Duncan from a couple years ago by looking at the map. We entered at Bearskin Lake, which is totally out of the BWCA, and there were a lot of ice fishermen in for the day.

We had to cross Bearskin and one portage and we were on Duncan. Relatively easy - but the gear had to be secured.

We were happy to find that there was no slush on the lake, so we set up the tent right on the ice, carving out working and campfire areas. The weather was great - highs in the low 40's and single digits at night.
It took one night for us to figure out that we could put the third cot back behind the stove. Shorter cots certainly helped.
Splitting crappy firewood. We got into a couple good logs but had plenty of duds that didn't burn well in the tent.
After setting up camp, we hit the ice, and Mark caught this beauty within an hour. Prospects were looking up, but alas, it was to be our only fish. Mark caught the only fish here a couple years ago as well.
We had a full moon every night - lots of great illum. As we were sitting around the campfire the first night we heard a wolf howling out on the lake. After a while we could see it sniffing around our ice holes, and then it started coming towards us. It stopped about 100 yards away, barked at us a bit, and then cut into the woods. Minutes later it reappeard about 50 yards away, scooted to the center of the lake, and howled for another 15 minutes.
On Sunday we trekked back to the Gunflint Trail and the Windigo Lodge to catch the Olympic gold medal game between USA and Canada. Not much of a crowd, but they had a great TV. The beer tasted good too...

We daytripped to Moss Lake on Monday. It was a gorgeous day, most of which we spent in our shirts out in the sun. No fish.

Heading back to Duncan from Moss.