Mosquitoes!!!!

There is another piece of the wildlife in the Boundary Waters which I did not mention last post. MOSQUITOES!!!! They are extremely numerous in the wilderness and you must find creative ways to deal with them or they can ruin a trip. Since we booked the upgraded outfitting package this time they gave us mosquito netting we could wear on our heads (The picture shows Paul wearing his netting as a "hoody" so it was at the ready and he could flip it over to cover his face whenever necessary.) This was a tremendous asset. The nets were especially handy on the portages, for this is one of the worst areas for mosquitoes. Especially when carrying a canoe over your head. It becomes like a long, hollow hat and the mosquitoes become trapped in the hull with you. The other handy place for this netting was going to the latrine (which is lovingly depicted in the other picture), another location where the mosquitoes congregate, waiting for fresh meat (or I guess it is really the blood they are after.) The mosquitoes were especially bad this year since they have had such a wet spring and early summer. The blessing to that is the water levels are high which sometimes means shorter portages because you can paddle up some of the beaver creeks and ponds. It also means there is no fire ban so you can have a wood fire, although we only did that twice. (More about that later.) There are two refuges from the mosquitoes: out on the water for they do not fly out there, unless they have attached themselves to you when you push off from the land. But those few mosquitoes you eventually kill or the breeze on the lake blows them away. The other refuge is in the tent. So, besides applying massive qualities of DEET mosquito repellent, far beyond what the manufacturer's label recommends, we often stayed out on the water in our canoe, or we went to the tent, often turning in before daylight was completely erased from the sky. (At this northern latitude during the summer the sun rises about 5:30 a.m. and does not set until about 9:30 p.m. We did stay up late enough to see some stars on one of the evenings and I saw the millions of stars that appear when the night is darkest on one of my late night latrine trips. It was disappointing that we did not get to see the Northern Lights, the Aurora Borealis. We were especially hoping for them on July 4th to be our fireworks show.