Trip Report Shout-Out

I love outdoor adventures, and for the past few years, I've written up detailed trip reports afterwards, with lots of photos. I just completed updating them all to my new visual design. I'm quite proud of these reports (many of which I co-wrote with my lovely wife, Erin) — to be blunt, I haven't seen better trip reports anywhere on the Internet. I now have 14 reports published, with 1,384 photos. So if you have some time, take a peek and let me know what you think. Here's the link:

http://reidster.net/trips/

I also have begun to put together some how-to notes (e.g. gear checklists), which are on the same page.

The above photo is from my latest adventure, this one 9 days in the Grand Canyon backcountry. Report to follow.... :)

Trip Leader Checklist

One of the things I enjoy doing is leading backpacking trips and other adventures. Along those lines, I created a checklist of the steps needed to prepare for such a trip. Turns our there are a lot. Perhaps this list is useful for you, too. Feedback welcome.

16 Mile Paddle

On the 2nd, the wind wasn't quite so bad, so Erin and I went for a paddle right from Timber Trail. The goal was to paddle across Farm Lake and Garden Lake, portage to Fall Lake, and then paddle up the Shagawa River to Shagawa Lake, showing that we could make it from our cabin to Ely town by canoe, and return home.

I estimated the paddle beforehand at 14 miles. We didn't complete the full plan, and it was still 16 miles. Ooof.

Portage beach at Fall Lake.

Two frog rocks taking, um, romantic liberties with one another.

End of the line! We'd dragged the canoe through one rapids already, and the prospect of more shallow paddling and rapids did not seem appealing, particularly at 3:30pm.

The paddle went under two pairs of culverts like this. Cool!

Note the fisherman eyeing us. We'd just zoomed out from the culvert, thankfully missing any sharp fishhooks. Hmmm.

Painted turtle.

Our cabin, from the lake. You can see Erin's white Honda through the trees.

Hegman Lake Pictographs, with Carnivorous Plants

On July 1, we decided to go canoeing no matter the weather, up to but perhaps not quite including tornadoes. With the help of the Timber Trail outfitting staff, we loaded up an aluminum beast and went out to Hegman Lakes to see the pictographs. They were pretty nice, even coming from someone who's spoiled by the excellent pictographs and petroglyphs of the Southwest. But a little ways beyond the pictographs was a floating bog containing tons of carnivorous plants - pitcher plants and sundews (and also a few iris, which are not carnivorous). Wow!