Day 3, Saturday, June 10 - Frost Lake

I awake early this morning with sharp pain on the inside of my left knee. I had felt some discomfort the night before, but hadn't thought much of it at the time. I just figured that I had maybe twisted it slightly on some portage somewhere along the way. But unfortunately, today it is much worse, and I have a difficult time extracting the leg from my sleeping bag. I get out to walk and discover that lifting the leg with a bent knee is near impossible, making uphill walking particularly hard. With the toughest part of our trip still ahead, this must get better quickly. If it gets any worse, it could jeopardize the trip.

Trying not to disturb Heidi, I get out of the tent to walk around a bit and hopefully loosen up the knee. It's a very crisp, gray, foggy morning as I venture out and begin to explore our campsite. In the brighter morning light, the campsite looks even bigger. Trails spread out in all directions, and I begin to limp along one nice path to the west. Before long, all alone by itself among the pine needles, I spot a pink lady's slipper. Further on, I see dozens more scattered about. We had unfortunately been too rushed the previous day to get any good pictures of the lady's slippers we found on the portage to Long Island Lake, so I was excited to get another chance.

I head back to camp to get coffee started, and just as I'm pouring my first cup, Heidi begins to stir back at the tent. I hand her a cup of coffee as she emerges from our tan, gray and navy blue Kelty Teton 4. With mugs in hand, we watch the rising sun burn away the morning mist over Frost Lake.

Our original plan for today included the possibility of heading a few portages west to Octopus Lake on the Frost River and doing some exploration north from there into the Hairy Lake Primitive Management Area (PMA). But my knee requires rest, and we are still both beat from the previous day's effort, so we decide instead to stick around camp and relax. It's another spectacular day, and we enjoy it by resting, taking pictures and eating a lot. At some point, a canoe with a couple of young fisherman floats by, and they hook something fairly large right in front of our campsite. After they successfully land the fish into their boat, we exchange cheers of congratulations from across the water. We speculate that these must be members of the group staying at the next site over.

To one side of our campsite is a perfect sitting rock that becomes labeled my "thinking rock". I don't recall actually doing much thinking there, but I do spend some quality time on it resting my sore knee and looking out over the lake. A few yards away from the sitting rock is the camp fire grate with nice log benches on the lake side and large boulders sheltering it from the other. On the back side of the boulders we find the skull of some animal that someone has likely placed there. Every camp must have it's mascot, so we figure this must be ours.

By evening, we wrap up some camp chores and settle in for another meal of freeze dried pasta. For tomorrow, we decide to take a wait and see attitude about my knee and whether to stay another day to rest it. I privately determine that somehow or another we will continue on, even if it means wrapping the knee in duct tape. I didn't come all this way to the edge of the Frost River just to watch a few sunsets and then turn around. Heidi and I watch as the full moon ascends through the trees across the lake, and soon thereafter we turn in for a good night's rest, in hopes that tomorrow will be a day of travel.