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Today, I heard about Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve in Duluth, MN. Last year, Hawk Ridge saw over 101,000 broad-winged hawks migrate overhead in a single day. On the 16th of this month, Hawk Ridge saw over 31,000 broad-winged hawks migrate overhead in a single day.

I’m generally happy to get a few different bird species to my backyard feeders on a regular basis and to see a single hawk or two on a car trip. I cannot imagine what 31,000 or more hawks flying overhead must look like. I’ll have to add “Hawk Ridge in September” to my list of Places to See.

Last weekend, Sarah and I went up to Allequash Lake in Northern Wisconsin with our friends Sheri and Bryan.We had reserved a primitive wilderness campsite on the lake that had water-only access. So, Sheri and Bryan loaded their two-person kayak on top of their car while we loaded the canoe on top of our car. Both cars were filled with camping gear and food, so we all were somewhat concerned with the number of trips it might take to get all of our gear from the dock to the campsite a mile+ away. In addition to a car filled with gear, Sarah and I brought Dalla.

We started from Madison about 13:30 on Friday. Using a pair of CB radios, we were able to travel in an easy caravan from Madison to the Northern Highland/American Legion State Forest, where the lake is located, in just under five hours.

After a brief stop at the contact station to register and pick-up some firewood, we found ourselves at the Allequash Lake boat launch. We were all somewhat intimidated by the thought that we might have to make four or five trips in the canoe (because it could hold more than the kayak) to get all of our stuff out to a campsite that we couldn’t even see.

However, once we got started loading things into the kayak and canoe, our outlook changed radically. Two factors were in our favor:

1. We hadn’t packed as much as we feared
2. The water-going vessels held more than we thought they would

So, after some creative packing, both vessels were full, and the cars were empty. We pushed off from the dock, and started paddling to find our campsite.

Dalla had only been in the canoe once before, and that wasn’t one her favorite experiences. To make this one better, we put a rubberized mat on the canoe floor so that she wouldn’t spend all of her time slipping crazily on the floor of the canoe. In addition, she was between my knees so I could keep an eye on her (there wasn’t any other place in the boat she would have fit at that point, anyway). She wasn’t too happy with the canoe trip, and she started whining once we pulled away from the shore. After a couple of minutes she stopped whining, and started to show an interest in the water gliding by the canoe’s walls. We both thought this was a sign that she was relaxing and learning to enjoy the canoe.

As we entered a relatively shallow portion of the lake (about three feet deep) with lily pads floating on the surface of the water, she jumped out of the boat and into the water! She probably thought that the lily pads were just lying on some sort of funny looking ground. Imagine the look of surprise on her face (and ours) when she cleared the canoe wall in one quick leap and entered the water.

This very contingency had been in our minds, so she was wearing her harness and leash. The leash was around my wrist, but it was also tangled around her because of the leap. She was paddling like mad, and she quickly turned around to face the boat. As soon as she came within reach (she was never more than a couple of feet from the boat), I reached out and pulled her back into the boat by a combination of the scruff of her neck and the harness.

Of course, I placed her back on the floor of the canoe between my knees. Bad idea, but I had no other choice. She immediately rewarded me for pulling her out of the water by shaking three times and soaking me. For the rest of the trip, she showed very little inclination to jump out of the boat.

The campsite itself, once we reached it, was great. There was a circle of stones for a fire pit, a nice picnic table, a relatively flat area for tents, and a sandy beach. There wasn’t another campsite within a mile of us, so we had almost complete privacy. Allequash Lake has a horsepower restriction, so the only boaters were campers like ourselves, or people engaged in fishing. All the waterskiing yahoos were at the other lakes where they could run their motors at full throttle leaving us with relative peach and quiet.

There were loons on the lake that could be heard calling morning and night. A pair of bald eagles were roosting in a tree near the lake. An immature bald eagle could be seen walking in the tree and flapping his wings (though he could not yet fly). We also got to see the eagles swoop down on the lake and pull out fish which were then dropped into the nest. We saw deer (of course), crawfish, signs of bears (scat) and beavers (dams), and other birds.

We spent some time Saturday afternoon trying to get Dalla to try voluntarily swimming. She would wade out into the lake just until she needed to start swimming, and then she would make haste for shore. Eventually, once we were all in the water, she took some very tenative steps into the deeper water which turned into a frantic swim towards me. Once she got to me, she started clawing at me, so I picked her up and she calmed down. She then swam to Sarah who was in deeper water than I was. Sarah was using a pink water noodle to float, and once Dalla reached Sarah, she put her front paws on the noodle and rested for a few minutes before returning to shore. She only swam for a few minutes, and it was obvious that while she floats easily, she swims frantically and it quickly tires her out. So, before we take her on any more canoeing trips, we’ll probably have to get her a doggy PFD. If the canoe tipped while she was in it, she wouldn’t swim to shore, she’d swim to us. Well, if we were both struggling to right the canoe, neither of us would have both arms free to keep the dog from clawing at us in a frantic attempt to keep from drowning. So, a doggy PFD is probably the logical solution.

After the dog had retreated back to the shore, we stood around in the lake looking at all the fish and crawdads in the water around us. Bryan got his fishing pole and he was able to land several sunfish and a blue gill using pancake batter for bait.

Saturday night, a racoon got into our trash. Dalla (a.k.a. the Mighty Hunter) did not bark, but did sit up in the tent and watch the whole affair. So, we all had to get up, secure the food and trash better, and joke about what a great “watch” dog Dalla is.

The weather was just about perfect: sunny days with highs in the mid seventies, and cool, clear nights in the fifties. The bugs were unpleasant around sunrise and sunset, but during the day they weren’t much of a bother. The lake itself wasn’t nearly as cold as we expected. While that made for pleasant wading and swimming, it somewhat put the kibosh on our plan to use the lake as a cooler. The beer we put into the lake wasn’t much colder when it came out than the air temperature.

We all agreed that our site on Allequash Lake was a truly sublime campsite and that we’d all go back again.

In a few weeks, we are embarking upon a camping trip in northern Wisconsin for a long weekend. To get from the car to our campsite, we’ll have to paddle our canoe across a lake. With that in mind, we decided that it would not be the worst idea to figure out ahead of time just how Dalla would handle a ride in a canoe.We don’t want to leave Dalla at a kennel for a weekend, but we’re also not interested in retrieving all of our camping gear off the lake bottom after the dog tips a fully loaded canoe.

So, yesterday, we took Dalla out on to Lake Mendota for a half-hour canoe expedition. She was somewhat less than impressed by the whole experience. When we led her on to the dock to which we had the canoe secured, she walked very tentatively (and with all of her claws out) after she looked down through the slats of the dock and saw the lake underneath.

Then, I got into the canoe and tried to coax her into the canoe with me. She would have none of that! So, I grabbed her and lifted her into the canoe in front of me. I wanted to keep her under close control because our canoe is meant for relatively shallow, calm fresh water and the lake yesterday was choppy from the wind and periodic speedboat wakes.

Once we got her in the canoe, she whined for five minutes or so while clearly looking unhappy. However, after that, she started to settle down and tried to get comfortable. If we had put down something on the canoe bottom on which she could walk, she might even have gone to sleep. As it was, the bottom of the (fiberglass) canoe is slick, and she couldn’t get any purchase to keep from sliding back and forth in the canoe when we hit a particularly large wave.

After getting the canoe back to the dock, and on top of the car, we took her over to the dog beach to try and coax her to swim. Sarah waded out into the lake and called the dog. Dalla would then wade out into the water, but as soon as she started to float (rather than walking on the lake bottom) she would execute some sort of caterpillar-contraction maneuver to get her feet back on the bottom. So, no swimming yet, but we’ll keep trying.

Sarah spent four days at Effigy Mounds National Monument last week working on a pair of master theses: her own and a fellow students.

Last Monday, Dalla and I drove down to help her and bring her some equipment.Before she left, Sarah and I loaded up the Saturn with various pieces of equipment and put the canoe on top of the car. Monday morning, I put my own camping equipment in the car, strapped the dog into her seatbelt, and hit the road.

It takes just short of two hours to get to the Monument from Madison if all is well. That day, it took me over two hours to get there. Between Dodgeville and Prairie du Chien, there is a windmill farm along US 18. Of course, that windmill farm is there for a reason: plenty of nearly continuous wind. So, it was no surprise when I had to slow down when I got near that area as the wind was pushing the car off the road. Normally, the Saturn wagon doesn’t have that problem, but when you strap a 17′ canoe onto the car’s roof, it’s like having a sail. So, that slowed us down. Then, when we hit Fennimore, I missed a rather well hidden turn because it was not only well hidden, but Dalla was literally howling in the back seat. Apparently, she was tired of riding in the car and wanted to get out and run around. So, we got out of town and I let her out on the leash for a few minutes. We got back in to the car and hit the road. It wasn’t until we arrived in Boscobel that I realized we were no longer on US 18, but rather a different highway and twenty miles out of our way. So, we had to double back on a little county highway that ran parallel to the Wisconsin river until we got back to US 18.

Finally, we arrived in Prairie du Chien. A quick jaunt across the Mississippi River, and we were in Iowa.

When I finally found the team of naturalists and botanists Sarah had assembled to help her with the coring she was doing as part of her thesis, I was a good forty-five minutes late. Sarah’s team was going to work on Founder’s Pond to core as far into the mud as they could. These cores would then be extracted in one-meter lengths and placed into plastic tubes. Sarah would then use these cores to help determine what plant life originally populated the National Monument. From this information, a vegetation management plant for the Monument could then be fashioned.

So, there were six naturalists there (the park’s conservation ranger, Sarah’s adviser, Sarah, another graduate student, the ranger’s seasonal assistant, and a volunteer that previously had worked as a naturalist at another national park) and six seats in the two canoes. It was obvious that Dalla and I would not contribute much to the coring operation, so while they paddled out into the Yellow River, we left to go hiking around the Monument.

By the time all was said and done, we hiked somewhere in the range of ten-fifteen miles. Some of the hiking was on nice trails while the rest was on some really unmaintained so-called trails. The temperature was hot and the mosquitos were out in swarms, but I used liberal amounts of mosquito spray (and a headnet, when necessary) and we both dranks a fair amount of water. Dalla, alone, drank two and one-half quarts of water. For a forty pound dog, that’s a good deal of water.

On our hikes we saw otters, deer, wood peckers, numerous song birds, fish, and the like. Dalla seemed to think that she would be able to take a deer if I’d just let her off the leash. I wasn’t buying.

Once the coring operation was completed, we met Sarah’s team back at the landing, where all the equipment was divvied up and stored. In all, the crew spent almost six hours on the water.

Sarah, Dalla, the other graduate student (Joie), and I went to their campsite at Pikes Peak State Park where we spent the night.

For dinner we cooked brats (in beer, of course), drank beer, and noshed on various junk foods. Dalla kept herself busy protecting our campsite from critters and other dogs and campers.

The most unique part of Pikes Peak State Park is the showerhouse. Now, Sarah and I got to see innumerable showerhouses as we camped our way from California to Wisconsin the summer of 2002 so we felt that we’d pretty much seen all there was to modern campsite showerhouses. Well, that thought was proven to be a lie.

The showerhouse has a weather radio that runs twenty-four hours a day in both the mens and womens areas. Even though I was thirty miles from the Boscobel airport, I probably knew more about the weather there than the residents of Boscobel did. We knew the up to the minute temperature, the forecast, the river level, and anything else the normally is reported on the weather radio. Taking a shower guaranteed that you would be exposed to at least two iterations of the weather radio’s information, if not more.

Dalla slept with us in our tent, and that’s something we need to practice. She spent half the night kicking me in my back and half the night sleeping on Sarah’s feet.

The next day, I took off for Madison as Joie and Sarah went back to collecting data for Joie’s thesis.