Where's the Portage?

Upon entering Amoeber Lake, we checked the map and noticed that if we just headed straight across the lake, we'd hit our next portage and be ready to get going on to the Knife Lake. However, the Boundary Waters had more interesting plans in mind for us. We went straight across and scoured the shoreline looking for the portage while tons of loons called to each other near the cliffs on the south side of the lake. We paddled withing a few feet of shore and went the entire length of that mini finger bay thing pointing southwest out of the main area of Amoeber Lake. Nothing even resembling a portage trail appeared. There were a bunch of downed trees, so we thought that it just might be blocked. We got out of the canoe and hiked around. Nothing... Now this was getting annoying.

After an hour or so of searching, we gave up and decided to head to another bay in Amoeber Lake, this one further north. Hopefully that portage would be easier to spot. Well, we headed toward the western shore of that bay, where the portage should be, according to the map. We weren't seeing it here, either. Great, we thought. No portage out of this lake. We kept thinking that trees felled by the storm had blocked the portage and they hadn't been cleared out yet. Finally, as we paddled southward around a corner in the shore, we found the portage tucked into a small inlet. We had finally found it! Of course, it ended up being a pretty long portage, over 1/4 mile. This debacle slowed us down considerably this day, and forced us to change our plans and camp at an earlier location. However, that wasn't really a bad thing...

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