Day 265

Daily Stats
Start: 3:00 PM - Montello, WI
Finish 7:00 PM - Endeavor, WI
Time: 4:00 hours
Daily dist: 11 miles
Total dist: 5200+
Companions: John and Tim
Weather: Clear skies, 80’s, SW winds 10+
Notes: Seemed to take forever to work the shuttle with cars.

At the rate it took the three of us to meet up, run a shuttle, paddle 11 miles, and get back to the campground it would taken two years to paddle as far as I have on this trip. It didn’t help that road construction had us detouring all over to reach Endeavor nor did it help that for a short while we weren’t 100% sure where our take out was.

Much like my efforts with shuttling with a bicycle yesterday, car shuttles for paddling trips tend to be riddles of a higher order that are often run on faith rather than full understanding. In fact when I explained the plan to Tim (while taking his boat off his car to put it on my truck along with the two others) he understood as far as the first stop but quickly got lost in what went where and why. Finally as he shook his head and waved his arms to ward off confusion he simply said, “I’ll just follow you.” It truly does require faith… just don’t forget your car keys.

Buffalo Lake - long, narrow, and weedy

With all three boats on my truck, and Tim following along in his empty car, we left the campground in route to the town of Endeavor. A fairly quick drive got us to the outskirts of town where a “Road Closed to Thru Traffic” sign blocked our access to the put in. Undeterred we detoured to another highway (the only other access to town) and quickly discovered another identical sign on the other side of town. Apparently Endeavor, much like an island, had been completely shut off from the rest of the world during most of the summer road construction season. We cautiously drove around the barricades into town and onto the take-out wondering how the local species may have evolved during their brief geographic isolation.

When we reached the town boat ramp we found a man on shore with a small mud splashed flat bottomed boat. He was there paddling the clumsy craft with a kid sized canoe paddle through weed choked water, not to go fishing or bird watching, but to pick up credit cards that were discarded by some unknown thief. Apparently the ancient dented craft the man had employed had a fairly fast leak. He explained that he had to paddle around as quickly as he could to pick up the cards then head back to shore to empty the boat of water and put the cancelled cards in his truck. More interested in the water than who this man was or how he came to be responsible for collecting the wayward cards, we scanned the several hundred yards of thick vegetation that separated the ramp from the open river channel and asked if there was another access point that had more direct access to open water. The man directed us to another boat ramp nearby which is where we left Tim’s car.

The weed cutters and some of the weeds they battle

From Endeavor it was a quick drive to the put-in in Montello where I ended my day yesterday. Once on the water we were greeted by a fairly stiff head wind that slowed our progress down the nine mile long and half mile wide Buffalo Lake. The very shallow lake is overgrown with thick mats of vegetation. About half way down we came across the huge aquatic weed mowers that keep three lanes clear for navigation, one along each shore with connector channels that allow lakeside homeowners to reach the third main channel down the middle. None of the channels provided passage that allowed us to hide from the wind. As we paddled on enjoying each others company and conversation it came to light that both John and I had read that the lake got its name from the last free ranging bison to live in Wisconsin. Apparently the hapless (and I guess lonely) animal fell into the lake and drown…

I wonder where those credit cards came from.

Three hours after starting out we reached a point where we knew we should be nearing the take-out. Somehow, however, the water didn’t look anything like where we had left Tim’s car. A half hour of investigating (which involved slogging through hundreds of yards of thick weeds to shore) revealed that we were as far as the first boat ramp we’d found and that the other ramp where we left the car had to be further upstream. The only thing we had to do was figure out where exactly, in the weed choked water. upstream was. There actually was a clear channel where the deeper flowing river prevented weeds from growing. We just had a hard time accepting the fact that the very twisty channel would indeed lead back to the western shore (where we knew we had to be) as it wound its way east and north toward the opposite shore of the mile wide marshy valley the upper end of the lake was morphing into.

Just before sunset we finally reached our destination and, with mosquitoes taking blood samples from our legs, quickly loaded Tim’s boat on his car and locked the other two to trees. We then drove back to the Montello to retrieve my truck and picked up the other two boats on the way back to the campground.