Manito-Wish.  My home away from home.  I’ve been coming here since I was ten.  I’m fifteen now.  Before now, I’ve done everything from two-night canoeing trips in the Manito-Wish waters to nine-day trips on the Superior hiking trail.  Now I’m back for round five.  Fourteen days on Isle Royale.  Ninety-pound packs, six guys, two tents, food, and a fiery sense of adventure.  Every year that I’m here, I rediscover my sense of adventure.

We walked in a straight line for miles.  The freezing sleet slammed into us as we climbed up the ridge.  We shivered as we continued our death-march from North Lake Desor to Todd Harbour.  Fifteen miles.  We shivered, we cussed, we tumbled, and we got cut -- but we marched on through our frozen hell.

We had been on the island for nine days at this point and had fairly tolerable weather.  We hiked along the Minong Ridge.  When it gets hot, it becomes an inferno.  When it gets cold, it becomes a meat locker.  On the tenth day, the weather took a turn for the worst.  It came out of nowhere, like a bullet from a hunting rifle.  We had to hike fifteen miles on ridges and valleys.  We had started our death-march around five in the morning.  By seven the tsunami had arrived upon us -- rain slammed into our bodies.  

Every step we took felt like we had walked a mile.  The rain had waterlogged our boots, and soaked through our rain gear.  Our hair looked like we had just gotten out of a six-hour-long shower.  Hair fell in our eyes and wouldn’t budge.  Every time we stopped, we looked at our maps and groaned.  Every time we thought we had walked for miles, it had merely been feet.  Minutes felt like hours, and hours felt like decades.  We stumbled and fell as we marched the last few miles to our next camp.

By the time we stumbled into camp, we all felt like the grim reaper had personally introduced himself to each one of us.  We were soaked, and frozen, and ready to die.  We moved like the undead as we set up our tents and peeled the soaked clothes off our bodies.  We miraculously managed to start a struggling fire.

Warmth.  Finally.

We all sat around the fire that struggled to cling to life and stared lifelessly into it -- reality slipped away.

The next day we got up and did it all over again.  We marched for four more days before we left the island in our rear-view mirrors.  After the day of living hell, we became more of a family than a bunch of mere acquaintances.  We all knew that we had survived more than most have at our age, and we survived it together.