Tuesday, March 7, 2000, 5:50 p.m.

We're in Wintergreen Lodge now, awaiting dinner from our French chef, Barnard. No joke: Paul Schurke hired Barnard as his cook. No complaints from us. This will be our first night in the new cabin; we moved over this afternoon. Still no snow, but some might be in store for tomorrow, when we hit the trails.

In the mean time, we've been out hiking. Dave drove us out to a lake this morning in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Hegman Lake, it's called. We took a short hike over the ice, maybe two miles that took a lot longer thanks to some fun throwing snowballs at each other. But the most impressive thing was the pictograph.

Outlined in bold red, this pictograph is about 15 to 20 feet above the water level on a small cliff. Dave the Ojibwe people may have painted it from a canoe or on a snow bank, or the water level might have been higher years ago. Nobody knows what the painting means, but Dave said it lines up with the winter ski, with a horizon line below.

"It's basically the Orion constellation," Dave said. And the canoes at the top? "It represents souls, which are in the Milky Way, which is the river of souls." The human figure, the moose, and the "curly tail" critter also have spiritual significance.

Tuesday, March 7, 2000, 7:45 p.m.

We've been spoiled rotten for the last two evenings, with good food and little work. Tonight, after a meal of Bernard's pot roast, we're hanging around in the cabin being lazy. Paul gives us a slide show of what Wintergreen does, some snow stars, and we feast on Baked Alaska.