Good evening,

How many two man tents can fit on either of the campsites on Paulson? Trying figure out if out group should bases camp there or not?

Also, any other next places to check out there or on the way there? Coming in from Round lake

Thanks,
CanoeViking

You can find reviews on this site, but the lake is mistakenly called Japanese Lake instead of Paulson Lake.

Reviews of shoreline site (#492)

Island site (#493)

We stayed at site 492 a couple summers ago, and it made for a welcome rest stop, but not sure I would want to stay for days. A solo canoeist was camped on the island and it looked nice from a distance. Have a back up plan because sometimes this lake is full. Portages in and out are no joke.

Yeah, the old name of the lake. It's actually supposed to have three periods (J.A.P. Lake) for Jimmy and Anne Paulson. It lost its punctuations on most maps and then slid into being, unfortunately, the same letters as the derogatory so it was switched to Paulson to maintain the name without the confusion. Just to the north over the former portage is Jimmy Lake, named for the same Jimmy Paulson.

Since you brought up Jimmy Lake, is any remanent of that portage still intact? Is it full of fish? Has anyone been there?

redbeardcanoeworks: "Since you brought up Jimmy Lake, is any remanent of that portage still intact? Is it full of fish? Has anyone been there? "

I did not personally look for the old portage trail the one time I visited Paulson. That said, the old Jimmy Portage has always been a mystery to me. Portages over 100 rods to dead-end lakes are very rare in the BWCA: Long/Stump, Patridge, Bog, Wonder, Manomin, Orinjack, Merritt, Gowan, and Neewin are the others that I can think of. All of them have campsites. Jimmy, to my knowledge, never did. It also doesn't have fish which is usually the driving factor in a dead-end lake having a portage in the first place. According to the DNR report, Northern Red Belly Dace is the only fish species in the lake. I don't know if anyone who ever took the portage can explain its existence, but my bet is that it's one of those old portage trails that existed from times past and wasn't on the USFS list for maintained trails. It also had the misfortune of being in the overlap between Cavity Lake and Ham Lake Fires (so parts of that trail burned in back-to-back years.) Needless to say, I think that a low-visitation lake that wasn't maintained much to begin with and then burned twice, I would say nothing discernable is left of that trail, but I could be wrong.

PS, came to add a line from the DNR fish report dated 1997: "Barely accessible by bushwacking from Jap Lake."