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."