The first time I’d paddled through Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) I was a 14-year-old altar boy on a church outing. We boys felt far enough from home to show off shamelessly for the girls with cannonball dives from the high cliffs.
My second trip — last August — was some 20 years later and planned as a low-cost, high summer adventure during the first married year together with my wife, Ann.
This time, with no indulgent Pastor Anderson to read the maps or prod us to quiet down and keep paddling, we were supposed to be the adults.
Even though Ann and I had done some wilderness camping on our own, and paddling through the Boundary Waters’ shimmering lakes doesn’t require the survival skills of the early French voyageurs (after whom nearby Voyageurs National Park is named), we still arranged to use a professional outfitter for our four-day, unguided tour. It would save time to have someone else pick up the U.S. Forest Service permits and pack all the food in advance, and over the phone, the outfitter’s employees answered all of our questions and helped plot a scenic route on maps they’d sent earlier.
Even though an Internet check of about a dozen other outfitters turned up similar prices and services, out of nostalgia I chose Cliff Wold — the same outfitter whose family-run company had taken care of my church group. So after a peaceful nine-hour drive north from Chicago, it was good to see Wold’s sign at the edge of Ely.
Our fee of $486 covered everything including a canoe, freeze-dried and fresh meals, a tent, sleeping bags, utensils, maps, a fishing license and the necessary permits. Also included was a night in a private bunkhouse and use of the outfitter’s showers, which allowed us to skip the added expense and bother of a motel room in Ely.
Wold’s office hummed with the military efficiency of its owner, a former U.S. Marine. Well-scrubbed student employees fitted us for paddles and life vests.
The next morning, under a sky of galvanized gray, a polite recent high school graduate drove us and our supplies for about an hour through the birch and spruce stands to a canoe landing called Island River.
Our driver filled us in on former CBS newsman Charles Kuralt, who had recently died and was a part-time area resident. Despite the details of Kuralt’s somewhat scandalous end, I could hardly concentrate on anything more than the sublime scenery out the window.
With more than a million acres and a thousand lakes, the Boundary Waters join Quetico Provincial Park in neighboring Ontario to make the upper Midwest’s largest swath of North Woods wilderness.
Feeling anticipation and a little alone, we waved good-bye in the windless silence. Behind the receding van, the first fat raindrops kicked up dust along with a realization: It was us against the north.
After shoving off, our route began to seem a little less vexing. It was a fairly straightforward plan, and Ann had a decent sense of direction, even if I didn’t.
“We can hardly get lost on a river,” she said. The Isabella River did make up about half the route, and she was right. It’s the big lakes and their tricky inlets that make navigation the toughest in the BWCAW.
Once on the move, we passed through wild rice, which we inadvertently “harvested” as it fell onto the floor of our canoe. It made for a decent, green-tasting snack. Over the next four days, natural surprises like this would provide entertainment on these lonely lakes as the world glided by.
During the days, there were sightings of eagles and beavers, the largest beasts we saw apart from the very occasional paddle-toting humans on the lakes and trails. Once, late on an afternoon, a pair of river otters playfully spied on our canoe from a discreet distance, backs arched.
“Sometimes wolves howling out around our back yard drive me crazy,” our driver had confided during the ride out.
Although numerous in the area, we didn’t hear any wolves or coyotes, or even encounter a moose, as I’d hoped we might. Nor were there run-ins — this time — with black bears, which was fine with us. (On my first trip, a bear had swatted down a hanging canvas food pack and sliced it up, as if with a razor, while we slept a few oblivious feet away. In case you wondered, black bears are powerful enough to bite tuna cans in half with their teeth.)
Though the bears left us alone, the trip never got dull. On our penultimate afternoon, winds kicked up just as we were crossing the huge expanse of Gabbro Lake. Stuck in the bow, Ann paddled furiously through head winds as whitecaps nearly broke over the side. Hugging the shoreline as best we could, we covered at least 2 miles at a pace that seemed like inches per hour under stormy greenish-black skies.
It was our scariest episode, but our biggest challenge was making the many portages between lakes and around rapids. In canoe language, a portage means emptying your boat and lugging it and contents over several trips on trails that can be brutishly rocky, hilly and long.
Although we did hit substantial rain during sections of the journey, we’d specifically requested a large tent to wait it out in — one of the luxuries of canoeing. Compared to backpacks, boats can carry a huge amount of equipment. And though lighter fiberglass and Kevlar models exist, we traveled with a traditional Grumman aluminum canoe that weighed 75 pounds.
We were both in decent shape, but balancing the canoe on shoulders and walking uphill for a mile or so isn’t easy. A colossal kitchen pack was less awkward but almost as burdensome.
Portaging made us both hungry for our surprisingly good meals. Encamped on Gabbro’s shore, we made an anchor by tying a rope around a rock and fished for a half hour before catching a prehistoric-looking 2-foot northern pike.
Birch bark flashed to start the fire, marking the start of our quintessential northern night. While we cooked up the fish and some red beans and rice, two loons shrieked and dodged one another 100 feet away on the water.
The magic light of sunset on granite faded to purple, and then darkness yielded to the diamonds in the Milky Way. A solitary loon echoed from a far corner of the lake, suspended in time.
In the ultimate show, curtains of blue and green Northern Lights startled us when they first appeared. Too mystical and beautiful for words, the lights hung and wavered in the sky above the last wisps of smoke from our campfire.
Though lingering for only 20 minutes, the glow, like the trip itself, now rests gently in our memories.
IF YOU GO
GETTING THERE
The drive from Chicago to Ely, Minn., on the fringes of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, takes about 10 to 12 hours depending on stops and traffic. Take Interstate Highway 90 to Madison, Wis., where it becomes I-90/94; when that road splits, follow the I-94 branch all the way to the turnoff for U.S. Highway 53 at Eau Claire, Wis. Follow U.S. 53 north from Eau Claire through a beautiful section of northwest Wisconsin into Duluth, Minn., where you will turn northeast on Minnesota Highway 61 and drive along the North Shore of Lake Superior until you get to Two Harbors. Take Minnesota Highway 2 north through the Superior National Forest to Minnesota Highway 1, then follow it north for the pretty 27 miles into Ely.
BASIC FARE
While it should be noted that per person prices decline sharply for larger groups, everything we needed ran us about $60 each per day. (The meals, incidentally, were huge, and some, like the fresh steak or french toast, were a major improvement over our own typical backcountry fare, which leans heavily on ramen noodles.)
LITTLE PROBLEMS
During our trip last August, insects didn’t cause us any problems, and repellants were hardly ever needed. But Norma Malinowski, assistant ranger in the U.S. Forest Service office in Ely, says biting black flies are pretty bad this year in the BWCA. And mosquitos are just now making their debut in the area. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that the flies are declining in number from their peak in mid-May and will continue to die off through August, the peak travel month in the area. Mosquitos also start to dwindle in August, Malinowski says.
“Different replellants work better for different people,” she says. Malinowski usually recommends repellants that contain DEET, but says even that doesn’t always work.
HOMEWORK
Sigurd Olson, the late bard of the Boundary Waters, wrote several books about canoeing in the area. “Sigurd F. Olson’s Wilderness Days,” a fine, 1980 anthology of some of Olson’s non-fiction writings, is out of print but available at some libraries.
INFORMATION
An association of Ely, Minn., businesses operates a good Web site at www.ely.org and may be reached by telephone at 800-777-7281. One of some 20 outfitters in Ely, Cliff Wold’s Canoe Trip Outfitting (218-365-3267) provided us with reliable service.
At the eastern end of the BWCAW is the tip of Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region, where many more Grand Marais-based outfitters operate.
For U.S. Forest Service information on obtaining canoeing permits on your own, call 800-745-3399.
