The Boundary Waters
September 2016
9/6 Lake Four (7.5 miles)
After an extremely challenging day of travel, starting with a 5:00 A.M. wake up call in Salt Lake City, we experienced the night of the ghost alarms at the Adventure Motel in the cute, minimally obnoxious, touristy town of Ely, Minnesota.
But before we discuss the ghost alarms, I should recall a few of the highlights of our travel.
The first event took place in Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, where my 5’0” tall wife motored through the gridlocked masses, navigating the endless corridors like the local Bear’s legends, Walter Payton and Gayle Sayers. She feinted left, bolted right, skidding between the fat man and the leggy middle aged woman in high heels waddling up the concourse. As she streaked ahead of me, I fought to keep eye contact with the back of her head.
“The reason for this magnificent display of athleticism?” you ask. Well, we only had a little over one hour between flights and Kim really, really wanted to eat at her cookbook hero’s airport restaurant. It really was worth the effort, as Rick Bayless’s spicy $12 sandwiches were way beyond the flavor of our $100 meal in Salt Lake the previous evening.
The next chapter took place in Duluth, where we visited our long time buddy, Steve Blum, in the Intensive Care Unit at St. Luke’s Hospital. Considering that Steve was less than 24 hours from open heart surgery, we found both he and Fay to be in excellent spirits and very positive about the operation.
We then pointed our white Toyota Corolla rental car north towards Ely. The drive was pleasant, as Minnesota is neat, clean and very, very green. Unlike Western Wyoming, where nearly all unirrigated vegetation is dead, colored a golden brown and desperately waiting to be covered by snow, the countryside of St. Louis County looked like it was mid May instead of the beginning of September.
Dinner was forgettable at the Boathouse Brewery, why do I always order walleye in the Midwest, but the beer was delicious.
The day’s real adventure came that night at the appropriately monikered Adventure Motel. We fell asleep about 10:30 and were deep in the land of sweet slumber when the first ghost alarm screamed. I bolted upright, not really knowing where I was or what was happening. I turned on the light to find out it was 2:00 A.M. and the radio alarm clock was roaring. I grabbed it, muttering under my breath about the shitty middle school children that must have occupied the room the previous evening. As I looked at the alarm setting, I was shocked to find it in the “off” position. As I moved the switch back and forth, the alarm continued to bellow, exasperating me to a nearly panicked state. I climbed out of the bed and pulled the electrical cord from the outlet. Silence.
Three short hours later Kim’s I Pad rang at 5:00 A.M., even though it was set for 6:00 A.M. Again, it was the ghosts of Ely, Minnesota playing “nasty” with two sleep deprived, frail, elderly folks from rural Wyoming. I tossed and turned another two hours before finally giving up and marching over to the office in search of coffee.
9/7 Lake Insula (16.7 miles)
In a nutshell, I would say that canoeing the Boundary Waters is a full body, fully engaged mind experience.
Even though the Souris River Canoe, a 42 pound Kevlar wonder, slides through the water like a hot knife melts through butter, you still need to paddle. This means leaning forward, digging the blade of your paddle deep into the water in front of you, and then pulling hard until the blade has become parallel to your body. At first we were both splashing about, but with time and experience we soon found the yellow rocket gliding across the lake at about four miles per hour.
I sit in the back, where I’m responsible for steering. At first I was only paddling on the right side and using my paddle as a rudder in an ugly, subpar “J” stroke. It wasn’t exactly a rigid zig zag pattern, but in all honesty, nearly that bad. Our boat meandered down the lake like a drunken, slurred “S.”
I soon discovered that we could go a lot faster if I alternated sides, paddling three strokes on the right side and then pulling five times on the left to straighten out the boat. When I finally came to this miraculous realization, our speed and direction improved considerably.
Navigating the plethora of lakes, narrow channels and backwaters is extremely challenging. Since the actual bodies of water look nothing like the map, you often have a nervous knot in the pit of your stomach as you blunder around half lost. I had thought that the map on my trusty Garmin GPS would be our savior. However, it proved worthless, as it showed us paddling on dry land and only labeled the largest lakes.
Keeping your bearing is difficult, because unlike the mountains, where one can use the peaks to navigate, the Boundary Waters area is relatively flat, with elevations varying about 100 feet from the low point to the high point. The maze of bays, arms and islands are virtually indistinguishable from the other like features. I found that you really have to concentrate and be lucky to have an idea of where you are. This is difficult, as you’re being blown around by the wind in the light weight canoe and your map is laying on the floor, under the weight of your size ten shoe. Even when the map was right in front of me, I would have to strain to read it with my 61 year old eyeballs.
I ended up using the campsites, which are all shown on the map, to decipher our whereabouts. Miraculously, I had deducted our location perfectly when checked against the longitude and latitude data of our GPS.
Even so, we had blundered off course once during the day, accidentally following the wrong shoreline around an island. Using logic, we worked our way to the other bank and retraced our way to find the elusive portage.
Portages! The portage is quite possibly the thing I will never forget about this trip. The first trick is finding them, as they are typically hidden away in the tree line and only when you get close and carefully scrutinize the site, will you see a narrow path disappearing through the jungle like landscape.
We would pull into the shore and I would totally unload the boat. Next, I strapped on the bear barrel, which holds all of your food, and would walk anywhere from a few yards to over a half mile. I would hustle back to our boat and both Kim and I would next carry our Duluth Packs, an enormous Texas size backpack that is totally uncomfortable and more than a little unwieldy. One stores all of your clothes, the tent and your sleeping bags in these large, drooping bags of torture. Kim’s pack, which was almost bigger than her body, wrenched her back during the first portage.
Next comes the canoe. Even though the Souris River is light, I still struggled to pick it up and toss it over my head, where it balanced on a yoke on my shoulders. Walking down a brushy trail with a 17 1/2 foot canoe on your shoulders is a little like knitting a scarf with a baseball bat.
9/8 Portage to the Kawishiwi River ( 24 miles)
God decided that we need a little more spice in our adventure. After a very pleasant, sunny evening spent at perfectly flat camp site located on a small island, which featured a nice grass lawn to situate our tent on, we were awakened at 12:30 A.M. by an hour long thunder and lightning show of Herculean strength. The inside of our R.E.I. Quarter Dome was lit up like noon, the wind howled and eventually bullets of hard driving rain pounded off our nylon fly.
Kim couldn’t sleep, worrying about the relative health of our toilet paper, which was stashed in a ziplock bag, stored inside of a plastic garbage bag. When she mentioned her concern, I rolled over and went back to dreamland. Poor Kim’s mind fretted all night long, with scenes of large, dripping lumps of pulp replacing our tender rolls of Charmin.
I crawled out of the tent at 6:30 A.M. to find a dark, ominous mass of cloud cover, with a sliver of yellow sun light on the eastern horizon. It was like Vegas neon, only much more vibrant.
We actually were in the boat early and paddling east with a nice tailwind for the first mile. After making a small detour, where I had a temporary brain malfunction in map reading, we edged around an island to find huge, white capping waves. Slowly we powered our way up the channel between two islands and then turned to the right, where powerful gusts pushed our light weight canoe towards some very large, protruding rocks. We both dug deep, paddling with everything we had to barely slide by these small monuments of death.
By the time we had worked our way to the northern end of the Lake Insula, the wind was howling, easily gusting 20-30 mph. We made our way through a narrow channel and into a small lake, where we checked out our two options portage to Lake Alice. As we were standing in the water pondering our choices, a gust nearly ripped the canoe out of my hand. Knowing that Lake Alice was large and had no islands to hide behind, Kim and I opted for option three - camp at the site across the bay, no more than a hundred yards away. We decided that two novices in a paper thin canoe out on a big body of water would be stupid. For once, we didn’t choose stupid.
It was a leisurely afternoon of drying out everything from the previous night’s deluge and a red hot game of “winner take all, fight to the death” gin rummy. I prevailed 525-515.
9/9 Lake Thomas (38 miles)
I’ve spent thousands and thousands of days in the Great Outdoors. September 9, 2016, was by far the most miserable experience in my 61 years on this Earth.
It started so well. We broke camp and were on the water at 8:00 A.M. The first few miles were pleasant, as we navigated down the placid Kawishiwi River. An otter even popped up in front of our canoe, doing a double take when he finally noticed our existence 20 feet away.
Within an hour we had paddled across the southern shore of Lake Alice, and were standing on a beautiful, sandy beach, commenting about the wonders of the Boundary Waters and rehashing our plan for the day.
We tore up the eastern shoreline of the lake, counting off the campgrounds as we passed them. The sun was shining, the birds were singing and of course, we both loved Jesus.
Soon, I spotted what I took to be the opening in the shoreline, where we were to exit right and find ourselves in a back water slough that would run parallel to the big lake for a couple of miles. We exited and paddled about looking for the ever elusive portage. This is a slow, painful process, where you crawl along the shoreline at a snail’s speed, carefully scrutinizing every potential area where the grass has been flattened or there is a small opening in the trees.
We searched and searched, finally finding a channel and outside it, a campground to the right.
“The area must have extra water from this summer’s rain,” I exclaimed with confidence. “We paddled right through the portage.”
Kim demanded that we beach the canoe and do a longitude and latitude reading on our GPS. I couldn’t believe it, the GPS was wrong, showing us to be way northwest of where I knew us to be. My wife asked me to use logic, looking at the coordinates and at the compass. Again, I demanded that I was right and we set off to prove it.
Twenty minutes later, I sat in the back of our boat shaken, with egg all over my face. I finally acknowledged that my internal “never fail, always correct directional computer,” which is located in my brain right next to the lobe that calls for beer each night at 5:00 P.M., had failed miserably.
Using the compass to navigate by, Kim, who might be related to Christopher Columbus on her mother’s side of the family, soon had us in the backwater channel heading towards our portage.
It was a beautiful body of water, with monstrous conifers lining each shore. As we reached the end of the channel, our canoe floated over a mass of flowering lily pads. It got shallower and shallower. We moved into a narrow creek, where we were stopped by a beaver dam. Looking up, we spotted what looked to be the portage. Kim carefully crawled out of the canoe and waded through the muck and mud to come back with the news that it was indeed the portage. After slogging through some mud and dragging the canoe over the beaver dam, we were quickly over the portage and on our way to our next one, when we ran into three canoes, the first humans we had seen in two days.
“Boy, do you have a treat ahead of you!” the young man in the back of the first canoe bellowed.
Again, it was lily pads, shallower and shallower water and then a spot where people had pulled up to survey the situation. When we climbed out of the yellow rocket, we could see the portage, which was situated on the other side of a swampy creek with no more than 1 1/2 to 2” of water in its channel.
Like an idiot, I took off with my 40 pound Duluth bag and our two day bags, carefully working my way down the shoreline towards the portage. There, almost directly across from my destination, sat a six inch diameter, rotting log, which bridged my side of the creek with the promised land. I looked at it closely. It was black with rot, tapered down to three inches at the far end and a good two feet short of the clumps of swamp grass, which I knew would support the weight of my body. Off to each side of the log lay putrid mud and a shallow stream of oily looking swamp water.
“I’m terrible at balancing,” I thought to myself. “There’s no way I can do this.”
Then, like the devil himself had taken control of me, I climbed on the log and streaked to the other side. Just as I neared the end, I started to lose my balance, leaning to the right. I pushed off hard, hoping against hope that I would make the grass. “Splat,” I plunged into the mud, actually up to my crotch on my right leg and to my knee on my left leg. I then said unkind words, nasty words, as I unbuckled my backpack and carefully pulled myself out from the suction created by the mud. My right knee throbbed when I stood on solid ground. Had I hurt it?
In the end, we poled the boat to take each piece of the gear individually to the other side. Kim ended up half crawling, half slithering across the muddy, stinking hell to get to the other side. We both resembled Peanut’s Pig Pen as we finally collected our wits on the other bank.
Amazingly, our bad day wasn’t over. We faced a half mile portage, carrying all of our gear, including the canoe, up and down hills, over huge downed trees that were covering the trail and traversing a rotted out boardwalk that made you mutter a prayer with each careful step. As if it could actually get worse, it started lightning and thundering as we ventured across the portage three times, amassing over three miles in a little over an hours time.
A light drizzle had been falling on us, but just after we had gotten to camp and set up our tent, one of the great down pours of all time drenched everything. Since I was already wet and miserable, I elected to process water with our Steripen so I could have a hot toddy. As if I needed one more miserable, very terrible thing to happen to me, my lighter was so drenched it failed to spark. It had been the most miserable day in the history of outdoor activity. Ever!
9/10 Hatchet Lake (43 miles)
Surprisingly, all went like clockwork on the day after the “worst day in history.” We awoke early and quickly packed up our extremely soggy Lake Thomas camp site. We sped across the large lake, carefully noting every island, campground or bay on the journey and cross referenced them with our map.
At the western edge of the lake, we stopped to chat with a family of four, the only humans we’d seen on Lake Thomas. Kim asked if they ever got mixed up or had a hard time finding the portages. The man stated that he had been canoeing the Boundary Waters for 40 years and that he was still “temporarily confused” at times. Him saying that made me feel better, but I still felt more or less like a beaten puppy.
Within minutes we were screaming across the first portage, quickly traversed a small pond and then did three more short portages that linked narrow, backwater channels between the lakes. It was all happening like in the movies, where I was a young Harrison Ford and Kim was Jessica Lange, and we were an invincible team in conquering the land once ruled by Jesse Ventura, which is sometimes called Minnesota.
Soon I stood at the western end of the 50 rod portage at Ima Lake. A strong southwest breeze was blowing and the lake was already choppy. Kim came wandering up with her much hated Duluth Pack. We looked out at the water nervously and agreed it was time for lunch. I threw my 40 pound Duluth bag back on my back and headed back the way I had come.
Even though we once again visited Lake Ima in the unrealistic hope that the wind had calmed, we ended up camping at Hatchet Lake, a much smaller, much calmer body of water. Our judgement had been sound. Within an hour of setting up camp, the wind was absolutely howling.
The most interesting thing about our camp site was the blown over timber. Huge, healthy pines, whose trunks had to be an easy two feet in diameter, had been snapped off like they were brittle match sticks. And there wasn’t just a few of them. They were everywhere. Some mammoth specimens had been pulled out of the ground, roots and all. What did it? A summer tornado? A hurricane force wind storm? Or was it a pissed off wife, who had had enough of her stubborn husband’s map reading skills? Only God knows.
9/11 Disappointment Lake (53 miles)
All went as hoped, in that we didn’t get lost or have any miscues, yet it was still a tough day.
The six portages, all short ones, coupled with ten total miles made for two tuckered adventurers. I really had visions of going much farther, but the paddle, unload, carry, load up, paddle, unload, carry and so forth had exhausted us by the time we hit Disappointment Lake.
Unfortunately, we faced a stiff head wind as we worked our way up the lake looking for a camp site. Panic was just starting to set in as we were both physically and mentally toast, and all of the camp sites were taken on the upper, northeastern section of the lake.
When we pulled around a rocky peninsula to see the most perfect spot ever (lawn, secluded toilet down a romantic path, a separate tent site that was nearly level and only had a few small, sharp rocks, and a glorious view up and down the narrow straits of the lake), I nearly cried with joy.
But, as is typical for our Boundary Waters expedition, the minute we got camp set up and were just getting ready to enjoy it, the wind started ripping once again. Needless to say, we spent much of the afternoon in our tent playing another game of Gin Rummy. Kim ended up queen for the day and was crowned the overall champion of the entire state of Minnesota. It was another big disappointment at Disappointment Lake for David.
9/12 Ely (58.5 miles)
Kim and I were wide awake and roaring to go at 5:30 A.M. Some of this may have had to do with the fact that we were frequently in bed at 7:30 P.M., reading our books on our I Phones or listening to podcasts. Sleep always came shortly after our heads hit our “make shift” pillows.
Since we had had enough of the Boundary Waters fun to last awhile, we crawled out of our sleeping bags, downed two quick cups of coffee and packed for the paddle out of the wilderness area, a full day ahead of our scheduled departure.
Once again, we used our newly refined map reading skills to hit both portages dead on, and like the French fur trappers who explored this country 300 years ago, I threw the canoe over my head and rambled down the trail like a man on a mission. I had visions of cold beer and real food on my mind.
As I sit here writing this in my Ely hotel room, I am especially thankful to be out of the wilderness, as it’s raining outside and a raw cold is in the air. However, Kim and I loved the whole Boundary Waters package. It is the definition of the word, “adventure.” Unlike other outdoor activities, where you are in control, the environment, such as the wind or water conditions, determined your schedule and course of action.
The area is incredibly lush, even the burned out section that we paddled through in our first few days was filled with mushrooms and lichen, with stands of huge conifers mixed with birch. The water itself, tainted a brownish, tea color by the vegetation, was endless. A huge lake, with many islands, would connect to a backwater slough, which would be adjacent to another smaller lake. You portaged from that lake to a larger lake and then found yourself in a slough. This process seemed to go on and on forever.
Overall, we canoed and portaged 58.5 miles. I drug our worldly possessions over 21 portages, ranging in difficulty from simple hops down a short path to longer, more painful experiences where your joy factor seemed to evaporate.
I don’t think that I’m moving to Ely and making canoeing my new passion. Nevertheless, I loved the area and loved participating in a whole new kind of adventure, one totally out of my wheel house. Canoeing the Boundary Waters is a very special experience.
