First Trip to the Boundary Waters
Canoeing and fishing with friends in the Minnesota wilderness.
Benny in the bow, me in the stern, as seen from camp. Photo by Pete Johnston.
I knew, going into our five-day excursion in northern Minnesota’s canoe country, that none of us had much paddling experience. Even so, it was a little disconcerting to overhear one of the guys ask another, as we prepared to launch our two 17-foot Northstars that first morning, “So, do we face each other?”
Voyageurs we weren’t. After five minutes afloat we were at the back of a dead-end cove, realizing we’d already missed a turn. Whatever—we were finally here.
We’d been talking about the trip for a year and planning it in earnest for several months. But I’d been thinking seriously about visiting the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness since two years ago, when I wrote a story about a planned mine on its doorstep. People I’d spoken with described a vast mosaic of boreal woods and more than 1,000 lakes spread across 1.1 million acres, a truly wild area along the Canadian border home to moose, bears, wolves, and lynx. I doubted the mining company’s plans would survive the inevitable lawsuits they’d face, but I figured we should see the place while we still could, to be safe.
So the guys and I met up in Duluth one evening in early August, where the sun hung tangerine in a smoky sky; wildfires were burning across the border in Quetico Provincial Park. The next morning we got moving before dawn and drove two hours to Ely. Along the way we saw a black bear beside the road, the only one we’d encounter all week. We picked up our canoes and gear at Piragis Northwoods Company, a well-run outfit that lived up to its reputation for great service.
By around 9 a.m. our gear was in the canoes, all paddlers were facing forward, and we shoved off from Entry Point 30, the launch site designated on our permit. My companions for the trip were Andy and Benny, both journalists, and Pete, a filmmaker. A couple times a year for close to a decade we’ve gotten together (along with our friend Jeff, who couldn’t make this trip) for a weekend of ice fishing or fly fishing. We call them fishing trips, but we usually stay up all night drinking beer and playing wobbly Merle Haggard tunes around the cabin stove or campfire. The fishing tends to suffer.
There’d be no campfires this trip, due to the extreme drought Minnesota had been in all summer. In fact, there almost wasn’t a trip at all—those fires up in Canada had forced the U.S. Forest Service to close portions of the wilderness area a couple of weeks earlier. We were just in time; not long after our visit new fires shut down the entire Boundary Waters.
After three hours of paddling and a pair of modest portages we found a beautiful campsite on a small island at the south end of Lake Three. It was pushing 90 degrees, so as soon as we set up camp, we swam. And then we fell into what would be the rhythm of the next four days. We’d sit on the site’s bedrock promontory to dry off and take in the view. We’d gossip about our neighbors: a beaver family that slipped past camp a few times a day, a few Bald Eagles nesting on an island 50 yards away, loads of loons and mergansers. Come mid-afternoon, one of us would head to his hammock to read and snooze for a bit, and we’d all follow suit. Rested, we’d return to the overlook and sit quiet as Quakers until someone felt compelled to speak. Then came time for an evening swim and maybe a taste or two of whiskey while we figured out dinner.
Despite our group’s history, fish were on the menu every evening—a northern pike the first night, two the next. The third day brought our best fishing. We paddled across our bay on Lake Three and portaged to Horseshoe Lake, where we didn’t see anyone. We portaged again to Brewis Lake, also without campers. Then another portage to Harbor Lake. Again: nobody. It was deeply quiet. Like the rest of the ground we covered that day, the land all around Harbor Lake burned a decade earlier in the vast Pagami Creek fire, whose footprint is still easily visible on a satellite map. The impression was elemental, and a little spooky—charred conifer skeletons, bare cliffs of the Canadian Shield, low, glowering sky. We’d found real solitude.
We found fish, too: walleye, the dreamed-of table fare. After a few minutes of trolling and drifting around the lake we started to feel—barely—their faint strikes on our hideous chartreuse jigs. For an hour we couldn’t miss. We caught eight or nine, kept five, and portaged back toward camp. Then we feasted: walleye fillets, pan-fried and wrapped in flour tortillas with hot sauce. Though simple, they would have been top-notch fish tacos in any circumstances. After a day of hard portages and paddling they were transcendent.
Weather pinned us close to camp on day four, but we still caught another few walleye for dinner just by paddling around our island. It would be hard to leave the next day. We were just starting to figure the place out. The quiet and the simplicity of our days were beginning to feel normal. We’ll have to get back there soon.