Couple Seeking Call of the Wild Take Hardships in Stride on 5 1/2-Year Kayak Trip

Living in an unheated house with no telephone or car isn’t a hardship for Matt Simonson and Rose Kuth.

Not when you consider that they have lived on an annual budget of less than $1,000 for the last 5 1/2 years, on a 20,000-mile kayak trip that took them to the Arctic Circle, the Gulf of California and back to Minnesota.

“We call it the poverty kayak traverse,” said Simonson, who ended his prolonged return to nature this fall.

‘Rules Are Piling Up’

“If Minnesota were like it was 150 years ago, I would have had no incentive to go on a trip like this,” Simonson said. “But now the restrictions and rules are piling up every year in the north country too.”

To cut expenses since then, they have turned off the furnace and water heater and they eat raccoon, muskrat and beaver that Simonson traps in the woods.

It’s a style of living they are accustomed to after experiencing the hardship of a 500-mile walk from Haines, Alaska, to Jackson, Wyo., when the rivers froze early, and nearly running out of water when high winds marooned them for three days on a desert island in the Gulf of California. They camped in 25-below-zero cold in homemade tents and sleeping bags and ate what they could hunt, fish or scrounge.

Primitive Course

Modern equipment has made long-distance canoe and kayak trips increasingly commonplace, said Dave Harrison, editor of Canoe magazine in Kirkland, Wash. But Simonson and Kuth took a more primitive course.

They put their kayaks into the Le Sueur River near Ellendale on April 22, 1981. They took them out of the Root River near Dexter Oct. 12, 1986.

They had planned to be gone two or three years. But Kuth’s inexperience slowed their progress at first, then a combination of sketchy maps and wanderlust kept stretching their itinerary.

“We made a lot of side trips,” Simonson said. “We went mostly by guess and by golly.”

Kayaked to Mexico

Simonson, 36, had previously kayaked alone most of the way around Minnesota’s borders, a five-month trip, and later paddled to the Gulf of Mexico and back in nine months. Before that he spent three years majoring in geology in college, until he decided he didn’t want to make a living exploiting natural resources, and parts of five years working at the Hormel packinghouse in Austin.

He quit his job with Hormel after buying his house for $3,000 in cash and paying his debts. Since 1975 he has been a trapper and handyman, never earning more than $2,000 a year, he said.

“I’m an outdoor-type person,” he said. “I’d just as soon make my living working closer to the land.”

Kuth, a 29-year-old nursing assistant, had never been kayaking except for short training jaunts on the Cedar River in Austin.

Decided to Stick it Out

“We didn’t realize how slow I would be,” she said. “On the Le Sueur River, Matt was ready to send me home. On the Minnesota River, I was ready to go home. It was upstream and droughted out. By the time we got to the Red River, we got together and decided to stick it out for at least a year.”

Kuth got seasick on Lake Winnipeg, sprained her ankle portaging in Saskatchewan, fell through the ice in frigid northern Alberta and capsized in heavy seas off the Mexican coast. Simonson wrapped his kayak around a rock shooting rapids in Colorado. But they were never seriously injured, he said.

They had no radio transmitter and sometimes went for weeks without seeing another person. They spent four northern winters in permanent quarters, mostly trading work for free lodging in places like a garage in Alberta and a half-built log cabin in the Northwest Territories, 100 miles from the nearest store.

But the hardships were a small price to pay to experience wonders like the ice breakup on the Mackenzie or a charging Alaskan grizzly scared off by a shotgun blast.

“Both of us have lived all our lives in a highly developed artificial area,” Simonson said. “We wanted a chance to see animals in their natural state and large areas of land that still are undeveloped.”