Across Serene Lakes ... & Down Rough Rapids : Paddling a canoe around Minnesota’s soothing Boundary Waters

In the 1950s, before Minnesota’s northern canoe country became an adventure travel destination, suburban teenagers went there to test the waters of manhood; in other words, to behave like hobos. A 10-day voyage into the unknown, it was our way of hopping a freight train. We smoked and swore as we pleased, carried cherry bombs in our pockets to ward off bears, chucked empty Spam cans into the woods, carved our names in tree trunks, came home covered with ticks and wearing the same clothes we left in, hoping at least to smell like men.

For years I resisted the urge to go back, leery of what I would find. The daunting labyrinth of lakes had become the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, one of the modern species of managed wilderness, bristling with rules and politics, teeming with people. Environmentalists decided years ago that to protect their turf they needed to promote it, make it more accessible and more comfortable. (“A privy at every campsite,” is the way a friend put it, exaggerating only slightly.) It was a shrewd strategy and, perhaps, the only way to build a strong constituency for wild places.

But despite it all, my boyhood friends had been going back every summer, avoiding holiday weekends and steering clear of the most heavily traveled routes. They said the Boundary Waters was still a place where you could get lost on purpose. They reminded me that the moose and the bear and the wolf still found it habitable, and that the moan of a distant freight train could not be more soothing to a hobo’s spirit than the loon’s midnight yodeling.

Just getting to the Boundary Waters was a haul in our day, with four of us and two canoes weighing down an ancient Pontiac. We were lucky to average 40 mph up 300 miles of farm-to-market blacktop from suburban Minneapolis to just south of the Canadian border.

Today, you can fly directly to Duluth, rent a car and three hours later be at the put-in with your waiting canoe, packed with tents, sleeping bags, waterproof duffels for your clothes and all the food you’ll need (vegetarian fare is available upon request). But I decided we would go the old-fashioned way, making the six-hour drive from Minneapolis through the remnants of logging and mining towns, along the northern shore of Lake Superior and west along the Gunflint Trail, one of the few paved roads that probes deep into the Boundary Waters.

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We spent the night before our trip at the Gunflint Lodge, a venerable fishing camp that today doubles as a hospitable, woodsy resort and a canoe outfitter. The next morning we pushed off amid the flutter and squabble of a family of mergansers, heading into territory that I had only touched on as a boy. For the first couple of days, we would follow a route, tracing the Canadian border, that 18th century French fur traders took as they made their way from northwestern Canada to Lake Superior and waiting cargo ships.

We were one canoe, three people--my wife, Barbara, and I, and a guide, Lee Kerfoot--and provisions for a four-day loop trip that would take us across Gunflint Lake to the Granite River, actually a chain of small lakes connected by goosenecks of fast water that can be portaged or run, depending on one’s ability to negotiate quick turns in a frothy current that usually is more riffle than rapids.

Beyond lay several larger lakes, including formidable Saganaga, where I nearly came to grief as a 16-year-old, paddling feebly against a fierce headwind. Between the bigger lakes, we would have to shoulder canoe and gear over several short portages, none longer than a quarter of a mile, along mostly flat, well-trod forest paths.

For the Boundary Waters, where you can paddle for weeks without seeing the same lake twice, this was a pretty easy trip. We paddled seven to eight miles a day, getting the traveling done by early afternoon, leaving plenty of time for fishing, swimming, exploring the islands where we were camped or just laying about. In mid-July the weather was hot enough to force us out of our sleeping bags one night, but comfortable enough on the water. The lake water was warm, and still clean enough to drink, which we did, although most outfitters urge you to treat or boil it first.

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You don’t have to have a guide to canoe these waters, but it helps if you haven’t been here before. Many of the lakes are full of islands, where it’s not hard to meander off course, even with the detailed maps that outfitters provide. An extra pair of hands comes especially handy if you or your companions have never experienced the tedium of paddling a fully loaded canoe across several miles of open water in a stiff head wind.

White-water junkies can find lake canoeing a bore. Others love the long, quiet rhythm of it. But it’s hard work for the inexperienced, and the chance to let the guide take over while your muscles regroup can mean the difference between a vigorous vacation and a tour of duty aboard a slave galley. Then there is the business of gathering firewood and cooking at the end of an arm-weary day. The guide does that.

Our guide was a fourth-generation member of the family that opened the Gunflint Lodge nearly 70 years ago. In his first summer of guiding, he was wound up tighter than a new spinning reel and fell over himself trying to do right by the guests. He did fine, his outdoor skills inspiring confidence from the outset.

It has been my experience on guided outdoor trips that the quality of the food rarely rises above boiler plate, but that you are usually so hungry it doesn’t matter. The fare on this trip was pretty typical--steak the first night followed by frozen fish (or was it chicken?), followed the next night by the inevitable freeze-dried noodle surprise. You can improve on the menu by catching some fish. The tasty walleye--often mistakenly called walleyed pike--abounds in these waters. But the walleye is a fickle fish, and the fly fisherman may find, to his or her chagrin, that the best way to catch dinner is with an old casting rig and a pail full of live bait. (Leeches, common in these waters, work best.)

Our four-day trip hugged the more accessible Minnesota side of the international border. Never more than two lakes away from the north woods’ civilized fringe, we probably passed 25 groups of canoeists, including a flotilla of young women on a two-week journey that would culminate on the Grand Portage trail. There, they would have to haul their canoes and gear through 10-miles of forest and marsh that has as many mosquitoes today as it did when the voyageurs, the French fur traders, blazed the trail over 200 years ago. Their route and ours also crossed a few of the lakes where outboard motors are permitted.

There is nothing like the whine of an outboard or a snowmobile to make you think you’re on a street corner in Palermo, Sicily, instead of in the middle of the wilderness. In the Boundary Waters and in nearby Voyageurs National Park, environmental groups are continually struggling to hold the line against expansion of motorized zones into remoter waters. But on our trip, it was not the mechanized traffic that created the biggest nuisance.

On our first night, we were camped on a lake shore just beyond the outboard motor zone when revelers on a nearby island kept us awake well past midnight.

The next day brought more evidence of slatternly human presence. Someone had discarded a set of broken tent poles along one portage. Down the way, a T-shirt was left hanging from a tree branch. Further on, scraps of toilet paper fluttered in the grass. I was beginning to get nervous, as though I were being made to confront the long buried debris of my careless boyhood and, at any moment, those ancient Spam cans would materialize by the side of the trail.

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The third day brought a change in the weather and concerns of a different sort. With thunder rumbling in the distance, we were about to cross Saganaga Lake, where even expert canoeists don’t want to get caught in a big blow. Watching the sky, we paddled through a maze of barrier islands, edging our way toward a broad bay and 45 minutes of open, choppy water that can spawn two-foot rollers and broadside a canoe during a summer storm. But on this morning, the weather stayed to the south of us, and by noon we were inside fjord-like Red Rock Bay, a mirror-smooth emerald passage between protective ledges of moss-covered granite.

Our last night’s campsite was the stuff of calendar photography, a humpbacked, nameless island that narrows into a long, smooth peninsula sheltered by Norway pines. Soft campsites were grooved into the hollows of spreading table rock. We swam off the tip of the island, then lay in the sun, oblivious to the no-see-ums pecking away at our legs and feet. For dinner, we wolfed down a couple of packages of bioengineered food, as if freeze-dried beef stroganoff were the trip’s culinary highlight.

Before the mosquitoes chased us into our tents for the night, I retreated up a long winding path to a grove of pines at the highest point on the island. I thought back over the four days and wondered which moments in which places would linger longest. Watching the vermilion twilight and listening one last time to the glossolalia of the loons, I realized I was sitting in one of those places at that very moment.

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GUIDEBOOK: Minnesota’s Watery World

Getting there: Duluth is the most convenient city to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, about a three-hour drive away. Northwest and United fly from LAX, connecting through Minneapolis and Chicago. Restricted round-trip fares begin at $478. Minneapolis is about six hours away from the Gunflint Trail area by car.

Where to stay: The Gunflint Lodge (750 Gunflint Trail, Grand Marais, MN 55606; telephone [800] 328-3325 or [218] 388-2296, fax [218] 388-9429) has private cabins with bathrooms, or bunkhouse rooms with two to six beds each, some with private baths, some not. Along the Gunflint Trail there are close to 20 other small, rustic resorts and fishing lodges (contact Minnesota tourism below).

Canoe trip outfitters: We booked our trip through the Gunflint Lodge, which offers various packages. As an example, a five-night package, including first- and last-night stays at the lodge in a bunkhouse, is $293 per person, including breakfast and dinner at the lodge and all camping food, plus tents, sleeping bags, canoes and other equipment. For a guide, add $100 per day. For a private cabin, add $35 per night.

Other outfitters who specialize in Boundary Waters canoe trips include: Canoe Country Escapes (tel. [303] 722-6482), which offers seven-night packages--including one night at a wilderness lodge on a Saganaga Lake island and three nights at the Gunflint Lodge--for $695 per person, including meals and all equipment; Way of the Wilderness Canoe Outfitters (tel. [800] 346-6625 or [218] 388-2212) charges $47.50 per person per day for fully outfitted trips with no guide; Voyageur Outfitters (tel. [800] 777-7215 or [218] 388-2224 has three-night packages that cost $196 per group for parties of one to four people, $170 for five- to eight-person groups (guides are extra); the Sierra Club also offers canoe and backpacking outings to the area, but these are already booked for this season. They will take names on a waiting list, however: tel. (415) 923-5588 or fax (415) 923-0636

When to go: Canoe season lasts roughly mid-May to late September, depending on the weather. In summer, days are long; it doesn’t get dark until around 10 p.m. Mosquitoes are least pesky in spring and fall. Bring bug repellent and rain gear since summer storms are common. Canoe outfitters can arrange to get you permits to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness through the U.S. Forest Service, which limits access to the region, but the number of permits runs out before cabin space, so book early.

For more information: Minnesota Office of Tourism, 100 Metro Square, 121 7th Place East, St. Paul, MN 55101-2112, tel. (800) 657-3700 or (612) 296-5029.

--F.C.