MINNESOTA WILD
Canoe trip yields spectacular sights, discoveries
Paddling across White Iron Lake, I looked up at the sky, cloudless and blue. Then I glided around a bend and spotted them: a pair of slim maple trees, rising from the rocky shoreline, burst into a brilliant orange.
It was still early. MidSeptember. In this northern edge of Minnesota, just outside Ely, most of the trees still shimmered green. But from our canoes, my paddling group witnessed hints that autumn, in all its brilliance, would soon arrive.
“It's the perfect time to be up here,” one of our guides, Devan, later told us.
The weekend would back up his claim: Comfortable temperatures. Fewer people — and perhaps more important — fewer mosquitoes. And those slim, orange maple trees, with more to come. It was as if all the forest's color had gravitated toward the water.
We had gravitated there, too. We had come to canoe, to explore just the edge of an epic wilderness of lakes, rivers and rapids. This trip, put on by Wilderness Inquiry, proved more easygoing than my past pack-and-portage excursions into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Each evening, we returned to a cozy lodge on a pine-covered peninsula on White Iron Lake.
The weekend had been billed as an “amazing trip for leaf-peepers.” As the trip approached, swaths of the Department of Natural Resource's color-coded state map, which Minnesotans eye each fall, had begun turning yellow and orange. But the Ely area?
Stubbornly, disappointingly green.
Still, as the van headed north, I hoped.
We had other goals besides leaves, of course. I craved time in a canoe. My camping and canoeing trips had relied, for too long, on men who boasted more gear and experience than I had. They knew how to start a fire despite the rain and — if I'm being honest — were willing to carry the canoe on their shoulders from one lake to the next. On this trip, I vowed to pay more attention to the maps and the weather and the knots used to tie up canoes. I wanted to be able to venture into the Boundary Waters on my own next time.
The two Wilderness Inquiry guys, clad in Chaco sandals and sporting tans, let me look over their shoulders as they marked their maps and made their plans.
I awoke the next morning to the sound of rain peppering the roof and the smell of onions frying in a cast
iron pan. After exploring the Boundary Waters by backpack, I was struck by the luxury. A roof! A kitchen!
We gathered at the long wooden table, drinking coffee and checking the weather on our phones. The rain would pass, our guides promised.
A visitor dropped by, a dog at his heels. Arctic explorer Paul Schurke and his wife own this lodge, which specializes in winter dog sled excursions. But in the warmer months, he lends the place to Wilderness Inquiry, the company he co-founded with Greg Lais while at St. John's University. (“This little lodge is lonely and forlorn all summer,” he said. “Mostly we wait until the snow flies, which it will very soon.”)
Wearing a baseball cap and a sweet, crooked smile, Schurke welcomed the group.
“We like to think you're in a very special place,” he said. “You're at the entry point to the most popular, beloved, heavily visited protected wilderness area on planet Earth and, for that matter, in the Milky Way galaxy.”
Outside this cabin, Schurke said, gesturing to the door, are 2,000 lakes, “almost all of which are clean enough that you could dip your cup in and drink from them.”
“Although Wilderness Inquiry wouldn't recommend it.”
Our guides were right: The skies cleared. We drove east, to the Lake One trailhead, and dipped our Kevlar canoes into the water.
Across Fall Lake, in the distance, an animal swam, creating ripples of water that spread and disappeared long before reaching our canoe. The animal was deep, strong. But what was it?
“Hard to tell,” Devan said, leaning forward. “A deer, maybe.”
Or maybe a moose? We called over to the other canoe, careful not to shout too loud. Their eyes widened. We had been talking moose all weekend, hoping to see one on our hike to Kawishiwi Falls. Or from the road. But on the water? We had never considered such a thing.
We took off, pulling the clear water back with our paddles as quickly as we could.
As we got closer, the swimmer looked smaller. A deer indeed, its short antlers sticking out above the water. We watched it swim toward shore.
A paddle, an island respite and another paddle later, Devan spotted another swimmer, much smaller this time. A beaver, someone predicted.
I dug my paddle into the water quickly, deeply, using every skill I had learned over these past few days, until we got close. Closer. Its figure finally became clearer: a red squirrel, dogpaddling toward shore.
We laughed so hard our canoe shook.