The innocence of Boundary Waters and the challenges ahead | Then & Now
My dad gave me an aluminum canoe in 1971 for my high school graduation present.
It’s still in the family, mostly retired since we entered the age of Kevlar but earning its keep as a durable roof over our dog pen.
Every dent signifies an early lesson learned, and there’s a lot of them.
But I never really understood the nuances or significance of canoeing until I joined my college buddy Scott Wolff in his backyard for the 1982 adventure featured here.
Scott grew up in Minnesota where early exploration would have sunk without the canoe. Paddling is in his family’s DNA.
The inside joke is that after a one-week honeymoon in Montana to consummate my late-September marriage to Meredith Heick, I took off almost immediately from Spokane (with her blessing) to Minnesota.
The trip with Scott exploring the Boundary Waters Canoe Area was twice as long as my honeymoon.
Hey, it’s my job.
My first glance at a BWCA map was overwhelming. It looked as though the lakes had been added to the paper by drenching a shaggy dog with blue paint and letting him shake.
While lakes are attractions in many of the nation’s 800-some official wilderness areas, they are the essence of the Boundary Waters.
The trip was my baptism into the expanded world of paddling.
Meredith and I tested the strength of our marriage by enrolling in tandem canoeing classes with the Spokane Canoe & Kayak Club.
Soon we were launching major paddling trips to a wide range of destinations near and far, including the Bowron Lakes Canoe Circuit in British Columbia, where Meredith was indoctrinated into the merits of single portaging.
When our two daughters were very young, we discovered the canoe was perfect for taking the whole family camping.
Being a writer, I kept notes on all the places we explored, especially regional standouts such as Upper Priest Lake, Little Spokane River, Bonnie Lake, St. Joe River and dozens more.
When S-R colleague Dan Hansen and I realized we both had kids that took to canoeing, we teamed to do more research and spread the information to others by publishing “Paddle Routes of the Inland Northwest,” featuring 50 flatwater and whitewater trips for canoe and kayak.
The author pages in most books feature pictures of the person who wrote the book. Ours features a very fine photo of our two young families, who deserve a raft of credit.
The 1982 adventure also opened my eyes to the wolf.
Little did I know then that starting a decade later, I would write dozens of stories through the rest of my career regarding the endangered species’ recovery in the West.
I tapped experts in North America and even Europe for my coverage. I also logged numerous personal experiences with wolves while hunting and hiking. (For an example, Google “hiking with dogs in wolf country” to see my YouTube video).
The Boundary Waters experience still resonates within me.
I jumped at the chance to join Scott’s family and friends in 2017 for a paddling adventure (story published Oct. 12, 2017) into Quetico Provincial Park, Ontario’s million-acre extension of the million-acre BWCA.
In the first two days of paddling, our group of eight covered 28 miles and nine portages through the Falls Chain into Kawnipi Lake, where we dined on fresh walleye tacos.
This is what wilderness is all about for paddlers, who can still dip their cups or bottles in the deep-blue middle of Quetico lakes and drink untreated water without consequence.
Of course, everything on this planet is subject to change, including wilderness.
On July 4, 1999, a storm of savage winds up to 100 mph swept across northern Minnesota smothering trails and campsites with toppled trees and raising havoc on 370,000 acres inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area – more than a third of the wilderness.
This year, Congress overturned a mining moratorium, opening doors to developing a copper-sulfide mine near Ely, Minnesota, that threatens the headwaters of the Boundary Waters.
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