ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, July 21, 1996 TAG: 9607190003
SECTION: TRAVEL PAGE: 8 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: ON GUNFLINT LAKE, MINN.
SOURCE: FRANK CLIFFORD LOS ANGELES TIMES
In the 1950s, before Minnesota's northern canoe country became an adventure-travel destination, suburban teen-agers 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. 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. 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.
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, which 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 head wind. 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.
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 more than 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.
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 2-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 fiord-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.
LENGTH: Long : 124 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: BARBARA ANDERSON/Los Angeles Times. 1. A pair ofby CNBcanoeists ride the fast water on Granite River in Minnesota's
Boundary Waters Canoe Area, about a three-hour drive from Duluth. 2.
A guide carries a canoe around the rapids. 3. Canoeists make camp on
Minnesota's Gneiss Lake. color.