Woody Osborne
You meet all kinds of folks in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
It’s true, sometimes, that you don’t see many people at all. Entry to the wilderness is managed by a state-of-the-art quota system that spreads visitors out over dispersed entry points and on different days. But at the height of summer, especially at the portages that connect this land of 5,000 lakes, you run into people making their way in the wilderness.
On one recent visit to the Quetico, which is the Canadian sister wilderness to the Boundary Waters, my family and I were sprawled out on rocks at a shoreline, exhausted after a monster of a portage, half a mile long with slippery rocks and plenty of elevation change. Often, the portages are fairly short, and within minutes of walking you will see the next lake glittering in the sun through the trees. But the trails can also be long, rocky, and boggy. It sometimes takes multiple trips.
We watched three canoes glide in, each carrying three young women. They wore big smiles and floral print sun dresses over their bathing suit tops and shorts. It took them under five minutes to empty their canoes and don all their gear, including a bear box on a tumpline. And then they were gone, up the trail. Amazons.
You’ll also run into families like ours, gear strewn about as we make multiple portages, as well as troops of Boy Scouts, and pairs of older gentlemen, their aluminum canoes bristling with fishing gear. I remember one conversation at an outfitters with a young man planning a solo trip. He asked me how many flannel shirts he ought to bring. I said I thought one was fine.
I am always happy to see so many different kinds of people canoeing the Boundary Waters, because, as any environmentalist knows, behind every wilderness there’s a fight. Lots of people from far-flung places need to care deeply about public wilderness in order to protect it against the inevitable plans for development, extraction, and otherwise removing the wild from a place.
Lots of people from far-flung places need to care deeply about public wilderness in order to protect it against the inevitable plans for development, extraction, and otherwise removing the wild from a place.
For me, being in the wilderness is an expansion of being human. It’s an opportunity to step out of a sense-depriving daily grind. Each trip, although taxing and sometimes scary, is enormously rejuvenating.
But more than just a getaway, wilderness is expansive. I feel more alive: freer to see, hear, smell, and think. There’s no better place to do that than from the seat of a canoe, hearing wavelets slap the sides of a boat, feeling the sun, the wind, smelling the sweet, sharp scent of clean lake water, and keeping an eye out for eagles overhead or movement in the shadows of pines close to shore. Is that an otter run? Was that a beaver?
Much has been written about the drive to protect land from society’s rapacious tendency to strip places of everything with economic value, leaving it suffering and barren. For me, wilderness is a promise, a commitment of diverse people who want the choice to engage more of our senses; that we can be nurturing of other species; that we can create places where profit doesn’t rule.
The Boundary Waters Canoe Area’s million acres of wilderness was hewn out of more than seventy years of contestation and court battles. That’s a long fight, but love for the outdoors once united this region.
The town of Ely, established in 1888 during the iron-ore boom in the nearby Mesabi range, was, in the 1930s and 1940s, facing a slowly dying mining industry. The huge forests, with towering, 200-foot white pines, were long gone. The whole state of Minnesota was cut over and the remaining slash burned by the late 1890s. Only “witness trees,” marking section boundaries and portages remained.
Just across the international boundary in Canada, deep, lush wilderness flourished, the logging industry not having reached the area. In his book Canoe Country, David Backes describes how the devastation of the cutover led the Minnesota forestry commissioner to request that the U.S. government not sell another half a million acres north of Ely for more logging. Out of the ashes, a phoenix of hope.
President Theodore Roosevelt established the Superior National Forest in 1909, and Ely began to remake itself as a doorstep to wilderness. If you went up there then, you’d have seen land logged to the shoreline, and would have had to paddle for days to get beyond the cutover, encountering dams, portages full of drowned trees, and abandoned machinery. Much of the wildlife—moose, fishers, pine marten, bald eagle, fox, wolf—was very much in decline.
If you went up there then, you’d have seen land logged to the shoreline, and would have had to paddle for days to get beyond the cutover, encountering dams, portages full of drowned trees, and abandoned machinery.
As the rest of the country began a great tidal shift toward urbanization, Ely began to bill itself as a retreat. For decades, beginning in the 1920s, resorts were built, with owners advertising “virgin lakes” and pushing the state to begin stocking them with fish.
In 1925, wilderness canoeing buffs and a growing resort industry worked together to counter a waterpower development plan involving dams that would create giant reservoirs drowning countless small lakes and islands. The Quetico-Superior Council, which included such prominent Americans as Jane Addams, William Beebe, Aldo Leopold, and Harold Ickes, was created to fight the plan.
An author in the magazine Outdoor Life wrote about the controversy in 1929, “no paunch, fat-jowled, chair-warming capitalist shall be allowed to spoil our forests, pollute our streams, destroy our remaining fish and game at will without a fight.”
The resistance was successful but the unity behind it was not to last. The Ely fishing tourist industry turned increasingly to motorboats and later seaplanes to move visitors in and out. In 1936, the Ely area had some sixteen resorts; in 1950, the number was sixty-five. In 1948, according to Backes, Ely was the largest seaplane base on the continent, with seventy planes running twenty round trips a day. By 1950, the number of visitor days had surged to well over 200,000.
Among the people working the Ely area resorts was famed wilderness advocate Sigurd Olson. He had urged the introduction of smallmouth bass into the lakes—a move with undeniable ecological consequences—but the seaplanes had begun to change his mind about Boundary Waters management. Suddenly, it was possible for people to fly in for a weekend from Minneapolis, Chicago, and even Florida.
Businesses and private cabins sprang up even in remote lakes. Canoeists encountered dozens of double-decker houseboats on some lakes, and water skiing even on remote ones. Portages became jammed, coliform bacteria levels in the water spiked, and campsites were full of litter.
Businesses and private cabins sprang up even in remote lakes. Canoeists encountered dozens of double-decker houseboats on some lakes, and water skiing even on remote ones.
In 1947, the Quetico-Superior Council hired Olson, who had left his university job to dedicate himself to wilderness guiding and writing, to mobilize public support for a ban on seaplanes in canoe country. Olson was a gifted communicator, and his articles and movie about canoeing reached a large number of people lamenting the grind of an urbanized and constrained daily life.
In 1949, President Truman signed an executive order that banned flying over the wilderness at an altitude of less than 4,000 feet and prohibited landings. This was the beginning of years of court cases. Local resort owners battled the increasingly popular idea of untrammeled wilderness, advocating for new development to sustain the local economy.
But history was not on their side. A University of Minnesota survey of visitors in 1958 revealed that many paddlers were not happy about the crowding and prevalence of motors. The appearance of snowmobiles in the late 1950s was yet another menace to the solitude.
In his first book, published in 1956, Olson wrote about the value of the wild: “The singing wilderness has to do with the calling of loons, northern lights, and the great silences of a land lying northwest of Lake Superior . . . . I have heard the singing in many places, but I seem to hear it best in the wilderness lake country of the Quetico-Superior, where travel is still by pack and canoe over the ancient trails of the Indians and voyageurs.”
Across the country, public support for investment in protected public wilderness lands was burgeoning. In 1964, Congress passed the Wilderness Act (drafted with Olson’s help), and the U.S. Forest Service slowly but surely took private landholdings to secure the area as wilderness as mandated by the law.
Motors are now prohibited on 75 percent of the surface waters, and snowmobiling is prohibited on interior trails. Logging and mining have been eliminated. Through years of battles that pushed out extractive industry and resorts, local people felt they had lost their livelihoods in one long bleed-out. The years of fighting sowed bitterness.
At a 1977 hearing on the Wilderness Act, 1,000 people showed up, many to protest. Sigurd Olson was hung in effigy. In 2007, six Ely residents roared into the Boundary Waters in motorboats, harassing campers, shooting fireworks and guns, and badly scaring people.
The best way to keep up the energy to protect wilderness is to go be in it. As much controversy has surrounded the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, a lot of people in Ely seem to accept that economies change, and that if it weren’t for the work of wilderness advocates in the first place, there would be no spectacular region left to fight over. And despite the fact that we canoeists, as the saying goes, come to town with a $20 bill and one shirt and don’t change either, I’ve always found everyone very friendly in Ely.
The best way to keep up the energy to protect wilderness is to go be in it.
My friend Woody, who has spent months at a time canoeing the Boundary Waters, talks about the time his truck broke down. He was in an Ely parking lot with the hood up, and three different sets of people stopped by to see if he needed assistance. Woody also talks about his friendship with Tim Cook, an evangelical pastor, whom he encountered many times at the Front Porch coffee shop in the summer of 2008.
“I remember telling him how in May, before any of the tourists arrive, I think of Ely as owned by ravens, who fly around saying ‘Talk! Talk!’ ” Woody remembers. “I love that,” said the pastor. “I am going to use that in my next sermon.” At the end of the summer, knowing that Woody was in between jobs, the pastor slipped him a $100 bill and said, “This is from me and my congregation, wishing you well on your next adventure.”
Recently, I’ve been thinking about an all-gals trip. I need to get my friends up there, exercising their wilderness sensibilities. Use them or lose them, I say. I want others to know the bliss of navigating by canoe for days on end, of jumping into a lake so clear it feels like no one has ever been there before, of sitting on a granite outcropping at night, feeling a breeze cross the water, and looking up into a vast, deep world of stars.
Because once someone feels that alive, there’s a good chance they’ll be willing to fight to be able to do it again.
Mrill Ingram is web editor for The Progressive.