Down the Gunflint Trail - without a Paddle

Confucius say: better to be windbound at the landing than ten miles out to sea.

We had headed out to "sea" once again, across Seagull Lake, just south of the Canadian border. We had found the path through the islands on the north end of the lake against moderate wind, passed the Palisades, and turned the corner into a back bay where we hoped, but didn't actually expect, to find a campsite free. 

A year ago we had the good luck to camp there, but it's usually occupied. It was.

We crossed the tip of the bay to the only other campsite nearby, fighting the much stronger waves that were sweeping in across four miles of open water. Taken.

Back to the protection of the islands, we  visited four other sites in the vicinity. All occupied. At two of the sites young couples—one with small child—were taking a "layover" due to the wind. The other two had been occupied just that morning. No one wanted to proceed out across the big lake.

At that point, we had little choice but to return to the landing. To be honest, I didn't really mind. 

There are quite a few lovely sites at the Trail's End Campground where we'd spent the previous night—a warren of loops and cul de sacs that defies topological analysis. It was only ten in the morning. We had plenty of time to locate the unreserved sites and evaluate each of them with care.

We finally settled on #30, high on a hill, partially surrounded by delicate popples,  with a nice view out toward the lake and only one other site nearby.  You couldn't actually see the lake, unless you walked out to the end of the bluff, but little matter. It was like being in Colorado. We ate lunch. We set up our camp chairs. We rolled out the super-delux air mattresses we'd brought along, too bulky to bring out on the trail. We took an evening paddle around the channels near the landing, where I first set eyes on the BWCA at the age of 12 in 1964. And that night the stars were fabulous.

An entry permit to the BWCAW is only good for one day. If a ranger had caught us trying to sneak out again the next morning, I think he would have "understood," but it happened to be raining, and we decided to scuttle the very idea of a canoe trip and spend some time exploring a few of the places on the Gunflint Trail that we invariably streak by, year after year, on our way to the landing and the wilderness of lakes and woods beyond.

Our first stop was Clearwater Lodge, a few miles north of the Gunflint Trail down Clearwater Road. It's a classic log cabin structure with a long front porch, and I wasn't surprised much to see the plaque on the wall commemorating its "national historic register" status.

The young man behind the counter was personable. When I mentioned that we'd been stymied by the wind the previous day, he said, "I'm not surprised. We didn't let anyone go out until late afternoon yesterday." We got onto the subject of Grand Portage—nine miles long—which he'd done recently. I told him I once did it going uphill, with two weeks of supplies, and then continued all the way to Lake Winnipeg.

"Did you canoe across Lake Winnipeg?" he asked. No. (Why would you?)

"My wife did it recently. It took twenty-two days, and they only paddled at night. It was too windy during the day."

We swapped a few more canoeing tales, not trying to one-up each other, just sharing experience. He'd never heard of the small private camp I once worked at, though it was only a few miles down the road. Well, that was fifty years ago.

"What do you and your wife do in the winter?" I asked.

"We're here, answering emails, shoveling snow. A few of the cabins are open year round. In summer we work seven days a week. Winter is our weekend."

Hilary and I wandered into the lodge, where there was a jigsaw puzzle set out on a card table, and a middle-aged couple was playing Four in a Row. An elderly couple was eating breakfast in the room beyond.

Such scenes always seem quaint, but also a little depressing to me. Maybe it was the rain, or the bad lighting. But it seems people aren't having as much fun as they imagined they would, and would almost rather be at home or outside sitting at a campfire under a tarp.

We visited several Forest Service campgrounds—Flour Lake, East Bearskin—which looked well designed for privacy but often narrow and closed in. Much more appealing was the campground on Devils Track Lake, only a few miles up the hill from Grand Marais. We chose site #8, later decided #11 was better, and finally settled in at # 12 and dropped our $11 into the metal slot at the entry kiosk.

On our way to Devil's Track, we had taken a sidetrip to Elbow Lake, where we met a man named Leroy Johnson. He was about to begin a shift checking outboard motor propellers for undesirable weeds and other invasive organisms.

"I've lived in Cook County all my life," he told us several times with obvious pride. "I know everyone around here. And that dog there is a Norwegian lundehund," he told us with a chuckle. "My son bought it. Then he moved out. So I guess it's mine now.  She doesn't hunt. I don't konw what she's good for. But she is kind of cute."

I looked it up later. That dog was bred in Noway to hunt puffins. 

The next morning we snagged the last remaining campsite at Judge Magney State Park via telephone and spent the day exploring the coast east of Grand Marais, where the crowds thin out and the roadside cliffs vanish, leaving you with miles of pebbly beaches. We got out our chairs at the Kadunce River Wayside and sat looking out at the calm water and the fresh blue sky for quite a while, utterly at peace. Before long a family of mergansers swam by in a broken line, fishing together, their heads often submerged and swiveling back and forth as they scanned the depths for fish.

A group of school children had assembled in the lot. After frolicking in the frigid waters of Lake Superior for a few minutes, they took a hiking trail up the river, accompanied by their chaperones.

A few minutes later a young woman came by with her daughter. She was  carrying two green Lund's shopping bags.

"We thought we'd just get out of town for a few days," she said, "just the two of us. I looked on my phone for beaches where you could find agates." 

Hours later, after visiting the museum and fort at Grand Portage, thirty miles up the road, and spotting a pectoral sandpiper in the gravel parking lot of the ferry landing to Isle Royale, we pulled into the lot at Kadunce Wayside once again. The school kids were long gone, the mother-daughter pair was several miles up the beach, and a hearty-looking middle-aged couple was playing cribbage at a picnic table nearby. It turns out they had biked up to the Canadian border from Mora, a small town east of Mille Lacs Lake, roughly 200 miles away. Now, on their third day out, they were heading back to Grand Marais.

"Who's winning?" I asked.

"She's kicking my ASS," the man said with a wild grin. He reminded me of Woody Harelson a little.

"Well, the worm will turn," I said encouragingly. "Where are you going to sleep tonight?"

"Right under that tree!" he said, gesturing to a place where their two bikes stood  near the beach. "This beach is on the Superior Hiking Trail. You can camp anywhere around here. We got a six-pack in Hovland  and decided to stop here and play some cards."

It's all part of the scene.

The next morning at dawn, after a very quiet night at Judge Magney, we hiked up to Devil's Cauldron. No one on the trail. And after four successive breakfasts of granola with powdered milk, we splurged on a hot breakfast at nearby Naniboujou Lodge.

Our waitress was a young Ojibwe woman from Grand Portage. "Have you ever been to the Suzie Islands?" I asked her. (Why did I ask? because only tribal members can go there.) "Not since I was a child," she replied, a little wistfully. "There isn't much out there. Just a couple of campsites."

Sounds nice.

"We stopped this morning at the wayside rest on Mt. Josephine," I said. "looking down on the Suzie Islands. I think that may be the prettiest view in Minnesota."

"When I worked for the tribe, I used to pick up trash there," she said. "I would look around and say, "This job's not so bad...."