Hunt Hill Getaway

 Frances Andrews, the daughter of a North Dakota farm boy who became a wealthy grain trader and philanthropist, may have developed her love of the outdoors at the family compound on Isle Royale, where she and her younger brother hiked, fished, and foraged for mushrooms and other wild edibles. In Minnesota she is perhaps best known today as the long-time personal friend of Ernest Oberholtzer, with whom she shared a variety of environmental concerns.

When Frances's brother and mother died, her father, Arthur, bought a  large chunk of woods and farmland in northwest Wisconsin as a memorial, naming it Hunt Hill. The family built two cottages on the hilltop, and Frances spent a good deal of time there working to restore the acreage to a healthier and more natural state. A few years after her father's death in 1951, Frances deeded the estate to the National Audubon Society, along with a generous endowment, the idea being that it would be operated as a research facility and a "nature camp" for Minnesota and Wisconsin residents.

Last summer some friends who have a cabin in the woods a few miles up the road brought up Hunt Hill in conversation. I'd never heard of it. A few months later, trying to cook up some adventures to fill the winter months, I googled it and was surprised to discover the Hunt Hill cabins were available for rent and not terribly expensive. I booked the smaller of the two, a log cabin built in 1930, for a couple of nights in early February, and started to develop an itinerary and a recreational plan.

The camp is situated a half-hour southeast of Spooner, which we've driven through a hundred times. But we always arrive from the west or (rarely) the southwest. The countryside to the southeast was terra incognita. So, as the date of our excursion approached, I concocted a route that entailed heading east from Stillwater to New Richmond and continuing across Dunn County on Highway 64 across a lovely ridge of nameless wooded hills  to Bloomer, where we'd turn north to explore the Chippewa Moraine Wildlife Area and maybe do some skiing at Hickory Ridge before continuing north on Highway 53 to the camp.

But this morning the sky was full of that fine-grained snowy-icy stuff that could spell trouble on a windswept rural road, and we opted for a more familiar, but also safer, route east along Highway 8. It's not a pretty highway, but we'd never had occasion to take it past Turtle Lake, so there were new things to see. I was intrigued by the silica factory in Barron, and we drove through Rice Lake several times just to get the feel of it. Nice park along the lake, lumber mill on the south edge of town, used bookstore on Main Street.

We were still an hour early—check-in was at two—when we turned off Highway 53 at Sarona and began to weave our way east down county roads toward the camp. The last half-mile of township road hadn't been plowed, and we surfed our little Toyota through half a foot of fresh snow to the entrance of Hunt Hill. The driveway was clear, but we met the snowplow halfway in. He backed down a spur going toward the main camp to get out of the way and I took a run at the final hill leading to the cabins, still unplowed. Didn't make it. I backed down and let the man finish the job.

The camp director, Nikki Janisin, pulled in a few seconds after we arrived.

"I'm glad you made it in," she said. "I left a message about the roads. I didn't know what kind of vehicle you had."

"I don't have a cell phone," I said. "But no problem. Is it OK to park here?"

"The other cabin isn't winterized. You've got the place to yourselves" she said. "You're from Minneapolis, right? Well, these cabins were owned by the Andrews family. Wealthy grain traders from Minneapolis. They were important players in preserving the Boundary Waters, too. This was their family retreat."

The buildings are modest. The woods are thick and quiet all around. "Someone might come and fix the yard light this afternoon," Nikki said. A ladder was leaning against the pole. "If something goes wrong, or you need anything, just give me a call."

The cabin is warm enough (it has a furnace), big enough (it has an ample living room, a cozy bedroom, a primitive kitchen, and a microscopic bathroom), rustic enough (wrought-iron fixtures, a huge stone fireplace, resident mice) and it's certainly remote enough. 

There are lamps everywhere—an important feature for readers, especially in winter—though most of the bulbs are feeble. The large picture window looks off down the hill through a maple forest to a distant, snow-covered lake. And the property boasts twelve miles of trails that cross fields, woods, and bogs.

It didn't take us long to settle in, and we had soon turned our chairs away from the fireplace toward the window looking off down the hill through the trees. Now we're watching darkness obscure the woods and sky, which now has some hopeful variations in color, unlike the drab gray we were driving through this morning. Tomorrow will be colder, but perhaps sunnier. We're going to nibble our way through dinner—crackers, pears, herring, cheese, salami—and then read a few fairy tales out loud. We've brought the French, the Irish, the Arabic, and the Japanese volumes from the Pantheon set.