Quiet lakes and untouched wilderness: Minnesota by canoe

By Christian Roewekamp Aug 23, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Ely, Minnesota - When Blayne Hall starts up the outboard motor of his small boat at quarter to eight in the morning, it is already light - but the view across Moose Lake, located close to Ely in north-western Minnesota, does not stretch very far.

'Sit up front and keep a watch out for the canoes,' Blayne instructs his visitor. And then away he zooms into the thick mist. With warnings coming from up front, he has only a second or two to manoeuvre the boat to avoid a collision.

But Blayne has a great deal of experience - and good luck. After a few minutes, the fog lifts and the sun is gleaming on the water. And the view opens up to take in the shoreline, dominated by a thick pine forest and countless birch trees.

Blayne Hall is one of the people who ferry visitors from Moose Lake to the area known as Boundary Waters. It is one of several departing points to enter a wilderness region accessible only by canoe.

Anyone who wants to get away from it all for a few days cannot go wrong here, and one of the rules is that your mobile phone, wallet and credit cards remain locked in a safe.

In the BWCAW - the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness - such things are of no use. For more than 150 kilometres, the wilderness stretches out along the US-Canadian border.

Grand Marais, located on Lake Superior, is the easternmost embarkation point. Ely is the westernmost entry for this region of more than 1,000 lakes and rivers, a good 2,400 kilometres of canoe routes and nearly 2,200 sites where adventure travellers can pitch their tents in the wilderness.

Simply jumping in your canoe and paddling away is not the way to go. A system of permits keeps the number of canoes in the Boundary Waters region under control.

On Moose Lake, for example, there are 26 such permits - meaning that at most, an equal number of canoeing groups may be under way at the same time. Adults pay 16 dollars for a permit, children half that.

Meanwhile Blayne has turned off his outboard motor and has tied his boat up to a tree stump on the shore. Then he heaves the backpacks from his boat into a canoe and his passengers disembark his boat and climb into the canoe.

And then their trip begins. Soon, the only sounds they hear are the wind in the trees and their paddles dipping into the water. 'It's a good thing you took so little stuff along,' Blayne says. 'We'll notice this with every portage we make.'

Portage means nothing other than having to carry everything - the canoe and the equipment - across land from one lake to the next.

Some of those stretches are maybe less than 100 metres. But others take a lot longer before everything - the canoes, the food supplies, tents and sleeping bags - are carried across and stored back on the canoe. Except for the water needed for cooking, which is simply taken from the lakes, travellers have to bring everything else along.

After two portages, Ensign Lake has been reached. Now there is still some six kilometres to paddle in an easterly direction.

Very few other canoeists are to be seen on this day, only a few elderly couples, and here and there an angler who nods silently in greeting to passing canoes.

Altogether there are 38 camp sites on Ensign Lake. Blayne has chosen one on the north-eastern part, just two kilometres south of the border with Canada.

'It's better if we stay on the northern shore,' he says. 'Lately there have been several bear sightings on the southern side. And we don't want to have them visiting us at night.'

Many visitors don't want to go home before they have finally spotted a bear. And so at Ely, the last outpost of civilization, there is the North American Bear Centre.

There is also the International Wolf Centre, and so the town of Ely with its 3,800 residents has become a destination also for non-canoeists. The magazine Budget Travel declared Ely in 2010 to be one of the '10 coolest small towns in America.'

Ted, Honey and Lucky - three black bears - live in Bear Centre. Up till 2007 the three had been kept privately by people in the neighbouring state of Wisconsin. Their fur is a silky black.

'But we don't groom them - no combs, no brushes. The bears clean themselves,' centre staff member Donna Andrews says while she is feeding the bears, by hand, a snack of grapes and water melons. Visitors are watching at a safe distance from a balcony.

The aim of the bear centre is to help preserve the natural habitat of the bears. 'We have 15,000 to 20,000 black bears in northern Minnesota,' director Lynn Rogers says. 'In 1971, there were fewer than 6,000 in the entire state. But the numbers are now declining again. We want to present facts to counter the prejudices against the supposedly so dangerous bears.'

She says that in the United States, there is a greater likelihood of being killed by another human being than by one of the some 420,000 black bears in the country.

At the campfire on Ensign Lake, supper consists of green beans and potatoes frying in a pan atop a gas cooker. A fire can be seen across the lake on the southern shore.

Are those the anglers who had sat so silently in their canoes earlier on? And are they going to be visited by the bears said to be roaming around? The questions remain unanswered beneath a cloudless sky and heavens lit up by the stars.