![[bicyclist near Chippewa Falls, WI]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/biker_chippewa.jpg)
![[The Mississippi Queen in La Crosse, WI]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/mississippi_queen.jpg)
![[web site logo]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/title_and_tag.jpg)
In summer, nearly every river is a good canoeing river.
For adventure, try the Bois Brule, which flows into Lake Superior over a series of rapids. For scenery, head for the cliff-lined Upper Iowa, which National Geographic Adventure magazine calls one of America’s Best Adventure 100, along with rafting in the Grand Canyon.
For fun with kids, paddle the crooked Kickapoo. Teen-agers like floating the Crystal River in the tippy canoes rented there.
Along Minnesota's northern border with Canada, more than 200,000 people a year find an increasingly rare commodity — absolute wilderness.
The million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is barely changed since voyageurs used its chain of lakes and rivers to push deep into the continent's interior. Today, the foot trails over which they carried canoes and 180-pound packs are used by vacationers, who wind their way from lake to lake in search of the perfect combination of woods, water and solitude.
As they paddle along the glassy waters of more than 1,000 lakes, they may see moose, lynx, otters and beaver, who have rebounded from near-extinction at the hands of trappers. In the evening, at nearly 2,200 campsites, they listen for the trill of loons and the howl of wolves, whose numbers also have rebounded.
In the 1920s, when the first resorts appeared along this remote, 57-mile highway that dead-ends near the Canadian border, guests had to have a certain sense of adventure.
The Gunflint Trail first was blazed by the Ojibwe, then used by fur traders, trappers and loggers. It was still a zigzagging roller-coaster through the woods when vacationers began to come. The first visitors in spring often had to patch the single phone line, which moose tended to snag and drag. Gasoline lanterns in their cabins often became plugged, and bears sometimes made appearances near cabins.
Still, they had it easy. After the guests left, resort owners faced a long winter of splitting wood for fuel, getting around by dog sled, harvesting ice and trapping for food and clothing.
After a long, hard winter, the sight of blooming forsythia can be intoxicating. And a butterfly? That must be just a fleeting dream.
My daughter spotted those things plus a robin soon after we arrived in Missouri for spring break, and they were enough to make her giddy with excitement.
"Oh, I like this place,'' she cried. "I like the way it looks, the warm spring air, the way it smells. And oh, look, some nice spring grass!''
All kinds of paths cross in the Wisconsin village of Trempealeau.
Canoes and cormorants, tugboats and trains, bicyclists and blues fans all are drawn toward this Mississippi River town. It’s just a little burg, but it’s smack in the middle of Mother Nature’s playground.
Perrot State Park starts at the end of Trempealeau’s First Street, with hiking trails that give vistors spectacular views of far-off Winona, the river valley and a hill French explorers called La Montagne Qui Trempe a l'Eau, or "the mountain that soaks in the water.'' To the north are the sloughs of Trempealeau National Wildlife Refuge, crossroads for birds and springboard for bicyclists.
For a hamlet out in nowhere, Lanesboro is picturesquely blessed.
It’s hemmed in by tall limestone bluffs, circled by a spring-fed trout stream and bisected by one of the nation’s best bicycle trails. Eagles, herons and egrets cruise along the scenic river just to the north, alongside canoeists and kayakers.
Nineteenth-century brick storefronts line downtown, which won a Great American Main Street award from the National Trust for
Historical Preservation in 1998; Lanesboro still is the only Minnesota town that has earned the honor.
More than any other river in Wisconsin, the Bois Brule has a pedigree.
They call it River of Presidents, but it also attracts senators and millionaires. Named for pines charred by lightning strikes
— “burnt wood’’ in Ojibwe, then French — it rises from conifer bogs near Solon Springs and flows
toward Lake Superior. Its cold, spring-fed currents harbor trout, and well-heeled fishermen discovered the river long before
loggers moved in.
They built the first lodges in the 1870s, when Ulysses S. Grant came to visit, followed by Grover Cleveland in the 1880s. In the 1890s, St. Louis oil and rail tycoon Henry Clay Pierce amassed 4,160 acres along the river and built a fishing retreat.
In Ely, one picture is worth a thousand tourists.
Who could ignore the call of its photogenic expanses of sky-blue water and rocky islands amid spruce forest? Who isn't drawn to a shimmering image of the northern lights, or of a moose and calf browsing in a patch of wild calla lilies? To see Ely is to want to be there, enveloped by tranquility.
The scenery has been around for a long time, ever since glaciers carried off the soil and left a stony, stripped-down landscape
that, to many, is the essence of the north woods.
In southwest Wisconsin, following the Kickapoo River is a lot like watching a magic act: No matter how closely you pay attention, eventually what you see is going to disappear into thin air.
When it reappears, it will be in a completely different spot, and you'll have no idea how it got there.
"Look, there it is again," said my husband, as we drove Wisconsin 131 through the Kickapoo Valley. "It's meandering like mad."