Canoe Country
From yurt to B&B on the Gunflint Trail
In a snowy Minnesota wilderness, guests get the best of two worlds.
When it’s 30 below in the north woods, that's nothing like a cold day in Siberia.
It’s more like a cold day in Mongolia.
Temperatures were dangerously low over New Year's when we drove with friends to the Gunflint Trail, but we knew a wood fire would be waiting for us in a round, canvas-sided hut called a yurt, or ger in Mongolia.
Minnesota's Boundary Waters
For canoeists, this vast wilderness is the promised land.
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.
Dreaming of Ely
The wilderness around this Minnesota town exerts a magnetic pull on city folk.
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.
Ely and the three bears
At the North American Bear Center, visitors meet some big personalities.
Everyone loves a teddy bear, especially one called Ted.
He's likely the world's largest black bear, at 850 pounds, but he doesn't throw his weight around.
When his fellow bear Honey doesn't want to play, which is often, he merely whines, "like a foghorn,'' says curator Donna Phelan. And when he wants to make friends, which is all the time, he makes a "wonderful amiable sound, an umph-umph-umph.''
Adventure on the Gunflint Trail
For outdoorsy folks, this Minnesota wilderness is a year-round playground.
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.
Winter in Ely
At the edge of the wilderness, fun starts when the snow falls.
Around Ely, beauty is stripped down to essentials.
There's little but water, stone, spruce and sky in the northern Minnesota wilderness, what conservationist Sigurd Olson called "the naked grandeur." Still, it enthralls visitors from all over the world.
In winter, snow, ice and silence settle over the forests and lakes, and stars plaster the inky night sky. For many, Ely's pull is even stronger then.
Winter on Minnesota's Gunflint Trail
On the edge of the Boundary Waters, Nordic skiers find snow that sparkles into April.
While people in cities to the south are looking for crocuses, folks on northeast Minnesota's Gunflint Trail are enjoying some of the best skiing of the year.
It's not that the Gunflint is so much colder. It's that there's so much snow it keeps itself refrigerated, like glaciers.
"We have a really good base,'' says Heather Telchow of Golden Eagle Lodge. "Even after these warm days, the snow is like brand new. I grew up in Faribault, and I'm used to it disappearing in a few days. But we don't lose snow like that up here. We keep it forever.''
Ensconced in Ely
A guesthouse overlooking Bear Head Lake is just one of the hideaways in Minnesota state parks.
In Bear Head Lake State Park near Ely, there are three places to spend the night: a tent, one of five rustic camper cabins and a modern split-level.
On a subzero day in winter, one is better than the others.
Minnesota's state parks are sprinkled with guesthouses and cabins that can be rented. Some are
marvelously atmospheric, such as the log cabins built in Itasca for the tourist trade.
Trying out the Border Route
On eight great day hikes, get a taste of this 65-mile trail through Minnesota's canoe country.
In Minnesota canoe country, hikers get serious bragging rights by backpacking the Border Route Trail.
This 65-mile trail roughly parallels the Ontario border, mostly through the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. The volunteers who maintain it can't use mechanized tools there, and signs aren't allowed.
Navigation isn't easy, and hikers frequently have to dodge blown-down trees.
A Gunflint legend
In Minnesota canoe country, a historic lodge draws skiers, paddlers and nature-lovers.
At the Gunflint Lodge, every new luxury burnishes the legend of the rough-hewn outdoorswoman who made them possible.
Justine Kerfoot was a 22-year-old college student when the stock market crashed in 1929. Her family lost their Illinois home and lake cottage, so she gave up medical school and moved to the family fish camp at the edge of the Boundary Waters.
"We were green people who came in from the outside and didn't know anything about anything,'' she said in a 1997 interview. "I just bulled it through.''
Land of big water
On Minnesota's vast Rainy Lake, a little horsepower is a good thing to have.
At the top of Minnesota, there's a spectacular national park — half water and all scenery.
Not only is it beautiful, but it's also the only national park we have, which you'd think would impress most people. But not, apparently, some of the locals.
My husband and I found that out two minutes after we'd arrived on Rainy Lake and were chatting with the friendly young woman checking us into our B&B.
Beguiled by bears
In northern Minnesota, the man who loved bears left a legacy for thousands.
Half a century ago, a Minnesota logger who lived in a forest full of hungry bears decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
By the time he died at age 86, Vince Shute had fed generations of black bears, become best friends with a bear named Brownie and inspired bear-lovers all over the world.
Shute wasn't a sophisticated man, but he had a heart.
© Beth Gauper, 2007 - 2013 all rights reserved
