Ely, International Wolf Center, North American Bear Center, Lake One thunderstorm, Echo Lake, Voyageur National Park, Fort Frances, Kenora (posted from HoJoe Coffee, Kenora, Ontario)
(this post covers 24-29 July, 2007)
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Sunday, 29 July-
After breakfast we drove west to an Ojibwe historical museum, Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung. We toured the display building and started walking down the long path to the outdoor areas but soon turned back for mosquito repellent and our bicycles. We were very impressed by the roundhouse. It was built of logs and we could see it had a tipi-shaped roofline but it wasn’t until we entered that we had an impression of size. Around the outer perimeter was a floor or platform covered in green carpet, some eight feet wide. Inside that is a circular dirt floor- so that we can touch mother earth. Four large logs rise from the dirt, each at the major points of the compass and each with a colored light at its base—white for north, yellow for south, red for east, black for west. On the outside of each upright log is a small basket containing bits of tobacco leaf. Atop the four logs is a very large iron ring to support the angled logs forming the tipi-style roof. At the smokehole area a roof of skylights kept out the rain but gave us daylight. A carved wooden eagle with outspread wings held a series of oblong wooden trays, each containing an offering of tobacco. Tobacco had also been pushed into the eagle’s open beak. Around the eagle were four poles with their tops painted the same colors for the points of the compass.
After the roundhouse we rode our bikes back the upper trail to the burial mounds at the end. The burial mounds were first formed by digging a shallow and interring a body. More deceased were eventually placed on top and also covered with earth, contributing to the mound. The largest mound at Rainy River was 113 feet in diameter and 24 feet high and had a commanding view of the river.
We then had a late lunch, splitting a large bowl of cream-of-wild-rice soup with bannock on the side and then each had a dessert.
After Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung we drove north another two hours to Kenora, Ontario, a town of about 19,000. The drive up ran along Lake of the Woods and ran through hilly country with many dirt roads leading off to cabins and resorts on the lake. At Kenora we first looked up the Wal-mart, then did some shopping at the local Safeway before finding a town park for our supper. Kenora sits on Lake of the Woods (the second-largest inland lake in Ontario) but this part of the lake has many islands and is a beautiful complement to the city.
After supper we moved to a pulloff with a great view over the lake and blogged, read, and watched boat and floatplane traffic on the lake before returning to Wal-mart for the night.
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Saturday, 28 July-
Our night in Wooden Frog campground was an excellent one and we woke early, around six. After breakfast we continued north on 53 to International Falls. There we took a right to the Rainy Lake Visitor Center, the last of the three. This one had more for us in that it had more information about the voyageurs. We saw two excellent films, one a 1964 film from the National Film Board of Canada called “The Voyageurs” and the other a 2000 film about a Canadian couple (Ian and Sally Wilson) who journeyed the route of the voyageurs as an adventure. I’d love to have a copy of the first since it gave facts like this: the voyageurs paddled (in general) at the rate of a stroke a second for 50 minutes, then took a ten-minute break where they would have a swallow of spirits and light their pipes. They would arise at 03:00 or 04:00, break camp and paddle for about four hours, at which time they were deemed to have earned their breakfast, typically some soup made from dried peas and fatty pork the night before. (note: I see there are some disagreements about this paddle-before-breakfast concept. The book ‘The Voyageurs’ by Grace Lee Nute says the soup simmered all night and at daylight the cook added four broken-up biscuits and called the men to breakfast, whereupon they ladled the thick soup directly to their mouths with their wooden spoons—and THEN started their paddling.)
The second film was interesting in that it was done by a young Vancouver couple who commissioned and helped build a birchbark canoe for their trip from Grand Portage (on Lake Superior) to Cumberland House (on the Saskatchewan River) for Part One of their journey, and then they built a dogsled (actually a lightweight dogsled called a ‘cariole’ used by the Northmen, I believe) and traveled for several months in the north-they took on and accomplished.
After seeing the Voyageur National Park visitor centers and launch ramps I had to ask a ranger whether it was largely a motor-boater’s park. We had seen hundreds of motorboats but not nearly so many canoes as we had seen at Ely and on the Gunflint Trail. When I asked whether Voyageur’s is mostly a motor-boat destination, the ranger showed me that there’s a remote chain of lakes in the center of the park. To get to them, you must use a boat to get to a trailhead, then walk the trail to the first lake where you use a key provided by the park service to unlock your rented canoe. You may not bring your own boat (even if you could portage that far) and the reason is the spiny water flea. The main lakes are all infested with the invasive spiny water flea but the remote chain of lakes are free of them. To protect those lakes, you may only use the canoes provided. Later, I read the precautions boaters are supposed to take. These are posted at the launch ramps. I saw this information at Fort Frances. After using your boat you are asked to wash off the bottom using either 40-degree-centigrade water or using a high-pressure wash wand. Then the boat should be thoroughly dried and not put in another body of water for five days. In watching the bass tournament guys load their boats at this launch ramp, I saw no compliance with these recommendations though of course I don’t know that they didn’t go somewhere else to do them.
After the Visitor’s Center we drove back to International Falls to cross the border back into Fort Frances, Ontario. This time we had a line about forty-five minutes long. But when we finally got across we saw a MUCH longer line coming the other way—easily a three-mile-long line which would have had to take more than two hours (later we learned that this only happens on Saturdays and it's due to all the many camps and resorts north of here having a Saturday-to-Saturday rental period) . We drove to the local Wal-mart and checked to be sure it would be ok to park there overnight. Afterwards we went downtown to the Fort Frances Museum and learned more about the fur trade in this area. We then drove to the town park at Pither Point and found a fantastic, breezy beach. We parked along the beach and watched floatplanes (Cessnas and Beech twins) take off and land in Rainy Lake and just hung out for a couple of hours. We had passed a bass tournament along the river on the way in so after supper we drove there and walked around as the announcer somehow kept the rapt attention of the crowd as each team’s catch was weighed in. I couldn’t get into it but the crowd seemed excited, perhaps as the local boys tried to out-fish the pros. Afterwards we drove back to the beach and hung out until dark. While reading about the town we realized we were parked only a hundred yards or so from the location of Fort St. Pierre and were parked on the historical fur-trading Rendezvous grounds of Rainy Lake. It was fun trying to imagine what this park would have looked like during a rendezvous.
After dark we returned to the Wal-mart for the night. With closing coming at 2200, it seemed like it would be a quiet night. But we parked too close to the loading docks and after closing we started hearing communications to the warehouse workers over the PA system (that's a new one!) and then a truck started up and idled a long time before pulling out. Around midnight we moved to the other end of the parking lot and had a quiet night from then on.
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Friday, 27 July-
What a super night for sleeping last night. The front which came through yesterday brought cool air and we slept very heavily and awoke felling great. With a nice airy morning we decided we needed to take care of haircuts. I needed a good buzz and Labashi needed to trim her bangs. Labashi did a great job of giving me a close cut just using scissors and a comb but demurred when I offered to trim her bangs. Picky, picky, picky! After a quickie general housecleaning of the van we left for Voyageurs.
After only a few miles of dirt road we came to a hard road (Route 23). From the point on the landscape changed from deep forest to small open fields with nice views to small lakes and a deep-forest backdrop, a very pretty combination. No wonder Minnesota bills itself as the ‘Land of 10,000 Lakes’. We continued through this country to the little crossroads of Orr where we found a classy little visitor’s center and the last grocery store for 50 miles. We had lunch in the parking lot of the visitor’s center and then talked at some length with the clerk about what we could expect at Voyageurs and then we stocked up at the grocery for the next few days. We had noticed gas had dropped from $3.02 to $2.92 per gallon our last day at Ely and here it was $2.95.
We hit the first visitor center for Voyageurs National Park at Ash River. The visitor center building was a 1930’s resort cabin and smelled so great from the years of using the stone fireplace. We then visited the resort area of Ash River and it reminded me of Long Level along the Susquehanna (below Wrightsville). We then moved on to Kabetogama Visitor’s Center. I had called it Ka-beato-GAM-a but the ranger at Ash River corrected me: it’s Ka-be-TOE-ga-ma. I’m apparently not descended from the Ojibwe after all.
We then found a campsite at Wooden Frog State Campground nearby. The campsites are a very reasonable $12 per site in this rustic campground—dirt roads, pit toilets, drinking water piped to strategic points throughout the campground but no showers available. We were lucky today and snagged one of the best sites in the campground. Someone had apparently just left one of only three sites which sit on the water and have a fantastic breeze coming into them. What luck!
On the way in we had passed a couple who had just come in from paddling and sailing their tandem kayak across the lake. We chatted briefly then but after Labashi and I settled in to our site I sought them out to ask about their kayak and see their traveling rig. The kayak is an Easy Rider Eskimo 20. They said they used to have a 16-foot Easy Rider but had had to coordinate paddling because they were close together and wanted something bigger. They love the Eskimo for its great stability and easy paddling. Tandem kayaks tend to be faster than solos because of their greater waterline length and their two paddlers but if it’s too wide, the width slows it down considerably. The trick, then, is to get the narrowest kayak with the stability characteristics you want. In this case, this couple wanted an extra-stable kayak because they sometimes paddle sizeable waves in their home paddling grounds in Washington State and they wanted to rig a sail. Their sail in this case is home-made. A four-foot mast of ¾” steel fits in a step at the front end of the bow cockpit and the sail is a four-by-four-foot square of cloth with an eyelet to fit over the top of the mast. The bow-person ties the bottom corners of the sail to her paddle to keep it spread and also to allow running at quite an angle off of dead-downwind.
The traveling rig is a Dodge ¾-ton diesel pickup with the largest pop-top camper I’ve ever seen, a North Star built in Iowa. The couple lived in the camper full-time for two years and considers it perfect for their needs. I’d love to have that open pop-top in hot weather but the downside is it allows a lot more noise inside than a hard-shell so would not be much fun in a noisy Wal-mart parking lot. To load their kayak, they put the roof down and he climbs up onto the roof via the ladder built onto the rear wall. He uses a strap tied to the front of the kayak to lift the bow while wifey helps as best she can to keep the stern (and vulnerable rudder assembly) from dragging until the kayak reaches the balance point on the back edge of the roof and he can just push down and then slide the kayak forward on the rollers in the roof rack. The ladder also serves a dual purpose—it’s also a bike rack. Interesting setup.
After we parked we wondered how we might go about getting showers. The information board said showers were available at two of the nearby resorts but we knew that a similar place on the Gunflint Trail charged $4.00 per person for a shower and that’s too much. Our campsite was situated a little further back in than adjacent sites and there was a screen of foliage between us and those sites. It occurred to me that we could swing open the rear doors of the van and use that to screen us from the sides while the van itself would shield us from the front. That would leave the back open to the lake but there was nobody about to see us—nothing there but a beautiful view and a nice breeze. Good idea! We each had a wonderful backpacker’s shower.
Later in the evening we took a walk and were surprised there were very few mosquitoes about. The sun had set long ago but the clouds were still lit up and reflected in the still waters of the lake.
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Thursday, 26 July-
Success! Last night we camped once again at the end of Lookout Road outside Ely. This high spot not only gives us a view into the Boundary Waters wilderness but also is near several known wolf territories. Our three howling stops with the International Wolf Center the other night were not far away and we had seen a map at the Center showing multiple wolf ranges surrounding nearby Pagami Lake. But it’s very buggy up here and they call in the reinforcements after dark. We had taped up the edges of the front-door screens using painter’s blue tape and I believe that’s the single biggest thing we did to stop the onslaught. In any case, it worked very nicely. Lots of bugs outside, very few inside. We slept wonderfully. Oh, yeah—and our attempts to call a wolf that evening didn’t earn any replies.
We awoke early this morning—around 0630—and drove into Ely to talk with the NFS rangers about a good day-paddle for us. By 0930 we were at imaginatively-named Lake One, a popular entry point to the Boundary Waters about 20 miles east of Ely and at the end of Fernberg Road. We thought we’d paddle across Lake One to the portage into Lake Two and decide there whether to continue. The ranger had told us the portage is a short one and when we asked ‘how short is short?’, she said ’30 rods’. Of course we then needed to know how long a rod is. There are 320 of them in a mile. Which means the portage is 495 feet or 165 yards and a rod is about 16-1/2 feet—about the length of a canoe. The maps of the area show all the portage lengths in rods, perhaps a holdover from surveys, I’m not sure.
As we started our paddle we immediately fell in love with Lake One. Take the finest Maine lake you’ve ever seen, the one with craggy pines, white birches and bold granite outcroppings and islands--- and you have some idea of Lake One’s beauty. It’s a large lake overall but has so many islands and bays that we paddled for over an hour and hadn’t done a quarter of it. We had only planned to do a two to three hour paddle today and had started off on a clear, sunny morning with 65 per cent chance of thunderstorms forecast for evening. But only an hour in we heard a distant roll of thunder and saw dark clouds rapidly start to fill the sky. It was then I remembered looking at the clear blue sky just over an hour ago and deciding to leave the bubble-vent up on Mocha Joe. The vent is a combination vent and fan (a Fantastic Fan for any of you RVers out there) and is right above our bed so any appreciable rain will mean we either spend the day trying to get the bed dried out enough to sleep or we go to a motel for the night. We decided to paddle on and monitor the direction the storm was moving, hoping it would pass by west of our parking spot. But within 20 minutes the whole sky was dark and the wind picked up. We turned around and headed for the launch ramp into a rapidly freshening wind with surprisingly-cold gusts. We’ve paddled in similar conditions before so were confident we could handle the wind conditions (and we had many islands and deep inlets available to hide behind/in if needed) but I did keep a close eye and ear out for lightning flashes and the follow-on thunder to determine if it was time hustle ashore. As it turned out, the closest strikes were two miles away. About half-way back the rain started but it was very light and in fact pleasant to paddle through as the wind gusts died off. Within sight of the ramp the rain stopped entirely. We decided to call it a day and were delighted to find our bed completely dry and only a few droplets on the windshield. The storm had missed our van.
After packing up we drove back to Ely to pick up some supplies before heading out and away from Ely. I’d love to see this area in the Fall; I bet it’s spectacular.
We then drove north and west out of Ely on the Echo Trail. That road roughened and soon turned to dirt but the rain had become steady enough to keep the wipers on. The rain was a good thing out here—the road would have been very dusty otherwise. We were headed for Echo Lake but tried a few forest roads looking for a good freebie campsite. We did find one with a nice view into a meadow but that was still a little too early in the day for a stop and the rain meant we wouldn’t have a lot of ventilation so we kept moving. We finally reached Echo Lake around 17:00 in a downpour but soon after we found and backed into our very nice little $10 campsite the rain dropped off and within an hour the sky was beautiful and clear. What a beautiful spot.
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Wednesday, 25 July-
This morning was another hot one and we decided we’d do some town things today and then some paddling tomorrow. We moved to a shady parking lot and spent an hour or so trying to determine how to stop so many mosquitoes from getting past the screens, then headed to town to shop for some items to help—like tape to seal up some gaps we hadn’t realized were there until we looked in the daytime. We also went looking for another battery-operated fan. Our one fan was a life-saver last night but we could use another if we are going to have to keep windows closed in mosquito country—and we’re going to be in lots of that.
On the way in we stopped at two outfitters just to see their goods, then at the tourist center for some suggestions. There we learned about the North American Bear Center on the other side of town. This is a new center just opened this Spring but other than that little bit of info, the tourist center folks couldn’t be much help.
After lunch we drove to the Bear Center and at first we were skeptical. It looked pretty industrial—a stone parking lot, chain link fence, a simple glass-door entrance, no graphics or signs other, construction supplies along the fence-row.
Well thank goodness we went in. This turned out to be a highlight of our trip. I’d even rank it higher than the International Wolf Center we just visited yesterday. The Center is largely based on the work of bear researcher Lynn Rogers. We spent five hours there, most of that time watching footage showing various aspects of bear behavior. The displays are incredible. There are 36 high-definition monitors, each showing some specific detail about bear behavior. Right off the bat I knew we were in for a treat when we saw two high-def monitors with footage shot by the center’s bear researchers in the last two months in the local area. The footage is dated and a log summary describes what happened. The researchers are following several radio-collared bears which have become so habituated to the researcher’s presence that they ignore the researcher and his/her cameras. Have you read about bears bluff-charging or clacking their jaws when upset? There’s footage to show the behavior plus info on what the researchers have found over the years. Regarding bluff-charging, for example, the conclusion is it’s just a show— no researcher has ever been attacked after a bluff-charge. And likewise no researcher has been attacked after the jaw-clacking behavior. And do you want to see details of contents of bear scat? There’s a whole wall showing all the different types of seeds, pieces of fawn hoof, ant pupae casings, bone fragments, etc found in bear scat in this area... and the identifiable contents are accompanied by color pictures of the item before it met the bear.
Other exhibits cover advice on what to do if you encounter a black bear by accident (slowly back away while talking to it in a low voice) or, if by chance you are in the million-to-one bear predation scenario (Fight back. HARD. Yell, get mad. Go into a fighting frenzy. Let the bear know you WILL be inflicting some damage.) And the best tool for discouraging a bear who’s too near? Pepper spray. The lower concentration spray called ‘Halt’ works well (aim for the eyes) and the bear doesn’t get angry or strike out—he/she just leaves the area. For grizzlies, the center recommends ‘Counter-Assault’ which is a maximum-strength formulation. We bought a can of ‘Counter-Assault’ in the Glacier National Park visitor center last summer before taking a hike in grizz country.
As I was walking about wondering what to do next I saw a familiar-looking guy go out through the staff-area door and come back in a minute later. I watched as he sat down in the middle of the displays and slowly looked around. I walked up to him and asked if he was evaluating the displays for changes. He was. It was Lynn Rogers, the bear researcher whose work is the centerpiece of the Center, the reason it exists. What a nice guy. Lynn is very self-effacing and very easy to talk to. He asked where I’m from and I blurted out something about there being lots of interest in bears in Pennsylvania due to Gary Alt’s work. Lynn said, “Oh, yeah… I know Gary pretty well. We were on a panel together last year.” What incredible luck to have had a chance to chat with him. We talked about some of the displays and he asked if I thought the bear-copulation video on the back wall a little much. He said the gift-shop girls had tried to talk him out of it saying the moms would be up in arms about their kids blundering onto it but there hadn’t been any problems so far (the Center just opened at the end of April 2007). I told him I saw nothing at all wrong with it and that it seemed just one more part of his study of all aspects of bears’ lives and, after all, it wasn’t all THAT graphic. We were soon interrupted by other people who recognized Lynn and wanted to say hello so I thanked him and walked away with a big smile on my face.
We spent the rest of the day trying to get every bit of information we could and finally walked out at 1800 as they were closing the doors for the day. What a great place!
We then drove over to the local city park and found some shade so we could make supper and relax a little before heading out to our Lookout Road spot for the night.
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Tuesday, 24 July-
After a wonderfully quiet night at the borrow pit, we awoke to a rapidly-heating van from a hot morning sun. We’ve been enjoying moderate temperatures but for the next two days the highs are expected to climb well in the Nineties. We drove on down the Gunflint Trail to Grand Marais. As we descended the hill toward town, though, we realized we couldn’t see Lake Superior for the fog. And in another minute we needed to turn on our lights because of the thick fog right along the seashore. We did a bit of shopping at the local supermarket then went to Superior Coastal Sports which has an internet café and free wi-fi hotspot—something not all the easy to find in this area. We checked our email and uploaded a blog update then headed down the coast 50 miles for the turnoff to Ely. While the Gunflint Trail is the gateway to the eastern Boundary Waters area, Ely is the gateway to the western Boundary Waters and, in fact, is known world-wide for it.
In Ely we first thought we’d find the NFS (National Forest Service) office for info on possible free campsites here in the western portion of the Superior National Forest. The office turned out to be in the same building as the International Wolf Center. Our friendly NFS clerk gave us some roads to explore for dispersed camping and we were set. We decided to spend this hot part of the day at the Wolf Center and we signed up for the program that night—‘ Wolf Communication’. We spent the next several hours learning about wolves and it was fantastic. The best part of the Center was the ‘What is a Wolf?’ exhibit. A few days before I had seen an ad showing a mounted wolf and the words ‘What is a Wolf?’ below it and thought the center would probably be geared toward kids and not worth our time. But it was much, much better. The exhibit discussed the role of the wolf through history and how different cultures had varying views of the wolf. The art and excerpts from books about the wolf were alone worth the $13 price of admission for the two of us. I know I spent over an hour in just that one exhibit room. I particularly enjoyed reading folktales about the wolf from around the world. On such a hot day I thought it unlikely we’d actually see the live wolves because they’d be hanging out back in the shady woods of their large enclosure. But we were at the center a LONG time so later in the day we saw two white wolves and two grays were out so we cruised by the viewing windows five or six times.
We then drove east of town to find our camping spot for the night because we wouldn’t be getting out of the evening program until late. We found a suitable spot at the end of Lookout Road. The Lookout was a ridgetop with a view into the Boundary Waters wilderness.
We had supper in town at the local Pizza Hut before returning to the Wolf Center for the evening program. There we were met by Kelly, a summer intern from South Dakota State. Kelly gave us a PowerPoint presentation explaining different aspects of wolf communication, from their facial expressions (slant-of-eye, ear position, etc), to their use of the tail to indicate dominance, submission, or fear and their use of scent-marking to establish and defend their territories. It was fascinating, for example, to see a depiction of the locations of the scent-marks of four packs and how each pack knows it does not cross the line unless it’s willing to fight to the death over the infringement of another pack’s territory. After our lecture we loaded up in the 12-person van and Kelly drove us to three locations to try wolf-calling. At each location one person would howl three times in succession. If there were an answer, then the kids could try a pup-call. Kelly told the kids to pretend someone had just smashed your thumb with a hammer and howl as loud as you can; that would be fine. Unfortunately we never got to hear the kids try their pup-calls. We did not get any return calls from the individual calls of the adults. Kelly said the program has about a 40 per-cent success rate and explained that it is somewhat hit or miss because the wolves have such a large territory that it’s only through chance that you will be within range when you call. We finished the wolf-calling adventure about 2200 and drove out to the Lookout, half expecting someone else to already be there. We tried a quick wolf-howl but were soon under attack by mosquitoes and called it a night. The van was so hot from being closed up all day that it took quite a while to cool down enough for us to sleep and we then fell under a relentless attack by mosquitoes finding their way past the screens. When it finally cooled off enough that we could close the windows, we killed off the last batch of skeeters and then slept very heavily.
================== END of 29 July post ==================
(this post covers 24-29 July, 2007)
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Sunday, 29 July-
After breakfast we drove west to an Ojibwe historical museum, Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung. We toured the display building and started walking down the long path to the outdoor areas but soon turned back for mosquito repellent and our bicycles. We were very impressed by the roundhouse. It was built of logs and we could see it had a tipi-shaped roofline but it wasn’t until we entered that we had an impression of size. Around the outer perimeter was a floor or platform covered in green carpet, some eight feet wide. Inside that is a circular dirt floor- so that we can touch mother earth. Four large logs rise from the dirt, each at the major points of the compass and each with a colored light at its base—white for north, yellow for south, red for east, black for west. On the outside of each upright log is a small basket containing bits of tobacco leaf. Atop the four logs is a very large iron ring to support the angled logs forming the tipi-style roof. At the smokehole area a roof of skylights kept out the rain but gave us daylight. A carved wooden eagle with outspread wings held a series of oblong wooden trays, each containing an offering of tobacco. Tobacco had also been pushed into the eagle’s open beak. Around the eagle were four poles with their tops painted the same colors for the points of the compass.
After the roundhouse we rode our bikes back the upper trail to the burial mounds at the end. The burial mounds were first formed by digging a shallow and interring a body. More deceased were eventually placed on top and also covered with earth, contributing to the mound. The largest mound at Rainy River was 113 feet in diameter and 24 feet high and had a commanding view of the river.
We then had a late lunch, splitting a large bowl of cream-of-wild-rice soup with bannock on the side and then each had a dessert.
After Kay-Nah-Chi-Wah-Nung we drove north another two hours to Kenora, Ontario, a town of about 19,000. The drive up ran along Lake of the Woods and ran through hilly country with many dirt roads leading off to cabins and resorts on the lake. At Kenora we first looked up the Wal-mart, then did some shopping at the local Safeway before finding a town park for our supper. Kenora sits on Lake of the Woods (the second-largest inland lake in Ontario) but this part of the lake has many islands and is a beautiful complement to the city.
After supper we moved to a pulloff with a great view over the lake and blogged, read, and watched boat and floatplane traffic on the lake before returning to Wal-mart for the night.
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Saturday, 28 July-
Our night in Wooden Frog campground was an excellent one and we woke early, around six. After breakfast we continued north on 53 to International Falls. There we took a right to the Rainy Lake Visitor Center, the last of the three. This one had more for us in that it had more information about the voyageurs. We saw two excellent films, one a 1964 film from the National Film Board of Canada called “The Voyageurs” and the other a 2000 film about a Canadian couple (Ian and Sally Wilson) who journeyed the route of the voyageurs as an adventure. I’d love to have a copy of the first since it gave facts like this: the voyageurs paddled (in general) at the rate of a stroke a second for 50 minutes, then took a ten-minute break where they would have a swallow of spirits and light their pipes. They would arise at 03:00 or 04:00, break camp and paddle for about four hours, at which time they were deemed to have earned their breakfast, typically some soup made from dried peas and fatty pork the night before. (note: I see there are some disagreements about this paddle-before-breakfast concept. The book ‘The Voyageurs’ by Grace Lee Nute says the soup simmered all night and at daylight the cook added four broken-up biscuits and called the men to breakfast, whereupon they ladled the thick soup directly to their mouths with their wooden spoons—and THEN started their paddling.)
The second film was interesting in that it was done by a young Vancouver couple who commissioned and helped build a birchbark canoe for their trip from Grand Portage (on Lake Superior) to Cumberland House (on the Saskatchewan River) for Part One of their journey, and then they built a dogsled (actually a lightweight dogsled called a ‘cariole’ used by the Northmen, I believe) and traveled for several months in the north-they took on and accomplished.
After seeing the Voyageur National Park visitor centers and launch ramps I had to ask a ranger whether it was largely a motor-boater’s park. We had seen hundreds of motorboats but not nearly so many canoes as we had seen at Ely and on the Gunflint Trail. When I asked whether Voyageur’s is mostly a motor-boat destination, the ranger showed me that there’s a remote chain of lakes in the center of the park. To get to them, you must use a boat to get to a trailhead, then walk the trail to the first lake where you use a key provided by the park service to unlock your rented canoe. You may not bring your own boat (even if you could portage that far) and the reason is the spiny water flea. The main lakes are all infested with the invasive spiny water flea but the remote chain of lakes are free of them. To protect those lakes, you may only use the canoes provided. Later, I read the precautions boaters are supposed to take. These are posted at the launch ramps. I saw this information at Fort Frances. After using your boat you are asked to wash off the bottom using either 40-degree-centigrade water or using a high-pressure wash wand. Then the boat should be thoroughly dried and not put in another body of water for five days. In watching the bass tournament guys load their boats at this launch ramp, I saw no compliance with these recommendations though of course I don’t know that they didn’t go somewhere else to do them.
After the Visitor’s Center we drove back to International Falls to cross the border back into Fort Frances, Ontario. This time we had a line about forty-five minutes long. But when we finally got across we saw a MUCH longer line coming the other way—easily a three-mile-long line which would have had to take more than two hours (later we learned that this only happens on Saturdays and it's due to all the many camps and resorts north of here having a Saturday-to-Saturday rental period) . We drove to the local Wal-mart and checked to be sure it would be ok to park there overnight. Afterwards we went downtown to the Fort Frances Museum and learned more about the fur trade in this area. We then drove to the town park at Pither Point and found a fantastic, breezy beach. We parked along the beach and watched floatplanes (Cessnas and Beech twins) take off and land in Rainy Lake and just hung out for a couple of hours. We had passed a bass tournament along the river on the way in so after supper we drove there and walked around as the announcer somehow kept the rapt attention of the crowd as each team’s catch was weighed in. I couldn’t get into it but the crowd seemed excited, perhaps as the local boys tried to out-fish the pros. Afterwards we drove back to the beach and hung out until dark. While reading about the town we realized we were parked only a hundred yards or so from the location of Fort St. Pierre and were parked on the historical fur-trading Rendezvous grounds of Rainy Lake. It was fun trying to imagine what this park would have looked like during a rendezvous.
After dark we returned to the Wal-mart for the night. With closing coming at 2200, it seemed like it would be a quiet night. But we parked too close to the loading docks and after closing we started hearing communications to the warehouse workers over the PA system (that's a new one!) and then a truck started up and idled a long time before pulling out. Around midnight we moved to the other end of the parking lot and had a quiet night from then on.
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Friday, 27 July-
What a super night for sleeping last night. The front which came through yesterday brought cool air and we slept very heavily and awoke felling great. With a nice airy morning we decided we needed to take care of haircuts. I needed a good buzz and Labashi needed to trim her bangs. Labashi did a great job of giving me a close cut just using scissors and a comb but demurred when I offered to trim her bangs. Picky, picky, picky! After a quickie general housecleaning of the van we left for Voyageurs.
After only a few miles of dirt road we came to a hard road (Route 23). From the point on the landscape changed from deep forest to small open fields with nice views to small lakes and a deep-forest backdrop, a very pretty combination. No wonder Minnesota bills itself as the ‘Land of 10,000 Lakes’. We continued through this country to the little crossroads of Orr where we found a classy little visitor’s center and the last grocery store for 50 miles. We had lunch in the parking lot of the visitor’s center and then talked at some length with the clerk about what we could expect at Voyageurs and then we stocked up at the grocery for the next few days. We had noticed gas had dropped from $3.02 to $2.92 per gallon our last day at Ely and here it was $2.95.
We hit the first visitor center for Voyageurs National Park at Ash River. The visitor center building was a 1930’s resort cabin and smelled so great from the years of using the stone fireplace. We then visited the resort area of Ash River and it reminded me of Long Level along the Susquehanna (below Wrightsville). We then moved on to Kabetogama Visitor’s Center. I had called it Ka-beato-GAM-a but the ranger at Ash River corrected me: it’s Ka-be-TOE-ga-ma. I’m apparently not descended from the Ojibwe after all.
We then found a campsite at Wooden Frog State Campground nearby. The campsites are a very reasonable $12 per site in this rustic campground—dirt roads, pit toilets, drinking water piped to strategic points throughout the campground but no showers available. We were lucky today and snagged one of the best sites in the campground. Someone had apparently just left one of only three sites which sit on the water and have a fantastic breeze coming into them. What luck!
On the way in we had passed a couple who had just come in from paddling and sailing their tandem kayak across the lake. We chatted briefly then but after Labashi and I settled in to our site I sought them out to ask about their kayak and see their traveling rig. The kayak is an Easy Rider Eskimo 20. They said they used to have a 16-foot Easy Rider but had had to coordinate paddling because they were close together and wanted something bigger. They love the Eskimo for its great stability and easy paddling. Tandem kayaks tend to be faster than solos because of their greater waterline length and their two paddlers but if it’s too wide, the width slows it down considerably. The trick, then, is to get the narrowest kayak with the stability characteristics you want. In this case, this couple wanted an extra-stable kayak because they sometimes paddle sizeable waves in their home paddling grounds in Washington State and they wanted to rig a sail. Their sail in this case is home-made. A four-foot mast of ¾” steel fits in a step at the front end of the bow cockpit and the sail is a four-by-four-foot square of cloth with an eyelet to fit over the top of the mast. The bow-person ties the bottom corners of the sail to her paddle to keep it spread and also to allow running at quite an angle off of dead-downwind.
The traveling rig is a Dodge ¾-ton diesel pickup with the largest pop-top camper I’ve ever seen, a North Star built in Iowa. The couple lived in the camper full-time for two years and considers it perfect for their needs. I’d love to have that open pop-top in hot weather but the downside is it allows a lot more noise inside than a hard-shell so would not be much fun in a noisy Wal-mart parking lot. To load their kayak, they put the roof down and he climbs up onto the roof via the ladder built onto the rear wall. He uses a strap tied to the front of the kayak to lift the bow while wifey helps as best she can to keep the stern (and vulnerable rudder assembly) from dragging until the kayak reaches the balance point on the back edge of the roof and he can just push down and then slide the kayak forward on the rollers in the roof rack. The ladder also serves a dual purpose—it’s also a bike rack. Interesting setup.
After we parked we wondered how we might go about getting showers. The information board said showers were available at two of the nearby resorts but we knew that a similar place on the Gunflint Trail charged $4.00 per person for a shower and that’s too much. Our campsite was situated a little further back in than adjacent sites and there was a screen of foliage between us and those sites. It occurred to me that we could swing open the rear doors of the van and use that to screen us from the sides while the van itself would shield us from the front. That would leave the back open to the lake but there was nobody about to see us—nothing there but a beautiful view and a nice breeze. Good idea! We each had a wonderful backpacker’s shower.
Later in the evening we took a walk and were surprised there were very few mosquitoes about. The sun had set long ago but the clouds were still lit up and reflected in the still waters of the lake.
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Thursday, 26 July-
Success! Last night we camped once again at the end of Lookout Road outside Ely. This high spot not only gives us a view into the Boundary Waters wilderness but also is near several known wolf territories. Our three howling stops with the International Wolf Center the other night were not far away and we had seen a map at the Center showing multiple wolf ranges surrounding nearby Pagami Lake. But it’s very buggy up here and they call in the reinforcements after dark. We had taped up the edges of the front-door screens using painter’s blue tape and I believe that’s the single biggest thing we did to stop the onslaught. In any case, it worked very nicely. Lots of bugs outside, very few inside. We slept wonderfully. Oh, yeah—and our attempts to call a wolf that evening didn’t earn any replies.
We awoke early this morning—around 0630—and drove into Ely to talk with the NFS rangers about a good day-paddle for us. By 0930 we were at imaginatively-named Lake One, a popular entry point to the Boundary Waters about 20 miles east of Ely and at the end of Fernberg Road. We thought we’d paddle across Lake One to the portage into Lake Two and decide there whether to continue. The ranger had told us the portage is a short one and when we asked ‘how short is short?’, she said ’30 rods’. Of course we then needed to know how long a rod is. There are 320 of them in a mile. Which means the portage is 495 feet or 165 yards and a rod is about 16-1/2 feet—about the length of a canoe. The maps of the area show all the portage lengths in rods, perhaps a holdover from surveys, I’m not sure.
As we started our paddle we immediately fell in love with Lake One. Take the finest Maine lake you’ve ever seen, the one with craggy pines, white birches and bold granite outcroppings and islands--- and you have some idea of Lake One’s beauty. It’s a large lake overall but has so many islands and bays that we paddled for over an hour and hadn’t done a quarter of it. We had only planned to do a two to three hour paddle today and had started off on a clear, sunny morning with 65 per cent chance of thunderstorms forecast for evening. But only an hour in we heard a distant roll of thunder and saw dark clouds rapidly start to fill the sky. It was then I remembered looking at the clear blue sky just over an hour ago and deciding to leave the bubble-vent up on Mocha Joe. The vent is a combination vent and fan (a Fantastic Fan for any of you RVers out there) and is right above our bed so any appreciable rain will mean we either spend the day trying to get the bed dried out enough to sleep or we go to a motel for the night. We decided to paddle on and monitor the direction the storm was moving, hoping it would pass by west of our parking spot. But within 20 minutes the whole sky was dark and the wind picked up. We turned around and headed for the launch ramp into a rapidly freshening wind with surprisingly-cold gusts. We’ve paddled in similar conditions before so were confident we could handle the wind conditions (and we had many islands and deep inlets available to hide behind/in if needed) but I did keep a close eye and ear out for lightning flashes and the follow-on thunder to determine if it was time hustle ashore. As it turned out, the closest strikes were two miles away. About half-way back the rain started but it was very light and in fact pleasant to paddle through as the wind gusts died off. Within sight of the ramp the rain stopped entirely. We decided to call it a day and were delighted to find our bed completely dry and only a few droplets on the windshield. The storm had missed our van.
After packing up we drove back to Ely to pick up some supplies before heading out and away from Ely. I’d love to see this area in the Fall; I bet it’s spectacular.
We then drove north and west out of Ely on the Echo Trail. That road roughened and soon turned to dirt but the rain had become steady enough to keep the wipers on. The rain was a good thing out here—the road would have been very dusty otherwise. We were headed for Echo Lake but tried a few forest roads looking for a good freebie campsite. We did find one with a nice view into a meadow but that was still a little too early in the day for a stop and the rain meant we wouldn’t have a lot of ventilation so we kept moving. We finally reached Echo Lake around 17:00 in a downpour but soon after we found and backed into our very nice little $10 campsite the rain dropped off and within an hour the sky was beautiful and clear. What a beautiful spot.
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Wednesday, 25 July-
This morning was another hot one and we decided we’d do some town things today and then some paddling tomorrow. We moved to a shady parking lot and spent an hour or so trying to determine how to stop so many mosquitoes from getting past the screens, then headed to town to shop for some items to help—like tape to seal up some gaps we hadn’t realized were there until we looked in the daytime. We also went looking for another battery-operated fan. Our one fan was a life-saver last night but we could use another if we are going to have to keep windows closed in mosquito country—and we’re going to be in lots of that.
On the way in we stopped at two outfitters just to see their goods, then at the tourist center for some suggestions. There we learned about the North American Bear Center on the other side of town. This is a new center just opened this Spring but other than that little bit of info, the tourist center folks couldn’t be much help.
After lunch we drove to the Bear Center and at first we were skeptical. It looked pretty industrial—a stone parking lot, chain link fence, a simple glass-door entrance, no graphics or signs other, construction supplies along the fence-row.
Well thank goodness we went in. This turned out to be a highlight of our trip. I’d even rank it higher than the International Wolf Center we just visited yesterday. The Center is largely based on the work of bear researcher Lynn Rogers. We spent five hours there, most of that time watching footage showing various aspects of bear behavior. The displays are incredible. There are 36 high-definition monitors, each showing some specific detail about bear behavior. Right off the bat I knew we were in for a treat when we saw two high-def monitors with footage shot by the center’s bear researchers in the last two months in the local area. The footage is dated and a log summary describes what happened. The researchers are following several radio-collared bears which have become so habituated to the researcher’s presence that they ignore the researcher and his/her cameras. Have you read about bears bluff-charging or clacking their jaws when upset? There’s footage to show the behavior plus info on what the researchers have found over the years. Regarding bluff-charging, for example, the conclusion is it’s just a show— no researcher has ever been attacked after a bluff-charge. And likewise no researcher has been attacked after the jaw-clacking behavior. And do you want to see details of contents of bear scat? There’s a whole wall showing all the different types of seeds, pieces of fawn hoof, ant pupae casings, bone fragments, etc found in bear scat in this area... and the identifiable contents are accompanied by color pictures of the item before it met the bear.
Other exhibits cover advice on what to do if you encounter a black bear by accident (slowly back away while talking to it in a low voice) or, if by chance you are in the million-to-one bear predation scenario (Fight back. HARD. Yell, get mad. Go into a fighting frenzy. Let the bear know you WILL be inflicting some damage.) And the best tool for discouraging a bear who’s too near? Pepper spray. The lower concentration spray called ‘Halt’ works well (aim for the eyes) and the bear doesn’t get angry or strike out—he/she just leaves the area. For grizzlies, the center recommends ‘Counter-Assault’ which is a maximum-strength formulation. We bought a can of ‘Counter-Assault’ in the Glacier National Park visitor center last summer before taking a hike in grizz country.
As I was walking about wondering what to do next I saw a familiar-looking guy go out through the staff-area door and come back in a minute later. I watched as he sat down in the middle of the displays and slowly looked around. I walked up to him and asked if he was evaluating the displays for changes. He was. It was Lynn Rogers, the bear researcher whose work is the centerpiece of the Center, the reason it exists. What a nice guy. Lynn is very self-effacing and very easy to talk to. He asked where I’m from and I blurted out something about there being lots of interest in bears in Pennsylvania due to Gary Alt’s work. Lynn said, “Oh, yeah… I know Gary pretty well. We were on a panel together last year.” What incredible luck to have had a chance to chat with him. We talked about some of the displays and he asked if I thought the bear-copulation video on the back wall a little much. He said the gift-shop girls had tried to talk him out of it saying the moms would be up in arms about their kids blundering onto it but there hadn’t been any problems so far (the Center just opened at the end of April 2007). I told him I saw nothing at all wrong with it and that it seemed just one more part of his study of all aspects of bears’ lives and, after all, it wasn’t all THAT graphic. We were soon interrupted by other people who recognized Lynn and wanted to say hello so I thanked him and walked away with a big smile on my face.
We spent the rest of the day trying to get every bit of information we could and finally walked out at 1800 as they were closing the doors for the day. What a great place!
We then drove over to the local city park and found some shade so we could make supper and relax a little before heading out to our Lookout Road spot for the night.
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Tuesday, 24 July-
After a wonderfully quiet night at the borrow pit, we awoke to a rapidly-heating van from a hot morning sun. We’ve been enjoying moderate temperatures but for the next two days the highs are expected to climb well in the Nineties. We drove on down the Gunflint Trail to Grand Marais. As we descended the hill toward town, though, we realized we couldn’t see Lake Superior for the fog. And in another minute we needed to turn on our lights because of the thick fog right along the seashore. We did a bit of shopping at the local supermarket then went to Superior Coastal Sports which has an internet café and free wi-fi hotspot—something not all the easy to find in this area. We checked our email and uploaded a blog update then headed down the coast 50 miles for the turnoff to Ely. While the Gunflint Trail is the gateway to the eastern Boundary Waters area, Ely is the gateway to the western Boundary Waters and, in fact, is known world-wide for it.
In Ely we first thought we’d find the NFS (National Forest Service) office for info on possible free campsites here in the western portion of the Superior National Forest. The office turned out to be in the same building as the International Wolf Center. Our friendly NFS clerk gave us some roads to explore for dispersed camping and we were set. We decided to spend this hot part of the day at the Wolf Center and we signed up for the program that night—‘ Wolf Communication’. We spent the next several hours learning about wolves and it was fantastic. The best part of the Center was the ‘What is a Wolf?’ exhibit. A few days before I had seen an ad showing a mounted wolf and the words ‘What is a Wolf?’ below it and thought the center would probably be geared toward kids and not worth our time. But it was much, much better. The exhibit discussed the role of the wolf through history and how different cultures had varying views of the wolf. The art and excerpts from books about the wolf were alone worth the $13 price of admission for the two of us. I know I spent over an hour in just that one exhibit room. I particularly enjoyed reading folktales about the wolf from around the world. On such a hot day I thought it unlikely we’d actually see the live wolves because they’d be hanging out back in the shady woods of their large enclosure. But we were at the center a LONG time so later in the day we saw two white wolves and two grays were out so we cruised by the viewing windows five or six times.
We then drove east of town to find our camping spot for the night because we wouldn’t be getting out of the evening program until late. We found a suitable spot at the end of Lookout Road. The Lookout was a ridgetop with a view into the Boundary Waters wilderness.
We had supper in town at the local Pizza Hut before returning to the Wolf Center for the evening program. There we were met by Kelly, a summer intern from South Dakota State. Kelly gave us a PowerPoint presentation explaining different aspects of wolf communication, from their facial expressions (slant-of-eye, ear position, etc), to their use of the tail to indicate dominance, submission, or fear and their use of scent-marking to establish and defend their territories. It was fascinating, for example, to see a depiction of the locations of the scent-marks of four packs and how each pack knows it does not cross the line unless it’s willing to fight to the death over the infringement of another pack’s territory. After our lecture we loaded up in the 12-person van and Kelly drove us to three locations to try wolf-calling. At each location one person would howl three times in succession. If there were an answer, then the kids could try a pup-call. Kelly told the kids to pretend someone had just smashed your thumb with a hammer and howl as loud as you can; that would be fine. Unfortunately we never got to hear the kids try their pup-calls. We did not get any return calls from the individual calls of the adults. Kelly said the program has about a 40 per-cent success rate and explained that it is somewhat hit or miss because the wolves have such a large territory that it’s only through chance that you will be within range when you call. We finished the wolf-calling adventure about 2200 and drove out to the Lookout, half expecting someone else to already be there. We tried a quick wolf-howl but were soon under attack by mosquitoes and called it a night. The van was so hot from being closed up all day that it took quite a while to cool down enough for us to sleep and we then fell under a relentless attack by mosquitoes finding their way past the screens. When it finally cooled off enough that we could close the windows, we killed off the last batch of skeeters and then slept very heavily.
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posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
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