When I think back to my formative experiences in nature, many of them involve public land, but no public land has meant more to me than the Boundary Waters of the US and Quetico Provincial Park of Canada. The BWCAW proper encompasses a million acres of wilderness reserved for non-motorized travel and recreation. Combined with the remaining rest of the 2.8 million acres of the Superior national forest, the 218,000 acres of Voyager National Park, and the 1.2 million acres of the Quetico, the “Boundary Waters” collectively provide over 5 million continuous acres of northern forests, lakes and waterways. These public wilderness areas showed me the beauty, challenge, and respect for the natural world.
I’ve already shared some of my Boundary Waters stories here: of my first trip, of my own personal growth, and memories with friends. I have many more stories which I’m sure I will share in the future. Hopefully, I’m not far from creating new memories in the Boundary Waters with my own kids. While the themes of beauty, challenge, and respect have come up before, each of those has particular meaning for me in the Boundary Waters.
Beauty
You have to be looking and observing to see the beauty of nature. Canoe camping trips in the Boundary Waters was where I first spent my entire days immersed in nature and for days on end. All too often nature is experienced in short periods measured in minutes or hours. This is exemplified by nature tourism – drive to the waterfall, hop out of the car, walk from the parking lot, take a picture and return to the car. In such a compacted experience, the “highlight” overshadows the beauty everywhere else. But what I learned in the Boundary Waters was that in the immersive experience, the beauty everywhere is allowed to come through.
The macro impression of the beauty of the Boundary Waters is that natural intersection where basalt and granite meet water and wood. Each of these are simultaneously eternal, but also changing and fighting over the location of that intersection. A boundary that is held in balance with (perhaps by?) this underlying tension. A bluff dominates one view, while a waterfall the next, and sentinel pines still another.
But when we slow down and live – on the scale of days rather than hours – our minds gradually open up the space to observe and appreciate the wealth of beauty that is offered to us in the Boundary Waters. The “white horses” of mist rising off of the lake in the morning or a fish rising in the evening. The distant sound of rushing water, only perceptible on a still night when the sounds of daytime and the wind don’t overpower it.
Caribou moss is easily overlooked, grey and diminutive, and if you aren’t paying attention it blends into the background. But on closer inspection, this is an intricate and beautiful community of organisms that form bending and twisting branches. Those branches can dry and become brittle, or be lush and swell, the grey taking on a green overtone. The caribou moss is frequently covers otherwise bare and exposed rock, but can also grow on the surrounding trees. In doing so, it lives in that tension zone between the rock, forest, and water as a common thread to the dominant forces of the landscape.
Challenge
The Boundary Waters has taught me about the challenges that nature presents. The disconnect between modern life and a natural experience warps our perception. However, when living with nature you must accept and adapt to the ebbs and flows of the weather, wind, current, or quarry. Rain or cold that would ruin modern plans is accepted, mitigation taken, and the day’s activities continued. When I’m in town, I run from my car into the store or my house when it is raining. The consequence of getting wet seemingly made more perilous by the perception that it can be avoided. Traveling in nature, the rain makes it a foregone conclusion that you will get wet and anything kept dry becomes a victory.
A willing embrace of a harder existence leads to the greater appreciation of those luxuries when they arrive. Trail food has never tasted as good as it does on the trail. While I don’t think that the “ambiance” has ever improved a meal that I’ve had in a restaurant. There are cups of coffee or meals that have made strong memories, i’m sure not for the ultimate quality of the fare, but for where I was when these were enjoyed.
The excitement of the fight and landing of a walleye is that much more when it represents a meal that day. Running rapids or securing a camp in the face of a storm brings with it a heightened awareness of being, of perception, of aliveness, that comes with the challenge presented by nature. This is true not only as an individual, but in the camaraderie formed in coming together as a team to meet the obstacle of the day. Afterwards, the glow and warmth of a fire never felt more comforting.
Respect
We all share the Boundary Waters as federally-protected public lands. But my travels in the Boundary Waters first showed me that we share the land, and these public lands, across time as well. Generations of people passed through these areas for thousands of years before now. In that sense, any of these lands “unexplored” to me, is well-trod given a long enough view.
It was the remnant tangible record of our Boundary Waters ancestors both recent and ancient, that taught me this sense of place in which the eternal and changing rock and water and forests provide a common experience between us and those earlier generations. For me, it started with the maps. The Boundary Waters were unknown to me as we planned our first trips, but as I studied the maps to plan our trips, the names of lakes and portages, spoke the experiences and lives of those who gave these names – the natural: Moose, Basswood, or Seagull – French: Lac La Croix – Native American: Ogishkimuncie. Knife Lake for the characteristically hard and sharp rocks. Still others spoke of experiences like “Have a Smoke Portage,” but what was the occurrence that resulted in naming “Disappointment Lake”? From these names, which obviously preceded me, I started to recognize and think of those who passed this way before me.
Apart from the names on the map, walking the portages furthered this sense. Here were natural use paths created by prior human feet through a wilderness, that I could follow literally in their footsteps. Those ancestors experienced the same heat, weight, stones, mud, and bugs of my own portaging experiences. The connection grew deeper.
Cliffs in the Boundary Waters are dotted with pictographs, crafted from bear grease and ochre, which are 400-500 years old. These pictographs representing people and animals, as well as other notations left for interpretation, clearly communicate a common experience from then to now. Viewing these in person, one cannot but begin to wonder more about the life of their messenger. Did they know or intend for their message to continue for half a millennia? Did they even consider time in this manner? Why did they choose this location and what specific experience did they have to prompt this documentation?
Questions like these led me to learn more of the history of the area, how the Ojibwe drove the Lakota from the region, the establishment of the fur trade, and later the development of logging. I visited places from these histories, like climbing to the top of Warrior Hill with my dad, camping a the campsite at the bottom of Silver Falls, where hundreds of years earlier Native Americans and voyageurs built and repaired canoes, or finding remnants of logging dams and camps in seemingly the most remote and out of the way places.
All of these experiences placed me in the same location with similar views and circumstances with all of these humans who came before me. The Boundary Waters taught me that we are each just one more story in the history of a location, and with it comes a responsibility to be respectful of this place by treating it with care for the next traveler to pass this way.
Redemption
The Boundary Waters also teach lessons in redemption. The Boundary Waters represent a large enough area that natural processes are able to shape the landscape. From time to time forest fires or blowdowns drastically change the the appearance of the land. A weather phenomenon called a derecho produces intense straight-line winds that can race across the Upper Midwest from North Dakota to New York. These storms produce a characteristic blowdown of mature trees rooted in the thin soils of the Boundary Waters, with all of the trees toppled like matchsticks in the prevailing direction of the wind. A notable such blowdown occurred in 1999, blowing down an estimated 25 million trees covering a half of a million acres of the Boundary Waters. But from these events, a new succession of trees begin. The Boundary Waters is a patchwork of forest succession so you not only travel through the physical location, but travel within the broader succession cycle.
Over a century ago, the logging cutover was ravaging across the North of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. By the early 1900’s the devastation of unbridled logging was becoming apparent, spurring to action efforts to preserve yet untouched tracts. Still other surrounding tracts were acquired by the public after logging had stripped the land of its timber resources, or after failed attempts to farm the rocky and acidic soils of the north. But it was from this destruction that this wilderness area was preserved and exists for our enjoyment.
Today the Boundary Waters are under threat. Sulfide mining is proposed within the Superior National Forest in the watershed of the Boundary Waters. These proposed mines are located upstream of the Boundary Waters and allowed to proceed will assuredly lead to contamination of the water flowing into the Boundary Waters. The toll of the cut-over has faded from the public consciousness, the success of the Boundary Waters has allowed us to think that this resource will always be the way it has been. Action must be taken now to preserve this wilderness area. Pending legislation would provide the resources and additional protections to help ensure the preservation of the last hundred years is not undone, but it requires action to make our support known. The Boundary Waters are eternal but changing. With enhanced legal protections and the individual respectful efforts of all visitors, this change can be towards the positive and natural so future generations can experience and learn from the Boundary Waters as I have.