Boundary Waters National Park

My overly generous sister & husband gave Maaike and I a 5 day trip to Boundary Waters National Park. Basically it’s a massive park filled to the brim with lakes and streams.

They only let a certain amount of people in the area at any one time, so you have to book ahead and get your permit. There are designated campsites that you have to stay at, and all have a fire grate and toilet. The first day we didn’t see anyone else, on subsequent days we saw a couple of canoes in the distance, so it really is quite remote, especially for a national park.

Our paddling skills increased a bit, I’m still not sure I’ve got the J-Stroke properly, but we mostly went in straight lines and didn’t have any catastrophes. Did come across beaver dams, which again renewed my absolute hatred of the creatures ;)

We did have to suspend the pack from the potential of bears being around. In the event we didn’t see any, and I’m not sure the bag was high enough / far enough out from the trunk anyway. Still, it was Maaike’s bag ;)

Mozzies were in plentiful supply, but if you don’t scratch them it didn’t seem to bother that much. Also “biting flies” were around. These guys look like flies, but damn they hurt.

We saw some wildlife, not heaps, but chipmunks and loons were about.

Carrying the boat was easy enough for one person. It weighs in at 20lbs ish, so about 9kg. There are pads for the shoulders at the centrepoint, so you can just carry it easily enough for the portages. Well, at least for the canoes we hired it was like that :). All the distances are given in rods, conveniently about the length of a canoe (16 1/2 feet). The longest portage we did was 150ish rods & yes, I took a break in the middle. Still, at least it wasn’t a metal boat like these other two had to carry…

I think if we were going to do it again we’d change a few things around.

1. We now know what distance we can paddle in a day. At least 8 miles or so. We’d have gone for longer days at the start of the trip to get “out there” a bit more
2. We would learn which fish are good to catch, and how to fillet, as most people go fishing while they’re here

There’s probably more, but that’d be the main things. All in all a great trip. It’s a nice spot up there, certainly one of the more remote areas you can get to in the States, at least easily anyway.

p.s we used the http://elyoutfittingcompany.com/ and were very happy with their service. They had great information and talked us through our route with plenty of tips for points we needed to watch out for, nice campsites etc.