Northland_A 4,000-Mile Journey Along America's Forgotten Border

by Porter Fox

  Scandinavian, German, Irish, and Polish families, descended from the first European settlers, still populate Minnesota’s northland. Most came to mine the Iron Range or farm the plains. They are soft on their vowels and temper sentences with a slight inflection at the end. They sleep in small clusters of homes huddled on the edge of the Great Plains, throw potlucks, and cook fifty varie­ties of tater tots. Families still use wooden flails to harvest wild rice; pick serviceberries, chokecherries, and hazelnuts; and make traditional dishes like gravlax, lefse, lutefisk, lingonberries, and sauerkraut. The local name for the Minnesota State Fair is “The Great Minnesota Get-Together.” You can see seed art there, butter sculptures, deep-fried candy bars, and two dozen varieties of food served on a stick. In the winter, Minnesotans embrace the cold by skiing, ice fishing, curling, and turning out professional hockey players. They say there are two seasons here: winter and road construction.

  Sunlight gilded the highway on the way north. Two hot rods with chrome tailpipes and hood scoops roared past. The Blackberry Barbecue Joint was packed. Nord Lund Auto Repair a few miles down the road was closed. A highway sign said Duluth was a hundred miles east. Fargo, North Dakota, was three hundred west. Ely was twenty-seven miles straight ahead.

  Ely (“ee-lee”) is the unofficial capital of the Boundary Waters. A line of two-story Craftsman homes marked the edge of town. Sea kayaks, canoes, skiffs, inner tubes, water skis, dories, and dinghies sat in driveways and parking lots. A black-and-white photo at a café on north Central Avenue reminded patrons of the town’s past. In the picture, two 1960s station wagons wait at a traffic light on East Sheridan Street. One has two sixteen-foot canoes lashed to the roof. The other is carrying a single canoe and two kids. Drivers and passengers wait patiently. They are here for the trip of a lifetime. That’s how outfitters describe a journey into the Boundary Waters.

  A local outfitter set me up with a canoe guide who had lived in Ely for thirty years and spent much of that time exploring the Boundary Waters. Paul Schurke is best known for an even wilder expedition. On May 1, 1986, Paul, Will Steger, Ann Bancroft, and their team completed the first-ever trek to the North Pole without resupply. They did it with dogsleds and trained around Ely. The feat was documented in a National Geographic cover story, a television special, and Paul and Will’s best-selling book North to the Pole. Paul’s wife, Sue, outfitted the one-thousand-mile, two-month journey—which saw temperatures dip to minus seventy-five degrees Fahrenheit—with hand-stitched garments. Her business became the Wintergreen line of outdoor clothing, which she still manufactures in Ely today.

  Paul’s bio made him sound like a modern-day La Salle. In 1989, he led the joint Soviet-American Bering Bridge Expedition, a dogsled and ski trip that crossed 1,200 miles of Alaska and Siberia in an attempt to melt the “Ice Curtain” between the two nations. In 2014, he retraced Teddy Roosevelt’s expedition down Brazil’s deadly River of Doubt—a four-hundred-mile stretch of rapids, waterfalls, poisonous snakes, jaguars, and crocodiles. (Only three parties had paddled the entire river since Roosevelt.) Paul is sixty-two years old, returns to the Arctic every year to lead trips, and has crossed Greenland, Arctic Canada, Siberia, Svalbard, and Antarctica’s South Georgia Island on dogsleds and skis—the latter to reenact Ernest Shackleton’s harrowing 1915 escape from his icebound ship. At six foot two, with broad shoulders, a thick chest, and long, muscular legs, he is ruthless on the trail. His endurance is legendary, and his tolerance for pain and hardship borders on freakish. His friends call him the Iceman.

  Sue is often a coleader on trips. She is two years older and about a paddle blade shorter than Paul, with blue eyes and platinum-blond hair cut in a bob. She is sweet, but when something needs to be attended to, she narrows her eyes and whoever is standing in front of her does exactly as she says. Family trips when their son and two daughters were growing up were usually spent with reindeer herders in Greenland, among remote tribes in Africa, or in the hinterlands of Siberia. Every summer, the family also took trips into the Boundary Waters from their house on White Iron Lake.

  I met Paul and Sue at their home my first night in Ely. The Schurkes run an outfitting service from their Wintergreen Lodge and had planned a trip for us along the Boundary Waters “Border Route.” I thought the trip would be a cakewalk after my first few forays into the northland. Most of the canoeing was on flat water, and there were established campsites throughout the area. When Paul laid out the plan that night, I realized that the Iceman had no intention of taking a lazy weekend paddle.

  The Boundary Waters skirts 150 miles of the US-Canada border. (Quetico Provincial Park on the Canadian side of the line extends the wilderness another million acres.) The classic Border Route runs 280 miles from Rainy Lake to Grand Portage on Lake Superior. The trip offers one of the most remote and unique perspectives on the northern border and usually takes fifteen days. We would be doing only part of it over three days, but Paul still planned to paddle a significant chunk. Also, he pointed out, not all the lakes connect. Meaning, we would load our gear into backpacks, carry the canoes on our shoulders, and walk overland on fifteen portages. Some of the portages were a few hundred yards. One was a mile long. All required several trips back and forth to haul gear.

  Paul and Sue were barbecuing at a lakeside fire pit when I arrived. Paul didn’t stop flipping chicken on the grill as he outlined the route, explained how he and Sue had ended up on White Iron Lake, warned me about what local politics I should be aware of, related a short history of Ely’s economy, and pointed out the best places to eat in town. Sue sat beside him in a camping chair, sipping a glass of wine. Paul had been a journalism major and admired the art of storytelling. He spoke like a man from the 1930s, using terms like “hot-dish and hash joint” (diner), “suds” (beer), “laid a rap on” (made a sales pitch to), and “the green screen” (computer).

  “My ancestors in the 1800s were from Germany and Norway, and like many Minnesotans who immigrated over here to become wheat farmers, iron rangers, and loggers, I just fit the mold of your typical Minnesota immigrant stock,” he said. “Dad was a carpenter. Mom was a schoolteacher. But they had the foresight to know that us kids needed to stretch our wings in places other than downtown Minneapolis. So they bought a piece of forested land in northern Wisconsin when we were kids—which was where we then spent our summers, enjoying Huck Finn adventures rafting down these wild rivers and kinda setting the stage for a life of adventure.”

  A couple of years after earning a journalism degree, Paul put down stakes in Ely. He and a friend then started an outfitting business for handicapped outdoorsmen. They learned about the Boundary Waters as they went and had some wild adventures, including getting stranded on an island in Lac La Croix with six quadriplegic guests. They hired Sue—a Swedish Californian who, at the time, had camped only once in her life. She managed a handicapped rehabilitation center in Minneapolis and, with Paul, found an Ely musher named Will Steger who was interested in running dogsledding trips for handicapped people.

  “We came back in the winter of ’79 with a handpicked circle of friends with different disabilities to give this a go,” Paul said. “It was another peak life experience. We got the full monty. We got the howling wolves. We got to live in igloos. We got dogsledding on crystal-clear nights at forty below, and it was cool. It was like an epiphany. I saw the light, and the light was good. It’s been dogs and our connection with Will ever since.”

  Eighty huskies howled from a chicken-wire pen the next morning as I packed for the trip. Paul and Sue had been up since 4:30 a.m. Paul’s instructions for packing the night before: “Wear pants and a shirt, and pack an insulating layer and a windbreaker. Dry shoes are nice for the camp.”

  Paul drove like he was running from the law on the long, straight dirt road connecting Ely with Crane Lake. I white-knuckled the armrest in the back seat. Sue sat shotgun and asked questions about their businesses and who was watching out for what while they were gone. Paul appeared lost in thought, most like
ly plotting another adventure. Two days into our trip he asked if I would join him and Sue on the first ski traverse of the Antarctic ice shelf.

  We pulled into a dirt lot next to the Crane Lake Bar & Grill around eight that morning. A covered ramp led to a dock, a gas pump, and a million acres of raw wilderness. A thick pine forest surrounded Crane Lake. Thin, green marsh fern grew along the rocky shore alongside moonwort, rattlesnake fern, and horsetail. Morning sun reflected off the water, and the only sound was the wind through the trees.

  Paul stepped out of the car and pulled a canoe off the roof. In ten minutes he moved most of our gear to the dock, repacked food and supplies in three portage packs, and got the scoop on an approaching cold front from a local guide. He stopped me on the ramp as I ferried a pile of life jackets. “Use the bathroom if you need it,” he said. “You’re not going to see one for a while.”

  THE BOUNDARY WATERS MARKS the northern edge of the Vermilion Batholith, so most of the lakes are lined with granite. Fault lines run through the Man Chain and Kahshahpiwi Lake, cleaving perfectly straight, granite and greenstone shorelines. Vera Lake is hemmed with jasper. Pink granite batholith circles Ensign Lake, and prehistoric “volcano bombs”—chunks of rock blown off the side of a volcano—lie at the bottom of Kekekabic Lake.

  The Laurentian and Saint Lawrence River Divides converge nearby. The intersection is one of four divide junctions in America. Water north of the Laurentian Divide flows into the Arctic Ocean; water to the south runs to the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean. The Saint Lawrence River Divide cuts north-south through Minnesota, sending water east into the Great Lakes or west into the Mississippi watershed. “This was the first crossroads of interior America,” Paul said as we loaded our gear into an aluminum boat. He had arranged for a water taxi to zip us through the first forty miles of the trip, on perimeter lakes where motors are still allowed. The boat had canoe racks and a semi-enclosed cabin for rough water. After what Paul called a “cultural and historical tour of the Border Route,” we would be dropped in Lac La Croix to paddle the rest on our own.

  The taxi driver, a tall, goateed man named Ted, pushed off from the dock and headed due north on Crane Lake. A strip of white-gold water painted a line from the bow to the sun. Red pine swooped over the shoreline. Long runs of granite split the forest. Ten-story granite bluffs rose from the depths, and flat swimming rocks the size of tennis courts sat near the edge of the lake.

  Paul directed Ted toward a cliff between Crane and Sand Point Lakes. The sheer face was etched with auburn pictographs hundreds of years old. There were handprints and an image of a moose. Ojibwe artists mixed hematite with sturgeon oil to make the paint. It chemically bonds to rock and lasts thousands of years.

  The land was barren when Paleo-Indians first walked into Minnesota’s northland fourteen thousand years ago. Glaciers were still melting. There was little vegetation, and there were only a few animals to hunt. Lakes were just beginning to see life. Most of the northland was flooded at the time. Giant chunks of ice from retreating glaciers melted in gravel pits. Lake Agassiz covered parts of the region then. While Indians in the south continued traditions they had established centuries before, those who wandered north carved out a new life—learning to forage and hunt in a foreign landscape.

  Holdovers from the Pleistocene still roamed North America then: mastodons, saber-toothed cats, five-hundred-pound beavers, speckled bears, and several species of prehistoric horses. Many of the first Indians in Minnesota ended up near what is now Knife Lake in the northern Boundary Waters. Silica-infused mud around the lake hardened into siltstone over millions of years and could be shaped easily. Indians fashioned knives, axes, and spearheads for hunting and butchering animals. Camps were established at the lake to quarry the stone and knap it into razor-sharp implements.

  The way a culture hunted, harvested food, fought, and lived determined the size and shape of blades. One way archaeologists distinguish between prehistoric Indian cultures is by the characteristics of their projectile points. The Clovis culture in Minnesota honed siltstone into long, fluted points. The Folsom culture that followed in about 10,800 BC were bison hunters and used smaller heads, fluted along the entire edge. The Archaic period (7000–500 BC) saw upper-midwestern tribes cold-hammering copper tools, while others shaped spearheads and arrowheads with stems to be affixed to a shaft.

  Burial mounds, pottery, domesticated dogs, and agriculture appeared in Minnesota around 2500 BC. Tribes there lived on wild rice, fish, squash, beans, corn, bison, and caribou. Ojibwe, Winnebago, and Cree tribes moved into the Arrowhead in the 1500s. The Dakota displaced them, and then the Ojibwe migrated west from Lake Superior and took over the land again. The Ojibwe are originally from the east and speak a form of Algonquin. Origin stories begin near the Atlantic Ocean, where a mystic seashell showed itself over the ocean. One day it sank and never rose again. The shell appeared again on the Saint Lawrence River, and the tribe followed it there and encamped for a while. It disappeared again and rose over Lake Ontario and, eventually, Point Island on Lake Superior—which is the geographic center of the Ojibwe nation today.

  The Ojibwe tribe documented its dreams, visions, shamanism, and history in pictographs throughout the Boundary Waters. Ted glanced at Paul as he leaned his long torso over the water to point out how the paintings were placed just above the high-water mark, where an artist could reach from a canoe. He almost fell in, and Ted backed the boat away. “It’s America’s first art form!” Paul yelled over the engine.

  North Hegman Lake has some of the most interesting pictographs in the area. The style is classic Northern Woodland, a culture that lasted longer in northern Minnesota than anywhere else in America. One of the images on Hegman is of a human with outstretched arms near a four-legged animal, likely a wolf. There is also a bull moose and a series of dashes. Above that are what look like three canoes, two with paddlers. There is a cross at the top, the Ojibwe sign for a star.

  Archaeologists speculate that much of the rock art in the northland reflects winter meridian constellations. Theories about the Hegman art suggest that the three canoes refer to the “Winter Maker” constellation of Orion. The paddlers are moving along the Milky Way, which the Ojibwe call the Path of Souls. Placement of the wolf and moose in the piece correspond almost precisely to Ptolemaic constellations set below Orion: Columba, Eridanus, Caelum, and Fornax. A dewclaw drawn on the moose corresponds to a star grouping in the Eridanus constellation. The artist also drew a line beneath the figures that approximates the horizon in the winter months. The horizontal dashes above the shaman’s shoulder likely indicate the four moons of winter. (A group within the Ojibwe tribe called the Wabunowin, or “Dawn Society,” kept track of moons.) The three dashes beside it would represent the month of February. In February, Orion hovers just above the horizon, meaning an Ojibwe hunter could calculate his latitude and distance from home by looking at the painting.

  WE TOOK OFF AGAIN and crossed the border into Canada. Driving through Minnesota’s northland at high speed is like traveling through time. You see millions of years of evolution at once. It is an ancient ocean, a dried-up riverbed, an overflowing lake, an old-growth forest. There are no sandy beaches or bays like in the Great Lakes. Even the wide, white slabs of granite surrounding the lakes are gouged from glaciers.

  The surrounding woods affect the light, sucking it in and holding it. Onshore, it is shadowy all day. In the middle of the lake it is blind­ingly bright. When you hike along a portage trail, it is hard to see twenty feet in front of you. When you get to the end, the scene is always different. It is like a slide show: lake after lake, subtle changes in the weather, depth, geology, topography, plants, and sky distinguish each scene.

  If you could fly a few thousand feet above the canopy like the Ojibwe’s mythic thunderbird, what you would see is Lake Superior 70 miles to the east; Grand Forks, North Dakota, 200 miles west; Lake Winnipeg 250 miles northwest; and Chicago 400 miles southeast. You would see the Iron Range splitting Mi
nnesota’s Arrowhead in two, and the Red River Valley running north to the US-Canada border. In the south, hardwood forests dissolve into the corn belt, and west of that, the northern plains roll toward the Rockies.

  Ted pulled into a skinny dock on Sand Point Lake. Two Canadian border agents wearing navy-blue uniforms, flat-brimmed campaign hats, and sneakers waited for us behind a makeshift pine podium. Someone had painted a Canadian maple leaf on a wooden pallet in front of the podium. Visitors were supposed to stand on it, hand over documents, and wait to hear if they could enter Canada.

  “One at a time,” one of the agents said. Ted bowed his head and approached. Things seemed to be getting serious. Paul went next and was uncharacteristically silent. I followed. A white house behind the dock was propped up on cinder blocks. A two-person paddleboat sat on the beach, and I imagined the two guards pedaling together with after-work cocktails.

  It was a triumph of field science that there even was a boundary in the Boundary Waters. The landscape is so rugged, it took surveyors 150 years to mark the US-Canada border through the region. In some places, crews had to wait for winter to freeze the ground so that they could walk on top of waist-deep wetlands.

  Most of the line was left unmarked until 1908, when an American survey team arrived at the mouth of the Pigeon River on Lake Superior, near Grand Portage, Minnesota. It took the group three years, traveling seasonally by canoe and on foot, to reach Gneiss Lake, about forty miles west. Proper surveying at the time required triangulation, meaning that astronomers had to scramble up vertical gorge walls and ferry across dangerous whitewater rapids several times to multiple sites to fix a position. Three additional teams, one Canadian, sped up the process five years later when they started surveying east from the Rainy River toward Lac La Croix.