Winter Camping In The BWCAW Pt.3

On The Trail

This wide-open trail that we are using was made by ice fishermen on Farm Lake, using their pick-up trucks with snow plow blades. The fishermen generally set their tip-ups close up to the boundary that separates the designated wilderness. Often ice fishermen go into the Boundary Waters wilderness, pulling a light sled or toboggan to favored fishing spots for a days fishing through the ice. Greg Drum is the skier who is guiding the sleds so that they stay on our route rather than turn right onto another trail. I am the skier up ahead, leading the dog team train.

Looking ahead at a beaver lodge to the right of center in the picture. I'm using skate skis on this day, which is a great treat to use when conditions are right.

Viewing a wolf kill of a deer. When we came up to the edge of the lake off of a portage trail, eagles and ravens flew up. We weren't yet in view of the kill site, but stopped the dog teams as we knew that the leavings of the wolf pack's dinner were just ahead. The wolves must have brought the white tail down just a few hours earlier, as the rib cage and other parts were still intact. The wolves were probably listening and watching us as we viewed the site and then went back and had our lunch as well.

Wolf tracks and bits of fur were all that was left at the site where the deer was taken down.

Winter's Last Blast?

It's not that we weren't expecting this blizzard, if a person listened to any weather report...
The winds from the northeast started yesterday morning and gusts (up to 30 mph) were soon buffeting the landscape and shaking any object that was vertical. Muir's canoe, which has wintered this year under an apple tree, was blown by the wind 20 feet to the bumper of our old GMC truck. Last night the snow and sleet started in and continued all day today and is still happening.as of this night.
The migrating juncos and red polls and robins are having a difficult time finding food. I threw down some sunflower seeds as well as filled the feeders and all day there were birds mobbing the area, in spite of the wind. Even some starlings at the suet.
Muir took off into the teeth of the storm , heading to Marquette for classwork that he had to do at the hospital there. He took his old 4 WD Toyota truck. He's staying at Fillmore's house for the 2 day trip.

At least for at least a little while I'll be skiing. Lynn is happily working as manager of the floral dept. at Econo Foods which is a relatively short drive from here, pays well and she really enjoys the work.

April 12---- Still mist snowing and gray mono chrome skies and world. No big wind gusts. Great for skiing!

Ski Mornings

Morning is the prime time around here because of the freeze that occurs at night. If you linger abed or don't allow time before your day job, you will inevitably lose the frozen snow to the warmth of the day.
For myself, after I get back from a guiding journey, I need a number of days to recover from both trip and travel. As I've gotten older the time needed for recovery hasn't decreased. So it took me a few days after arriving back home from the Arrowhead of MN to get back into a healthy exercise regimen.
Good exercise at this season means skiing; either early morning Keweenaw crust through the bush, or the very controlled exercise of skate skiing at the world class, groomed MTU trails that are less than a mile from my house.
Today is supposed to go to 40 degrees Fahrenheit, so with the sun beating down, one must get in a ski while the temperatures keep the snow hard. So, for a few mornings now I've got in my ski by at least mid-morning. The MTU trails are freshly groomed and appealing in their wide lanes through the mixed hardwood and conifer forest. The trails wend through hills and forest, pass within sight, at this leafless season, of roads and a few buildings. I park at the Pilgrim Rd. lot, which is close to my house and usually nearly vacant, but the main lot is always with cars and local skiers coming and going. Though I am a solitary skier by temperament, I do enjoy seeing a few skiers on the trails who are invariably happy to be out. On the occasion that I see someone who I know, it is nice to stop our sliding and talk for a minute or two.
As the morning rolls on I begin to notice areas of the trail that have direct sunlight becoming slushy and slow - a sign that signals the time to head home for chores and correspondence.
Some of my thoughts as the ski season wanes begin to turn to the waterways that are beginning to open and show signs of the migrating spring weather, though as Dan at Downwind Sports said the other day, "Some are saying that this year we may be out skiing on the trails into May."
I don't think there is better exercise for my back than skiing every day. I'll reluctantly give it up soon as the trails and ground turns bare.


A typically wide piece of trail at MTU. The university invested into what were simple and unimproved narrow woods trails to turn them over the last 5 years into a world-class Nordic ski facility.

A freshly groomed trail for skate skiing on. My skis were the first to be on this trail the other morning. Like skiing in a park, which I guess the trail system is. Jeff Parker and an old acquaintance from Eagle, Alaska, Jim Meese, do the grooming of the trails.

At the trail head parking lot on the MTU Campus. The waxing room and other team rooms are to the right. The skiers, and later, mountain bikers enter the trail system from here.

A chery wood paddle blank that I cut out recently is being planed thin on our back deck. I cut out an ash blank as well, both of which I hope will see use later this spring on the water.

April 1, 2008 After the Spring Snowstorm

STEPPING OFF THE TRAIL

Lynn coming back from the first clothes line hanging of laundry for the new year. Though the snow in the morning has the frozen boiler plate "Keweenaw Crust" that makes such good go-anywhere skiing, when it is thawing out the settled snow-slush will give way, sometimes even on the compacted trail.

April 1, 2008 Snowstorm

April Fools Day in the Keweenaw, after a spring snowstorm. The Upper Peninsula below us got the bulk of the snow. We got just 4 inches of wet, heavy fluff and a lot of wind to blow it around.
The picture above shows not just the paltry 4 inches of new snow, but also the last half of this winter's compacted-to-ice snow that has been slipping off the garage roof the last few days, and will lay in ice slabbed glory, to melt where it falls. The temperature today was a sunny 34 degrees with a prediction of 40 for tomorrow.

On the late afternoon of the last day of March (yesterday), as meteorologists predicted, the snow started to fall fast, adding to the thick, compacted snow that has been slowly, intermittently melting.
This is a winter that I feel relief experiencing - the first old-fashioned or "regular" winter in a decade - a winter that has held off from having regular thaws and instead has been cold and with ample snow that came early and is leaving late. Since my childhood I have felt a regular disappointment that our climate was warming when compared to what grandparents, parents and elders told me about their winters at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, with the irrefutable evidence of climate change shown in the news and in our environment, having a winter with regular cold and snow (both of which were lacking in the subarctic Alaskan interior for much of this winter) was a real relief. To the wimpy malcontents that I've listened to in the Keweenaw and Ely, MN regions, whining about the winter, " Please go south to the doldrums of heat and humidity. If you don't like winter, don't live here!"

Last night the wind started to blow gusts of 39 mph when I went to bed. Before I got into bed I remembered that I had left the extension ladder up against the chimney so moved it off the chimney before the wind blew it off.
In the morning the wind had diminished and the gray, stormy skies began to show sun by late morning. Lynn and I decided to bring the dogs and go skiing on the MTU trails up the road. Our no wax skis needed glide wax to keep the skis from slowing to a stop with clumping snow. The trail we followed was freshly groomed and it was a leisurely time for us as well as the dogs.

I cut out 2 canoe paddle blanks yesterday - one a cherry wood, the other an ash. I really like the deck for working on them during the spring, with its south facing orientation and its view of bird feeders, field fringed by woods and little creek valley. Lynn shoveled it this afternoon and it looks like it is ready for paddle carving and relaxing again.

Jeff Hull's "Streams of Consciousness" and the loss of species

As I sit here this morning by the fire, after reading a few stories in Jeff Hull's Streams of Consciousness, I think about Hull's stream fishing in North and South America. He writes of the grayling fishing in Montana and always in "Chasing Grayling" there is a sense of loss -- of the Grayling fish, of parts of the stream ecosystem to human development, of the loss of Hull's spiritually sensitive experience on the Big Hole River. Hull watched a young fisherman catch and injure the same fish that Hull had carefully caught and released earlier that day. Hull's sorrow and rage at the "progress" wrought by man that means a loss of whole wild nature runs like an undertow through the sea of his beautifully written descriptions of waters that he has fished.
In "Knots" Hull uses the metaphor of fishing knots to look at, among other things, the knots that people's desire end up making in trying to possess wild nature - trophy homes, loss of wildlife habitat, pollution of air, water and sight - not a rant by the author but a measured plaint to what is loss for everything living.
In "Estancia del Zorro" a University writing project about the impact of free trade on a fully capitalist Chile leads to a Patagonian fishing trip. Amidst rapidly rising extractive industries, unburdened by environmental regulations, Hull fishes on a guided trout fishing excursion in the relatively under-fished Patagonian streams. Here, his guide Rodrigo dreams of going to flight school to learn to fly helicopters so he can guide fishermen to waters that are unfished by anyone, an example of modern man's drive to "progress" beyond where other men have been, to make a mark for oneself in a new way.
Though I have focused on just one current in the stream of Jeff Hull's writing, to the exclusion of his Hemingway-like description of sporting people, dogs, waters and woods, what I came away from was the bittersweet sense of Hull's and my loss - of our youth, of innocence, of part of our birthright to land and water that is healthy, where man is not the dominant species. Yes, the wild is still out there, but it is mostly just background to man's dominance and "progress".

SKI and DOGSLED 2008

Here we are at the height of winter and I'm too busy with guiding, travel between MN and MI, spending limited family time to really sit down and concentrate on making blog entries. My back seems to be holding on to mobility in spite of its deteriorated L-5 disc and I'm classic skiing on dog team trips (due to quite a bit of snow in Minnesota's Arrowhead region and skate skiing back home on the Michigan Tech trails. Both seem good for my back.


The lodge-to-lodge sleds that I am standing by are evolved by Paul Schurke to a pretty ideal form for 2 guests to mush together on, pulled by 5 Inuit dogs. Made of steel, plastic and aluminum, they stand up to more abuse than any other more traditional toboggan dogsled .

Picture by Lynn as we start out on a classic ski on the Maasto Hiito ski trails. On this winter of big snow and high wind, the oak tree is still holding on to some of its leaves that were rattling in the breeze that day.

On the County Road #6, between Finland and Little Marais, on my way over in January to visit Kate at Grand Marais, MN. An above freezing snow in December left much of the forest cloaked in a heavy layer of snow that bent down alder, birch and willow branches and led to hard mushing. A willow branch whipped in my eye on New Years eve caused a cornea surface tear. Though small, it was painful for days.

Daughter Kate and her friend Nathaniel at the gorge and falls on the Devil's Track River, just a walk from Kate's cabin outside Grand Marais, MN. Kate was about to get back her car after an alarm by shorted wiring disabled it while she was home in Houghton for Christmas. Lynn was driving the repaired car over to Kate and I was over for a visit after guiding, before taking Lynn back to Houghton.