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Canoe Lovers: Grand Portage Rendezvous Days and Powwow
Last weekend was the annual Rendezvous Days and Powwow at Grand Portage National Monument in northern Minnesota. The Grand Portage was the 8-mile trail that fur-trading voyageurs took to bring the furs they gathered to the company’s remote headquarters. In August every year, the voyageurs would show up and the rich company owners would come from Europe, and Grand Portage became a rough and tumble celebration. After the celebration, the furs were loaded aboard massive voyageur canoes and paddled across the Great Lakes and eventually shipped to Europe where many became hats. In the states, the voyageurs would carry trade goods up the portage and then paddle 100s of miles back…
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It’s All in the Knot
Earlier this year, I was guiding a trip in Pigeon Bay, which is on the border of Minnesota and Ontario on Lake Superior. It was a windy day, but the wind was from the southwest, which, because the bay runs east northeast, usually means that it’s going to be calm in the bay. The bay itself is about 4 miles deep from Pigeon Point to the furthest west point of the bay, so it escapes the fury of the lake on any winds except from the northeast. The bay is formed by the Canadian mainland and Pigeon Point, a slender peninsula with a maximum width of about half a mile and…
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Grand Portage National Monument Rendezvous Days and Powwow
Every year during the second weekend of August, Grand Portage and the Grand Portage National Monument hosts Rendezvous Days and a Powwow. During the event, 1000s of people and 100s of reenactors show up at Grand Portage to experience what life was like for fur traders, who used canoes. The event celebrates the cultural heritage of the Anishinaabe and the history of fur trading in the area. The Rendezvous Days celebration harkens back to a different time, when beaver pelt was one of the most important trade items in the world. All across North America, the canoe held a central role in the trading of beaver pelts. It was easier to…
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Spring(?) Kayaking on Brule Lake in the BWCA
This spring has been slow in coming. In northern Minnesota, we’re between 14 and 20 days behind median ice out, and it’s wearing a little thin on the nerves. This week some of the bigger lakes in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness finally started to go out, so with that in mind, Jeffrey and Michelle Forseth of Sea Kayak Safety and I went to paddle on Brule Lake. The put-in was completely ice free and it was 50°F, so we figured that we were golden, but as we paddled east along the shore, we started to run into ice and soon ice coated as far as we could see,…
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Kayaking Norway’s Lofoten Islands
In 2008, a friend and I took a trip to Norway’s Lofoten Islands to kayak and tour the countryside. I wrote about the Fram Museum Kayaks in Oslo before, but I’ve never written about the trip itself. I usually write a bit more about the nitty gritty details of my trips, but this time, I’m mainly going to include photos and talk slideshow style, because the trip had its upsides and downside due to the nature of how it was designed by a tour company we hired — we didn’t kayak camp and we sometimes drove to new places to kayak instead of starting at one point and making our…
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Twin Lakes Canoe Route Trip Report
Just 25 miles from Grand Marais, Minnesota, the Twin Lakes Canoe Route [pdf] offers canoeists a five lake adventure that unlike the nearby Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness doesn’t cost a dime and doesn’t require a permit. The US Forest Service describes the the Twin Lakes Canoe Route as a quiet, wilderness-like lake experience featuring five water accessed campsites, four portages and plenty of fishing. While we’ve day tripped on the lakes before, we never camped, so with only one night to spare, we decided to give it a go. The Twin Lakes Canoe Route Put-In The put-in for the Twin Lakes Canoe Route is 16.5 miles up the Gunflint Trail…
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Two Pictures: Tettegouche State Park and Pigeon Bay Kayaking Trips
This summer, I started a new kayak guiding company and am one of the few Grand Marais kayaking companies. One of the reasons that I started this company was because I love paddling and wanted to share it with more people and many of the locations that I guide weren’t being guided anymore since a friend of mine sold his business several years ago. In Grand Marais, no one was guiding the Fall River Trip. No one was guiding the full Tettegouche State Park trip, although two places do half the trip, and no one was doing Pigeon River. Additionally, no guides in the area were running multi-day trips along…
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Great Lakes Sea Kayaking Symposium Trip Report
I just got back to Grand Marais, Minnesota after spending a four-day weekend in Grand Marais, Michigan at the Great Lakes Sea Kayak Symposium, an event organized by Down Wind Sports and Kelly Blades. The symposium gathers together some of the best instructors in the Midwest, combines them with some of the best instructors from Canada and even abroad, then it throws in a ton of sea kayaking students and mixes it up. It makes for a fun four days of adventure. Grand Marais, Michigan is a small town of just a couple of hundred of people, a high school graduating class consisting of seven students, a brew pub and…
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Kayaking the Canadian Sauna Islands on Lake Superior
Last week I did a kayaking trip from Grand Portage to Squaw Bay. I was paddling with Dave and Amy Freeman of Wilderness Classroom (Facebook page), their new intern Dan Modahl and John Amren who used to own Superior Coastal Sports in Grand Marais. Dave and Amy just started out on the last leg of their 13,000-mile trip across North America via kayak, canoe and dog sled. They’ll complete the trip next April in the Florida keys. They started the trip in 2010 by kayaking the Inside Passage. John sold his store a couple of years ago, which freed him up to finally do the Lake Superior kayak circumnavigation that he…
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Kayaking to the Sea: Sault Ste. Marie to Quebec City
Last weekend, Tim Gallaway, a PaddlingLight contributor, left on a 850 to 900 mile long trip from Sault Ste. Marie to Quebec City via kayak. I asked him to share a little information about his trip to PaddlingLight’s readers. The goods are below, but first this is how you can follow Tim’s journey: Soo to the Sea Facebook page Tim Gallaway’s Twitter Kayaking to the Sea Webpage Kayaking to the Sea I’ve had to repeat this bit so many times it has more or less become a script. It’s quite interesting really. I’ve come to recognize what questions are about to be asked and if the person asking me the…
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Kayaking in the Apostle Island Sea Caves
In April of this year, we joined the Gear Junkie on a short trip to the Apostle Islands for their new Off the Map video series. We spent the day exploring the mainland sandstone sea caves and filming the trip. I hadn’t seen the video until today. It’s pretty sweet. Here’s the video: It makes the sea caves seem pretty fast paced, and I love the footage of me doing a roll. All in all it was a great way to get off the north shore and spend time with friends. Check out my original Apostle Island trip report.
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Apostle Island Sea Kayaking Trip Report
Yesterday, I went over to the Apostle Islands with Stephen Regenold and TC Worley of Gear Junkie. They were filming a travel piece and needed some kayakers to help out, so I recruited my friend John Amren, and we all trekked over to the islands. For those that don’t know, the Apostle Islands are often called the premier sea kayaking destination on Lake Superior. The National Park Service, which manages the islands, calls them the “Jewels of Lake Superior.” They are about two hours east of Duluth, Minnesota, four hours from the Twin Cities and about 30 minutes north of Ashland, Wisconsin. A peninsula juts out into Lake Superior and the 21 islands that…
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Kayaking Lake Superior’s Shipwreck Coast (Skeleton Coast)
Lake Superior’s Shipwreck Coast, in the southeast corner of the lake, runs approximately 50 miles from the sand spit of Whitefish Point to the first safe harbor at Grand Marais, Michigan. As part of my Port Huron to Home trip in the spring and summer of 2011, I kayaked past this mainly undeveloped area. At the time, I wanted to paddle past it in two days to avoid getting stuck there during bad weather. In the end it took me five days, because of wind and waves. Out of the entire 800-mile trip, the Shipwreck Coast, also known as Superior’s Skeleton Coast, was the most hauntingly beautiful and monotonous section of the…
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Boundary Waters Border Route Trip Report
The Boundary Waters Border Route starts on the western side of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) at Crane Lake in Voyageurs National Park. It follows the Minnesota/Ontario border for about 200 miles until the Grand Portage, a 8.5-mile portage to Lake Superior. Most paddlers can complete the trip in two to three weeks. This fall I joined the Wilderness Classroom to photograph part of their three-year, 12,000-mile trip across North America by canoe, kayak and dog sled. I met them at Crane Lake on the western side of the BWCA and paddled the Boundary Waters Border Route with them. It took us 17 days and included a three-day visit…
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Soo to Hessel: The Curse of the Last Day
As cheesy as it sounds, you don’t have to go far from home to have an adventure. Despite the allure and romance of exploring the long expanses of wilderness in, let’s say, the South Island of New Zealand, Iceland, Patagonia, Kamchatka, or the Himalayas, there are many things worth seeing close to home. I have all of the above listed places (and many more) on my bucket list but at the moment I am unable to wander the world aimlessly by the constraining fact that I am a starving college student and kayak bum. But still the lure of adventure tempted me into a trip. I didn’t have to travel…
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