In a previous blog, I wrote about the various hikes that Cyndy and I have been doing. We're up to a comfortable ten miles on any given day, carrying a small day pack with ample water supply, with no aches and pains.
But, in addition, we've also enjoyed some time on diverse waterways. The following is an account of these.
By clicking here
, you can view some of the photos that Cyndy has taken of these and other places.
Missouri Breaks
Once at the bottom of the great Western Interior Seaway, which extended from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, the rock formations here are primarily sedimentary sandstone.
The first part of this river trip passed through the White Cliffs, consisting of steep cliffs of white sandstone. The second part, farther downstream, is the Montana Badlands.
We did this trip with 11 other paddlers, with our gear provided by Missouri River Outfitters, headquartered in Fort Benton, Montana, once a Wild West riverboat town famous for its bars and brothels and infamously acclaimed as having "the bloodiest block in the West."
Fort Benton is also the home of Shep, a shepherd dog that, daily, stood watch on the city's riverbank for his owner, a sheepherder who had died and whose body had been shipped back East to his family; Shep's vigil ended only with his death, after five-and-a-half years.
Missouri River Outfitters is operated by Nicole Fugere, a young Fort Benton entrepreneur who employs several people and brings tourist dollars into the community.
She provided us with three excellent, professional local guides: Nycole, Cali, and Blake who set up our tents, cooked our meals, kept us safe, and related their vast knowledge about this great waterway that was a significant part of the explorations of Lewis and Clark in 1804 through 1806.
Each day, Nycole would have us paddle our canoes into raft formation and read to us from the explorers' journals or biographies.
On some days, we also hiked up into the surrounding hillsides to study rock formations or petroglyphs or camping sites of nomadic Native Americans; on one hike, we climbed several hundred feet in elevation to a spot where the explorers mistakenly thought they were seeing the Rocky Mountains for the first time.
The river was moderately slow at a flow rate of about 3.5 mph, so we paddled most of the time at a comfortable pace, traveling 18 to 22 miles per day through majestic scenery that included bald eagles, fresh water pelicans, mountain goats, big horn sheep, and antelope.
Crow Wing River
In central Minnesota, Cyndy and I paddled for two days on the Crow Wing River State Water Trail, one of the tributaries to the Missouri. We did this trip on our own with gear rented from
Gloeges Northern Sun Canoe livery.
Per their suggestion, we parked our travel trailer at Huntersville State Forest Campground, which is one day upstream from the livery.
A Gloeges driver then took us two days upstream to our put-in point at Shell City Campground. There, we made our way through a narrow passage of tall marsh reeds for several hundred yards before reaching the main stream of the Shell River, so named because it was once a place where people harvested clam shells to make buttons.
We paddled casually for about six hours on the Shell and then the Crow Wing until we reached our trailer.
On the second day, we continued on to our take-out point at the livery.
This was a pleasant trip on another easy, often wide river with a flow rate of about 3.5 miles per hour. The service and information by Gloeges was excellent. And, again, we supported a local business ... actually, a multi-generational family business that started their endeavor 50 years ago.
Voyageurs National Park
At International Falls, Minnesota, we took a 2.5-hour tour boat into the waters and islands of
Voyageurs National Park. There, we visited an island with a now-defunct gold mine that had boomed in the late 1800s.
This vessel was operated by national park service, and our park ranger guide elaborated on numerous historic and natural features, including information about the several bald eagles that we saw.
Of key interest were the French voyageurs after whom this beautiful wilderness area is named. They were robust, idolized men who paddled 36-foot-long birch-bark canoes, which weighed 400 to 600 pounds, for hundreds of miles from the west end of the Great Lakes to Montreal during the fur trade years of the 18th and early 19th centuries. They paddled, ten in each canoe, carrying a cargo of beaver pelts that weighed three tons.
The requirements for being a voyageur included the ability to carry two 90-pound packs of pelts over portages, paddle at a rate of 55 strokes per minute for 14 hours a day, and be able to sing so as to keep cadence with the other paddlers. Few who engaged in this grueling lifestyle could swim, a characteristic that prevented them, in case of capsizing, from swimming to shore and forsaking their cargo.
The voyageurs are historically significant because the route they commonly took is, today, the international boundary that separates Ontario, Canada, from the Great Lakes states.
Lake Superior Sea Caves
In the quaint far-north town of Cornucopia, Wisconsin, we hooked up with
Lost Creek Adventures for a day of kayaking along the sea caves that populate the mainland shore. This area is also part of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.
We had hoped to be on the islands for four days of paddling and camping, but not enough customers signed up for that adventure, so it was cancelled. As an alternative, we booked a day trip on two days: to the sea caves, and to Sand Island, which is just one of the more than a dozen Apostle Islands. Alas, stormy weather prevented us from doing the Sand Island crossing. But we are grateful for the sea cave adventure.
We, along with seven other customers, started at Meyers Beach, five miles east of Cornucopia. We paddled another two miles across a bay to the caves. The temperature was cool, the skies cloudy, and the water calm ... a great day.
The sea caves are present along a three-mile stretch of sandstone cliff face that is reddish-brown in color. It is from nearby quarries on Bayfield Peninsula that this stone was cut and used for the construction of "brownstone" homes and buildings in cities such as Chicago, Boston, and New York.
Here, the cliffs are subject to the powerful forces of Lake Superior and the winds that howl unfetched for hundreds of miles, driving pounding waves against the cliff face. These waves, along with historic geological upheavals, have formed caves ... some only a few feet deep and others large enough to paddle into and/or through. Which we did, grateful for the absence of waves.
At a mid-point in our six-hour journey, we stopped for lunch, served by our guides, Mitch and Nick, on a small beach.
Then we paddled back along the cliff at a somewhat slower pace, riding up close to touch and to listen as the caves, with water splashing into them, "spoke" to us.
Mitch told us that, on windy days, Native Americans of the area would come to the cliffs and, sitting above them, listen to and interpret the bass thrum as the wisdom of spirits talking to them.
On the day after our paddle, the winds across Lake Superior rose to gale-force velocity. So Cyndy and I walked that trail northeast from Meyers Beach. For the first two miles, we heard only the sound of wind and windblown leaves, as we made our way around that initial bay that we had paddled across on the previous day.
But once we reached the cliffs, the higher-pitched wind sounds were punctuated by that bass thrumming as the great lake's surface water crashed into the caves.
I had a question on my mind about a book that I was writing at the time so I took the time to listen for inspiration ... just as Mitch had said the indigenous people do. I believe I heard an answer.
Crooked Lake
Upon re-entering Michigan from the west side of the Upper Peninsula, we stayed at Clark Lake Campground in the Sylvania Preserve in the Ottawa National Forest.
This is near the small community of Watersmeet, so named because it is near a peninsular divide from which the Ontonagon River flows northward into Lake Superior, the Wisconsin River flows southward to join the Mississippi River, and the Paint River flows eastward into Lake Michigan.
On our first day there, we hiked ten or more miles around Clark Lake. On our second day, we rented a canoe from Bob at
Sylvania Outfitters and paddled around Crooked Lake.
This water body is aptly named because it has nine bulbous inlets, three narrow connecting channels, and many, many more miles of shoreline than its three miles of "as the crow flies" height or its one mile of width.
We put in at the canoe launch on the northern tip and circumnavigated the entire lake, keeping the shoreline on our right as we went in all possible directions.
This preserve is a wilderness area where there are 13 primitive campsites that are accessible only by small watercraft or overland trails; paddling there, we felt like we got a one-day taste of what indigenous people and early explorers would have experienced daily.
Lake Superior in Grand Marais, Michigan
We are currently camped at the Woodland Park municipal campground in Grand Marais. From our campsite, we have a lovely view of Lake Superior.
Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore is adjacent to the west. There, we walked another ten miles along cliff bluffs that rose several hundred feet above the waves of the great lake below.
