MCA HUT! Archive

Well ... I did it and lived to tell the tale. I oughta get a t-shirt with "Survivor of the Sioux/Hustler Trail Clearing Trek of ’00" emblazoned across the chest. The trail’s name references the north-flowing Little Indian Sioux River and Hustler Lake which the trail circumnavigates, coming within three or four miles of the Canadian border. The trip was alternately misty, rainy, warm, buggy, windy, sleeting and just downright cold. It taxed my strength and endurance to their limits more than once on the long portages between lakes or around cataracts and rapids. We had to cross six (the longest was two hundred sixteen rods or two thirds of a mile) to get to our base camp, which was at the northernmost end of the twenty eight mile loop.

The portages are unimproved footpaths through the forest which can be rocky, mucky, tangled with slippery exposed tree roots or across canted outcroppings of the pink granite bedrock scraped clean by the last glaciation. They are never flat, and the up and down wore me down. Vicki, a traffic manager for a television station in Rochester, hyper-extended her knee on an outbound portage Friday morning. But it’s the inevitable, unstable footfall that caused the sideways lurch into the underbrush, the fanny splat into the mud or the cartoonish pratfall wearing a canoe for a hat.

Each of us nine crew members had a forty pound Duluth pack, a backpack design that hasn’t changed appreciably in a few hundred years, on our back or an even heavier seventeen foot Kevlar or Fiberglass canoe. With three people in each of the three canoes, two Duluth packs, two four-foot-long two-person bucksaws, various sized bow and hand saws and nippers it took us three hours of paddling and portaging to get to our base camp by noon. We pitched our tents on a point of land surrounded by water on three sides with a large granite outcropping sloping down to the water, had a cold lunch and paddled another 30 minutes to where we were to begin clearing trail.

The portages were a cake walk compared to the three mile section assigned to us to clear. A tagging crew had marked the trail in late April to facilitate our work. They marked the locations of the tree falls crossing the rail on the 1:24,000 USGS topographical map of the area. The legend classified each treefall as small (six inch or smaller trunk, large (trunks larger than six inches), and tangled (multiple trunks of various sizes). Some were rotting deadfalls and others had been blown down, broken off or uprooted during a windstorm that upended gnarled root systems as tall as a man and formed water filled craters two feet deep. Sometimes we could walk right up to a trunk and start sawing, but usually we had to prune our way through branches to provide a place to stand and brace our feet close to the trunk before we could take the big boy out of the sheath and make it sing. Part way through, the logs would sometimes sag and bind the saws so other crew members had to wrestle the log up high enough to open the kerf and free the blade. Eventually we got smart and cut a six foot long lever pole to raise the log and complete the cut. Then we’d haul, roll or lever the cuts off the trail. Jon, the group leader’s twenty-six-year-old son was the one youngster on the trip. He was dark and handsome, tall, well built, soft-spoken and ex-military. Dave, his dad, said the harder Jon worked, the more fun he thought he was having. Jon would hoist severed trees and launch them off the trail or drag whole uprooted stumps back into the forest. The kid was an animal. If the logs were small enough, us mere mortals would haul them back into the forest so there wouldn’t be piles of debris lining the trail, creating eyesores. Sometimes we had to settle for just making the trail passable.

We each carried two quarts of water and took breaks every quarter hour to stay hydrated. The trail lunches consisted of pita bread, bagels, peanut butter, cheese, hard salami, raisins and a substance affectionately known as "gorp" which consisted of dried fruits, salted nuts and M&Ms. Gorp evidently replaced electrolytes lost during heavy exertion.

On that cloudy, damp Friday afternoon temperatures were fairly warm in the upper 50’s, and the mosquitoes, black flies, deer flies, gnats, chiggers and no-see-ups swarmed around us. Our defense was head nets worn over baseball caps and gathered down around the neck or tucked into the top of the shirt. I had applied DEET repellent and tried to ignore the little bastards as long as I could, but finally had to retreat behind a head net too. That night-in the closed, bug-free tent-I had a hard time falling asleep initially because phantom bugs continued landing and crawling all over my face, head, neck and ears. Shudder. (Side note: hearing aids are great for preventing buggies from crawling into your ears).

On the trail, we came across lots of animal sign. The most common was moose scat, which looked like deer pellets on steroids, Timber wolf scat looked like very hairy dog doo from all the fur ingested while grooming themselves. We even saw black bear scat, which resembles cow pies. The moose scat was so prevalent that someone joked that we were actually clearing the trail for their benefit since their numbers might very well exceed the annual number of hikers along the remote trail. Deb, who was knowledgeable about local flora and fauna, pointed out colonies of low growing plants with three stiff waxy leaves and groups of little red berries. The berries are edible and the flavor source of Wint-o-green Lifesavers. I really enjoyed these and munched a lot of them with no ill effects.

The weather was so changeable we were shedding or adding layers of clothing for warmth, cooling or rain/sleet protection every fifteen minutes. We’d drop our day packs, retrieve and don or remove and stow clothing to fit the conditions. Despite our best efforts we were all more or less permanently soaked or clammy. Everyone had wet feet. I had spent a good chunk of change on polypropylene sock liners and thick, padded wool expedition socks so even though my feet got wet, the socks still provided warmth, cushioning and blister prevention. I had happy feet!

At about three pm we stopped work and dragged our weary middle-aged carcasses back to the trail head, put in our canoes and paddled back to camp. We repaired to our tents to shuck wet duds, pick off wood ticks, warm up in our sleeping bags, maybe take a little nap, pull on warm dry cloths and emerge for dinner. Mike was my tent mate. He was about six foot three, two forty, shock white hair and the rugged good looks of a retired male model. He was actually a railroad construction worker for the Shortline Railroad which runs taconite iron ore from the open pit mines in Biwabik and Chisholm along the Iron Range, just south of the BWCA, to the ore docks in Duluth on Lake Superior. Mike was consistently the hardest worker of the crew, but when he finished work he had to rest right now. He would slip down into his sleeping sack, nod off and instead of sawing logs he would make the sort of grunting sighs that a person trying to pass constipated bricks does.

The water temperature up there never really gets warm even in the dead of August. John, a former Wisconsin DNR forester and unicyclist, who got me interested in this trip, said PFDs (personal flotation devices) are commonly known as CFDs (corpse flotation devices) in the BWCA because should your canoe capsize in water this cold, you’re dead after fifteen minutes from acute hypothermia and the CFD merely assists rescue workers in retrieving the body. Without the CFD a body stays submerged in the freezing water and refuses to bloat and bob to the surface for three to four weeks. Water temperature was probably in the fifties on Friday night when Jan, a homemaker with two teenage boys who also takes church youth groups up to the BWCA for summer canoeing trips, decided that before she began dinner (being camp cook) she had to take a swim. She dove straight in, made a few underwater strokes and came up gasping from the cold; hollering challenges to the rest of us loafers. You can count on one finger the number who took up her challenge. Dinner that night was pasta with red sauce and Italian sausage. It was hot, there was lots of it and we wolfed it down like feral dogs wary that pack rivals would try to steal it. (Well ... that’s a little hyperbolic, but it was damned quiet for the first few minutes of the meal and no one offered to share portions).

Everyone was exhausted and turned in at dusk except three of us who watched a loon swimming across the glass-like water calling to its mate on a distant lake, and a chorus of spring peepers (tiny frogs with high pitched voices) threeping away. Couldn’t hear them at all once I took my ears off at bedtime. After we brushed our teeth we had to swallow the toothpaste because it attracted bears if we hocked it on the ground around the campsite, and dumping anything into the lake is a major no-no. I woke up later that night to the sound of big rocks being tossed into the lake. Why the hell was someone up in the middle of the night doing that: disturbing people’s sleep? It was beavers returning to the water with a big slap of the tail after their nocturnal feeding activities. They keep a low profile during the day because the wolves like to snack on them. Some said they heard far off timber wolves howling toward dawn, but it must have been at a frequency too high to rouse me from zzzzzzzzz.

We awoke Saturday morning to rain pelting the tent. The entire day wave after wave of showers and low scud pulsed by as we worked. I thought it odd that the sky overhead would darken when the rain started, but if you looked out through the forest instead of up, the air turned bright white. It looked more like snow than rain.
We walked past the area we cleared Friday afternoon and retrieved all of the tools we had stashed under a big log so as not to have to lug them back and forth from camp each day. I got out ahead of the group with my little razor sharp hand saw and was cutting branches on logs so the crew could come through later and belly right up to the log with the two person buck saw. I had just tottered across an extensive old beaver dam and decided to peel rain gear and long johns. Sitting down on a log putting my boots back on, I looked out across the backed-up water from the dam. The top of a dead tree out in the water suddenly swiveled its head and peered at me with beady black eyes. Deb and John told me later it must have been a Great Barred Owl because of its dark eyes and size (18" - 24"). I was sitting still for a long time watching it when I noticed a vole (little dark gray short tailed mouse-like thing) scurry across the forest floor. She or her cousins must have been what the owl was hanging around for. I turned back to check the owl, but it had vanished

When we started back to camp at the end of the day, it was sleeting more often than it was raining. By the time we got pulled onto shore at camp it was evident that the temperature was dipping rapidly. Everyone did the "wet/cold off-dry/warm on" drill and Mike napped out, immediately grunting as usual. When we mustered for dinner it was apparent that Jim, a retired business executive, was absent. John, his tent mate, said Jim had gotten badly chilled and couldn’t warm up. John couldn’t coax him out of the tent. I’m guessing our crew leader became concerned that Jim might be in the early states of hypothermia because when the Cajun black bean and rice soup was about ready he started hollering over at Jim’s tent good naturedly, announcing the menu, then that it was being served, then that he’d better get over here quick before it was all gone. Jim finally showed up rubbing his arms and doing a little dance to generate some BTUs. Everyone was relieved and we devoured everything that wasn’t nailed down (that’s hyperbole, again, for ? held in reserve for Sunday breakfast, our last meal in camp). Cookie hadn’t brought quite enough chow, not having accounted for our increased appetites. Seems cold weather stimulates appetite because the body has to burn more calories to stay warm.

Sunday broke crisp and clear. Breakfast was a little meager. Only five packets of instant oatmeal for nine hungry campers. We got creative and pooled our individual inventories of trail goodies. I contributed a half pound of raisins, which were boiled to plump them up, before adding them to the oatmeal. The remaining two bagels (supple as shoe leather after three days) were sliced thin and spread with peanut butter, sprinkled with gorp and salted cashews from Mike’s ultra secret personal stash, and topped with Jan’s very chewy dehydrated pineapple slices that everyone had politely, but consistently, refused earlier in the trip.

We broke camp and were packing the canoes when it was discovered that a nipper and a bow saw had been left on the trail Saturday night. Dave, our crew leader, normally upbeat and tolerant of mistakes kicked himself loudly and repeatedly for not doing an equipment checklist Saturday night. Someone had to paddle back to the trail and retrieve it. John, the best canoeist in the group offered to paddle-as did Jim. Jon, the young buck, offered to run out and back the one and three quarter miles from the trail head to the place we deduced the tools must have been left. There was more grumbling by Dave about losing two hours to this mission and how late we’d be getting back into the Twin Cities. The rest of us decided to build the first fire of the trip to pass the time. Mike somehow found dead dry balsam branches and birch bark for kindling and we were soon in business. I poked a couple of stripped green branches through the grate and upended my soaked hiking boots on them. They started steaming after awhile and there was conjecture about what they’d taste like with peanut butter and gorp.

After a short time they returned, all three paddling furiously like the survival of the species depended on them. Jon had evidently leaped out of the canoe at the trail head and run full speed over hill and through bog along the trail, found the tools and sprinted back. John and Jim had followed Jon at a rapid walk, fearful he might twist a knee or sprain an ankle and not be able to walk back unaided. They were relieved when Jon came racing back. They trotted back to the canoe and peeled rubber back to camp.

I pulled my steaming boot off the sticks and laced them up. They didn’t get dry but they were less squishy and a lot warmer. We hastily doused the fire, finished loading the canoes, and pushed off for the three hour return trip to civilization. We had a nice wind at our backs the whole way back. The paddling was easy until ... we rounded a bend and John, in the stern, noticed white caps on swells in the channel at the far end of a long island. He guessed at least a twenty knot wind. We could have paddled a straight line course from our current position to the portage on the far side of the channel, but instead John decided to go out of our way-upwind-and hug the island’s shoreline. Then when we got out into the open channel, turn the canoe forty five degrees downwind so we wouldn’t have waves hitting us broadside, breaking over the gunwales. We waited for the other canoes to tell them our plan then set off. We hugged the shoreline, then when we hit the open channel paddled like hell and hoped we’d hit the far shore not too far downwind from the portage. A canoe novice, poor Jim in the bow had spray breaking over him and swells coming within an inch of the top of the gunwales as we rolled side to side with each swell. Once we reached shore he admitted that he thought us in peril and feared capsizing. We recalled our earlier conversation about the Corpse Floatation Devices and laughed the laugh of men who had faced danger and endured. The fact that the risk was relatively small didn’t diminish the sense of accomplishment and macho brotherhood. The other two canoes didn’t follow our prudent course and wound up way downwind. Winded by the exertion of channel crossing, they still had to paddle directly upwind to reach the shelter of the portage where we waited in our canoe for them in case either canoe dumped and we had to play rescue.

The rest of the trip was uneventful.. We spotted an osprey hovering in the wind (only three hawk species can) then folding its wings diving for fish. It was opening weekend for Northern and Walleyed Pike and as we got to the final two portages, we started seeing fisherman heading in the opposite direction. We warned them about the wind ahead and were thankful it was behind us.

We made landfall and began unloading the canoes. I had taken off my cap early that morning and now had a good sunburn on my noggin. We lashed canoes atop vehicles, sorted out and stowed gear, and donned the street clothes we had left behind in gym bags. They seemed odd and insubstantial.

Handshakes, hugs, words of appreciation for the cookie, crew leader and Jon the tool retriever-and that was it. A good trip and a good group. No complainers, know-it-alls or prima donnas. Despite the wet, the cold, the bugs, the work, the short rations, I’m ready to do it all over again. But not ‘til 2001.

We stopped at Gordy’s in Cloquet for the best burgers in Northern Minnesota and shakes you have to eat with a hacksaw. I ate like a pig-unapologetically.

Afterword: Tom had such a great time he has already signed up as a crew member for this year.