Blue, blue windows behind the stars,
Yellow moon on the rise,
Big birds flying across the skies,
Throwing shadows on our eyes

I’m still trying to catch up at home after two weeks away. But I want to write down a little about my trip to Quetico before it gets to be old news, because I had a wonderful time.

There were nine of us in the rather eclectic group put together by Dr Starr Bowen, who is a canoe builder who goes to Quetico regularly.  Five were women, including his daughter who is a documentary film-maker in London and three of her friends from England, two of them recent Oxford grads.  There was a college sophomore and a 16-year-old and the rest of us were middle-age guys.  It was an interesting mix and made for some good campfire conversations.

Quetico Provincial Park is just barely across the Canadian border from Minnesota.  It is a pristine wilderness where no motorized vehicles are allowed, a huge maze of lakes and conifer forests. We put in our canoes at Beaverhouse Lake, on the left in the map below and followed the black line for ten days, camping out mostly in a different place each night, before exiting the park at Stanton Bay. Click on the map if you would like more detail.

There was some talk of just picking a campsite and staying there the whole time, but I was glad we made it a journey, with different scenery and a different feel to it every day.  When we camped out on mossy hillsides, there was more than one reference made to Hobbit journeys.  Actually, my own fantasies ran more toward Last of the Mohicans, probably because of the English girls.

In spite of the abundance of water, we often had to portage the canoes and provisions to get from one lake to another or to go around beaver dams.  The portages in fact were the most challenging part of the journey.  Some of them were half-mile or more in length over fairly rugged terrain.

There was fish for dinner every night except for the first night when we got into camp very late and very tired.   Actually we threw back most of the fish we caught.

Once I noticed a jet far overhead, but otherwise there was little to remind us of the civilized world. None of us brought a radio and cell phones didn’t work. We saw only a few other campers, most of them along a narrow stretch of water on the next to last day of the journey.

We did not see as many animals as I expected.  One moose. No bears. Many eagles.  Lots of beautiful sunsets and mirrored lakes. If you get a chance to go there don’t pass it up.