Solo In The Boundary Waters
In September, 2017, I took a seven-day solo trip through the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota. This video documents that seven-day trip, including many of the lakes that I visited, commentary about quite a bit of my gear and suggestions for anyone who wishes to visit the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
Hey everybody, my name is Scott, and over the course of the next week or so, I'm going to be exploring the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota. Now if you've never been to the Boundary Waters or if you've never even heard of the Boundary Waters, hopefully this video will give you a little bit of a taste of what it's like to visit this amazing wilderness area. So I invite you to sit back and enjoy while I solo the Boundary Waters.
The Boundary Waters is a wilderness area of about a million acres in northern Minnesota situated between Lake Superior and the Canadian border. It's actually part of a much larger ecosystem that
extends into southwestern Ontario, as Quetico Provincial Park. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area is the second largest wilderness area in the United States east of the Rockies, second only in size to the Everglades. This amazing place is protected by the Forest Service, and everyone who visits is expected to leave it as pristine as they found it for the next person. because where else can you go to explore and live in the unspoiled natural habitat of moose, bears, lynx, loons, pine martens, wolves and numerous other species?
Now most people I know where I live in Texas have never even heard of the Boundary Waters, and when most people think of Minnesota they typically think of only two things: bad winters, and really bad politicians. But northern Minnesota is an amazing place to visit, and with ten thousand lakes in the state,
there are ample opportunities to get back to nature and see abundant forests and pristine lakes, and just get away from the everyday hustle and bustle of modern life.
So it's Tuesday. Here's a view of a typical campsite at the Sawbill Lake Forest Service campground. Some of them you can pull in; this one's actually big enough you could pull a camper into. What you see, there's a fire grate and a picnic table and this one here is right by the lake. You can see the fire grate here; somebody camped here last night, but it's empty today. This one happens to be right on the water.
My venture into the Boundary Waters begin at Sawbill canoe Outfitters on the southeast shore of Sawbill Lake, about 30 miles north of Tofte, Minnesota, a little hamlet situated on the north
shore of Lake Superior. The day started with about a 75 minute paddle to the north to the end of Sawbill Lake, where I would encounter my first portage of the week, or portage as our friends a few miles north of here in Canada pronounce it. Loosely translated, the original French word portage means something along the lines of, “mud and bug infested path of interminable link that leads seemingly to nowhere.”
Basically what happens is that you get to the end of the lake and you find a portage outlined
on the map, get out of the canoe and carry everything on through the woods to
the next lake. Over the coming days, I'll probably do that 40 to 50 times.
It's Wednesday the 6th, and I just wanted to show you my camp real quick. I've got my camp set up on Cherokee Lake. I've got my tent set up and you may notice that there's an extra tarp over the tent; it's just provided a little bit of extra protection because the forecast tonight calls for rain. You can see my sleeping bag and my backpack and some clothes inside the tent, as I've got the window open right now. Over here, I've got my water station; I've already filtered a gallon of water and I'm getting ready to start dinner momentarily. I've got some clothes drying on the line and then down here a little closer to the lake, it's my fire grate. I've already got my camp stove set up and I'm gonna start cooking in just a minute, along with my camp chair and some basic other stuff.
So a couple quick points as I stop here for lunch: one thing I forgot to mention earlier is that yesterday actually as we were crossing over from Sawbill. taking all the portages through to Cherokee Lake, from what I've read we actually crossed over what's called the Laurentian Divide. Everybody's familiar with the Continental Divide in the United States: that's the high point that separates watershed for the Pacific Ocean from the Atlantic Ocean.
Paddling Sawbill Lake from Campsite on North End to Ada Creek Portage
This video is meant to be viewed within a website. The website shows many photos, text descriptions and more videos of this area. Click this link: to go directly to this videos web page. Otherwise, just check out the BWCAwild home page at
Description: Paddling Sawbill Lake beginning from the campsite on the north end of the lake north to the Ada Creek portage in the BWCA.