6 days in the Wilderness

As many of you may know, I spent 6 days canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota and Ontario. I did this as part of a course from AMBS (Creation & Spiritual Renewal) which ended up being an independent study. We went with a Mennonite Camp in Ely, Minnesota called "Wilderness Wind". There were only 4 of us, as you can see by the first picture - this is us coming out of a river into our first lake, Nina Moose, that's Sharon Reimer at the front of the left canoe, and her husband Paul is at the front of my canoe on the right. In the back of the left canoe was our fearless guide, Luke Keller - the two of us were also tent buddies - had lots of laughs - it was great. We all had a really great experience out there - I highly recommend doing one of these trips!


Like I said - this is us setting out on our first day. There was beautiful wilderness everywhere, and lots of cool wildlife.


This is looking out across lake Agnes from our first camping spot.


On our second day we headed up toward Canada (Ontario to be precise). There was a nice big cliff on the Canadian side of the lake (Lac la Croix) that had some cool pictographs on it - here's a nice one of a moose. In the lower picture you can see the cliff on the right hand side. We actually camped on a beautiful point of rock about a mile from these cliffs, just on the U.S. side of the lake.


for about half an hour that evening the breeze died down, and the lake became smooth as glass. These are two of the pictures that I took of the stunning reflections. I took many more than this.




We had many adventures with inaccurate maps as we tried to get out of this lake into the next one (Iron Lake). It took us many hours and 3 attempts at different routes - but we finally made it. The next day we were not moving camps though, and some morning storms on our second day in Iron Lake forced us to have a nice long rest. In the afternoon we set out for Rebecca falls (seen here, and in the next picture). They seemed more like "slides" than "falls" to me - but the amount of water coming down was pretty impressive. You can't see well in the pictures, but water was forcing itself through crags in the rock all the way down - it was pretty cool!


this is me infront of one of the 2 falls (Rebecca falls is actually two falls on either side of a small island). As you can see I'm sporting a nice pair of rain pants :-)


When we arrived back at camp we had this visitor: a massive snapping turtle. This was easily the largest turtle I've seen outside of a zoo. Paul affectionately named him Freddy. Mostly he just sat there, we took a picture with this water bottle for scale. By the morning he had gone.


This rocky point was our final campsite on Stuart (or maybe it's Stewart) Lake. Most of our campsites were on rocky points. I found them quite nice, as the points tended to catch a bit more of the breeze, which kept the bugs down, and it was nice to lie around on the rock in the late afternoon and evening sun. very cool!


Near our last site there were these nice big slabs of rock that something had forced up on top of each other - presumably ice? At any rate, I thought they looked kinda cool, and it's neat to think about the powerful, natural force that must have occurred to force these massive slabs up and out of place.

Like I said, it was a wonderful experience. We got to see lots of beavers, and beaver dams and lodges - even had to lift our canoes over a few dams. We saw a deer swimming - they swim very well! as well as a little river otter. We heard wolves, and had the privilege of having loons sing us to sleep almost every night. We didn't have watches, so we were up and down with the sun, getting more in tune with a natural rhythm and pace of life. It was a bit of a shock to get back into a van and zip back to camp after it all, and then to fly 3000km's the next day! It was a fabulous experience of 4 people coming together from different parts of N.A., building friendships, experiencing community, creation, and connecting with God in quiet and the wild, far from society. What a blessing!