By Michael Phelps
Most people don’t have the guts to go on a trip like this. They’d say it’s too cold or they’re not that crazy. Some might even tell you to save your money and go in the summer. Well, Eric Thomas, Kim Colway, Casey Bakken, Tony “Hondo” Cruikshank, Mike Ennis, and I, Mike Phelps, had the guts to follow Doug Berg into The Boundary Waters in the middle of winter. We were “crazy enough” to do something hardly anyone else ever did. And we were looking forward to it.
Day One
We left school around 9:00 Wednesday March 5th and headed for Grand Marais. We ate breakfast/lunch in Rush City. Everyone had bacon. We got to Grand Marais and had an hour to run around town before checking into the hotel. We checked into the hotel. Doug got his own room while the six of us were crammed into another. Kim, Eric, Hondo (Tony), and I ate at the Blue Water Café and all had steak and eggs and bacon. Casey and Mike E. went up to the grocery store for their dinner. Everyone sat in the hot tub at the hotel. Casey, Mike E., and I spent an hour jumping into snowbanks.
Day Two
We woke up at 5:15 a.m. Thursday and went over to the South of the Border Café (that’s the Canadian Border, folks) for breakfast. Everyone had bacon. Before we left town, we stopped by the grocery store so Doug could pick up four extra pounds of bacon. Then we spent the next hour and a half headed out the Gunflint Trail. We got to our drop off point and got ready to hike. All our gear was either loaded onto our backs or pulled behind us on sleds. It was difficult because the snow was very dry and we had to break our own trail. Every time we passed a slushy spot we had to stop and scrape the ice off the bottoms of our sleds. Some of the portages had such steep and slippery hills that everyone had to team up, sometimes in groups of up to four, just to get the sleds up them. Lunch was eaten at a campsite at the other end of the lake from where we ended up staying. Bagel, cheese, and salami were fine today but we knew they would get old by the end of the trip. We wanted to get to an island about six miles from the start but it was such hard going that we only got about two miles before we settled for a closer site. I was disappointed that we couldn’t do what we set out to do, but I didn’t really mind stopping early. Doug hiked out to try to see how the trail was further ahead while everyone unloaded, got firewood, and dug trenches to sleep in. Lastly, we all shoveled a huge pile of snow by flashlight for our quinzhee. The stars were incredible that night. I remember walking out to the water hole in the middle of the lake and turning off my flashlight to look at the stars. They were just so bright and so numerous.
Day Three
Friday was pretty much spent making camp. We spent most of our time getting firewood and hollowing out the quinzhee. The quinzhee was gigantic. It had two rooms separated by about a foot of snow. One room fit two people rather comfortably and the other housed four. It was kind of a tight squeeze in that one but we managed. It was warmer than a trench, that’s for sure. When we weren’t getting wood or working on the quinzhee we went sledding or sat around the campfire eating bacon. Doug even did some skiing that day. Every so often during the day we’d hear Eric yell out “HONDOOOO!” We think he’d just say that whenever he didn’t have anything else to say. There weren’t many stars Friday night due to clouds.
Day Four
Doug let us sleep in Saturday morning, which everyone was grateful for. We went snowshoeing that day. Doug led us out on a route he had looked at earlier which took us through a lot of woods. It was a difficult trail. Roots stuck up everywhere and branches stuck across the paths in the most inconvenient places. If somebody followed another person too closely they got twigs and branches snapped in their face. Even with snowshoes on we still sank about five or six inches (except Hondo, who kept turning our nicely broken trail into a nicely broken trench) but that’s a lot better than sinking two or three feet every time a snowshoe came off! We found a groomed ski trail at the far end of our hike that really excited Doug. We made the quinzhee slightly bigger that day as well. We also got firewood, went sledding and ate bacon by the fire.
Day Five
This was, in my opinion, the most exciting day. Doug made pancakes for breakfast which everyone liked. We also had bacon with breakfast.
We all went cross country skiing out to the ski trail we’d found Saturday so Doug could have his fun. Supposedly there were some big hills to ski. There was even an old car rolled over with a tree growing up through it off to the side. We didn’t quite get that far though. Hondo was straggling way behind so I stopped to wait for him, but he didn’t come. I went back a ways and still he didn’t come. Eventually I heard him yelling, but I thought he was just angry about falling down or something. But when he continued to yell without getting any closer I became worried. I skied back, almost to the start of the woods, to find him sitting on the ground amongst a bunch of tree roots holding his ankle in pain. I didn’t know if he’d broken it or just twisted it or what but I went to get Doug and the rest of the group as fast as I could. It was slow going through the woods with skis and several times I had to take them off and put them back on again. The others had gotten quite a ways ahead and even though I was shouting at the top of my lungs, for a time I got no response. Finally, almost to the last leg of the trail, Eric and Kim heard me. Eric, who had brought his snowshoes along, headed back toward Hondo while Kim, who also had snowshoes, raced across a lake to get Doug. In the end, Hondo was okay, but we didn’t get to ski on the groomed trail and Kim, Mike E. and I got stuck hauling skis and poles back in our arms from the people with snowshoes. That night at the fire we started joking about things we could do to Doug. Eric got an idea and the more we thought about it, the better it sounded. So we all went up to Doug’s tent where he was quietly sleeping. First, Eric used a wire to tie Doug’s zippers together from the outside. Then, with THE SPOON throwing the first blows, he proceeded to spoon snow onto his tent. Eventually, after Eric stopped using the spoon and moved up to a snow shovel, Doug woke up. ” Wha?…Huh?… Hey, what cha guys doing?…. Eric’?…. @#$%4″!! Eric!” ZIPP…ZIPP…ZIPP…! That was all we heard as he furiously tried to get out of his tent.
Kim moved back to her trench and Eric wanted to sleep by the fire so we knocked out part of the wall inside the quinzhee and put two people to a room. We also got wood and ate bacon by the fire. Eric and Mike E. even went fishing in the water hole, but they didn’t catch anything.
Day Six
Monday, the last full day in camp, was Solo Day. In solos, everyone split up out of sight and earshot for three hours to do whatever we wanted. Some people hiked around a bit, others sat and listened to the woods, or else just wrote in their journals. Everybody agreed that, while it seemed short once it was over, three hours seems like a long time while you’re doing it. Even if it was boring at the time, everyone was glad they did it and even felt it should have been longer. The rest of the day we did whatever we wanted. We had a fairly decent woodpile by now so we didn’t need to get wood. Instead we had a snowball fight back in the woods, went sledding face first at the quinzhee, and ate bacon by the fire.
Day Seven
Last day. We finished up all the bacon at breakfast before breaking camp. Everyone loaded up their sleds again for the hike out. No one believed Casey and me (the only veterans on the trip) when we said it would be faster and easier on the way back but it was. I was hardly tired by the time we got back to the van. Boy, was it nice to see the van again. Music, heating, and padded seats were back in our lives.
We stopped at the municipal swimming pool in Grand Marais to take showers, which almost everyone took gladly. Dinner was at Pizza Hut in Two Harbors. We got three pizzas (all large I think, but I could be wrong) and actually finished every last slice. We wanted bacon, but all we could get was Canadian bacon, so we didn’t.
Unlike the trip up there, everyone was pretty quiet on the way home. We finally rolled into the Perkins parking lot around 10:30 Tuesday night. We all finished the trip by going to Perkins and ordering a big round of bacon (just kidding).