“FLOODING HUNTER’S ISLAND”

  When I moved up to Ely and started hanging out with serious paddlers, I heard rumblings of a “race” called Hunter’s Island, a 150 mile loop through some of the best parts of Quetico and BWCA wilderness areas, which comprise the two flowage routes of water moving away from Saganaga Lake to Lac La Croix, one north through Quetico park and one south along the border between the U.S. and Canada. It became clear that Hunter’s Island is the local testing ground for paddlers, where one can prove himself worthy in an outstanding challenge of grit and even see where he stacks up against the rest (time is an element of the race). It wasn’t long before I dedicated myself to preparing for a sincere attempt.

  Late last year I reached out to one of the guys I have done a marathon paddle with, Zachary Sunne (I completed my first 50 miles in 24 hours paddle with Zach last summer). Zach is a thru hiker who has completed some serious hiking trails (3,000+ mile Central Divide Trail, among others), and an unflappable paddler. Zach was unsure if he was going to spend another summer in Ely, exploring the wilderness for a third year before starting a more permanent life elsewhere, but I aimed to entice him back with the prospect of a go at Hunter’s Island, and he obliged to be my bow paddler.

  During my musings on this race, the route and what perils might lie in wait, there was no shortage of misgivings – would we be able to average 30 miles a day for 5 days regardless of conditions, would wind blow us off the big lakes to the point of taking us off our pace or obliterate our determination, would the Maligne river be too daunting a challenge with rapids and dangerous waterfall portage entries, could my body handle the seven miles of portages and long hours in the canoe, among others – but the first day of our trip provided a variable that I could not have foreseen. Before the trip, conditions were high, high enough for the Ontario Parks service to issue an alert stating that travelers should re-route around the Maligne River (a necessary portion of the Hunter’s Island route), as high water made the river too dangerous to navigate, a section that advises novices and groups with children to stay away from in normal conditions. I spoke to a fellow paddler in the area who had been on the river a week prior to our departure, and he assured me that while conditions were extreme, the river was not impossible or inherently dangerous for an experienced paddler. Then, one day into our trip, only 21 miles into the route, the skies opened while we were portaging off Swamp Lake onto Saganaga Lake and dropped four or more inches of rain on us in one night. Beyond stopping us well short of our daily goal and putting us well behind our average pace to start the trip, it filled the lakes with enough water to, unbeknownst to us at the time, wash roads away and trap BWCA travelers at entry points back in Ely, and more prescient to our situation, super-charging the Maligne River and Falls Chain of lakes. As I laid in camp that first night I obsessed over the prospect of a bloated river and the possibility of getting caught downstream at a point where we could neither continue our route for fear of capsizing above a deadly waterfall, nor turn back to fight an impossible current upstream. A couple of weeks before our departure I had helped a man, Erik Grams, whose brother, Reis Grams, had perished when they were swept over Curtain Falls – Curtain Falls was on our route – with advice on how to repair the heavily damaged canoe they had been in when they were carried over the falls. The danger was real in my mind’s eye no matter how much I tried to send it to the doldrums.

  When we arrived at the start of the falls chain, north of Saganagons, the river was bloated, and as is the case with flood water in my experiences, some of the signs of high water were not apparent because the water had risen above all terrain, gulping up boulders and leaving no sign of white water approaching falls – it was one mass of water sucking through the start of the canyon into the falls chain, and a risky approach to the high water portage entrance (many river portages have two entrances, one for high water, one for low water conditions) was a clear indication of extreme conditions. Flood water has the unique appearance of harmless water trickling over a prominent point sunk below the water which betrays its unreal strength. We were forced to skirt around a point before the approach where I felt the stern of the canoe being pulled downstream, much closer to the suction of the falls than I was comfortable with.

  The portages on the entire Falls Chain of lakes and river were rugged with tricky approaches similar to the aforementioned, and during these conditions there were mini-rapids running down some of the portages, forcing Zach (Zach portaged the canoe, in addition to the lighter – 50 lbs. versus 80 lbs. – of our two packs, for 80% of the portages, while I took the heavy pack) to hand the canoe across sections of the flooded trail to me, but we work well as a team and were able to single portage without much delay, though the portages were grueling.

  Zach and I stopped at the first site on Kawnipi Lake after departing the falls chain, greeted by an old Bell canoe that had been torn to shreds in the falls chain and discarded at the site below – a testament to the destructive capacity of water flowing from one massive body of water into another.

  We stayed at the campsite for 2 hours, most of the time I laid prone on top of cedar pine needles trying to give my hip flexors and tight glute muscles a brief rest. Back on the water we paddled down my favorite lake, Kawnipi, all afternoon into the evening. The wind came down for us and we finished our day’s paddle gliding over glassy water through the freshly burned western edge of Kawnipi in the twilight, again having to maneuver around high moving water, elusive in the low light, once portaging through a game of pickup sticks comprised of massive fallen pine trees, a great place to break a leg, and then running some rapids onto Shelley Lake, where we set up camp in the dark and slept for a few hours on an island.

  At sunrise on day three we hit the water and paddled through the Poet’s Chain, Keats was my favorite lake in the series. We took the hardest portage of the trip to go from Russell Lake, gaining and losing serious elevation, to Sturgeon. This portage included a direct decent where one would expect to find switchbacks to alleviate the sharp angle of decline, where running water carved a chute into the muddy path.

  The paddle across sturgeon was nice, with low winds at our back. We took a short break on “Vidmar’s Point” at the southern end of the lake, a point lined by tall red pines that is slowly moving from one end of the lake to the other as winds push sand up on one side and erodes the shore on the other – this might be my favorite campsite in all the Boundary Waters or Quetico. My dear friend Thomas Vidmar told me I had to stop there on my trip, and I was happy to oblige and again lay prone for thirty minutes to rest among the Red Pines – no better place for a nap than a sandy bit of land under red pines. As Viddy would say, “That’s a five out of five stars campsite, Daddy.”

  We reached the mouth of the Maligne at around 4:30 pm and the pit in my stomach grew – the river was moving fast from shore to shore, and the first set of falls was pumping. Clearly the river was cresting following the heavy rain and we were approaching it at its most dangerous. The plan was to portage twice and then decide if we could continue down the river, per some advice from the legendary paddler Adam Macht. The approaches to the first two falls were mild, as each had a bay preceding the approach that slowed the suction at the mouth of each falls, much to our delight, but it became apparent to me that the current was too strong on the river for us to be able to back out, and so our decision was made for us: we would have to navigate the Maligne River in flood conditions. We spend the next 4 hours paddling down rocket booster rapids, lined by boulders hiding just beneath the surface, threatening to tear a hole in our canoe or overturn us, lining our canoes down shorelines where water rushed around our legs, inches from drop-offs that would certainly shroud us in currents that we may never return from, approaching high water portages along suction points inches above waterfalls, bushwhacking through thick woods to get around points where the current was overwhelming, and lifting the canoe over trees that had fallen during the storm and blocked the navigable shoreline of the river, while wearing our heavy packs and dealing with the worst bugs on the trip (there were three inch long bugs I’ve never seen before – super sized may flies?) that wanted nothing more than to run down the back of my shirt. That time on the Maligne was hell on earth. I was locked into an expressionless trance where my entire being was focused on the task at hand, locked into the flow of the river, the obstacles around us, every flick of the paddle through the water and every shift and shudder of the canoe as it tried to turn sidewise, threatening to dump us over falls, or the shifting current below rapids slapping at the zero-rockered hull of our Wenonah Minnesota II Canoe – these slaps felt like a hand under the surface of the water grabbing the stern to throw it sideways and then back. The most exhausted I was on the entire trip occurred after this section, not so much from the physical exertion, but from the series of adrenaline dumps and the necessity of peak focus held for four hours straight. Once we reached the portage around Twin Falls, the final falls emptying into Lac La Croix, my nerves were shot and I was completely drained of energy.

 The sun set on us as we reached Twin Falls and we took an hour-long break before navigating the final rapids through a pinch point to Lac La Croix, following the rising bubbles of flood waters all the way out into the main lake. I’ve never encountered these rising bubbles before, but I will not forget how ominous they were, the only indication of heavy water flow below the canoe when we were in calmer areas between rapids or falls, like a cauldron bubbling over a fire, certain to obliterate anything deposited into it. I’m not sure what causes the bubbles, but they were unique to my experience, though constant on that day. I again laid prone for the entire break, smoked a little, and found a second wind (maybe a third or fourth) and we paddled to the southern end of Coleman Island, halfway down Lac La Croix, in the dark. There is something magic, albeit unnerving, about navigating a gigantic body of water in the dark – one can see the major landforms and judge his position accordingly, but he must constantly take stock of the shoreline, lest he loses track and paddles miles out of the way. At 1:30 am, after about three hours of paddling in the dark, we pulled into camp, and I fell asleep without eating.

  The rest of the trip was calm in comparison to what we had faced during the past two days on the Falls Chain and the Maligne River through Tanner Lake but challenging by normal standards. We overturned below Wheelbarrow Falls after choosing the wrong path and were tossed about in the rapids below, but thirty minutes of bailing water out of the canoe on a pile of rocks in the middle of the rapids had us back on track in no time. The strong current on portions of Crooked Lake were totally unexpected – areas where on previous visits there was nothing but flat, still water, were suddenly transformed into swiftly currented suction points as water pressed the issue flowing from Saganaga Lake back into Lac La Croix through the southern route. Now heading back east the current was working against us, running in the same direction as the alternative northern route whose current we had paddled with through Quetico. There were times where Zach and I had to work hard to paddle upstream against these currents where it seems impossible that there would be enough water to create current in such deep sections of lake, and it continued through much of the narrows at the southern end of Crooked Lake. Curtain Falls was magnificent in flood conditions, and I was glad to be past it while standing above its entrance. The wind kicked our butts on Basswood, especially after we rounded U.S. point and 15-20 mph winds had us surfing large rollers for several miles, an uncomfortable feeling in a canoe for those not used to the whipping motion a canoe experiences when a large wave carries it with a quartering tail wind. In the stern I had a blast surfing these waves, but Zach was at the mercy of the wave and my draw strokes and more than once he made it clear that he was having much less fun than I was. Turning East for the final time we battled headwinds on big water crossings, cursing the conditions on that final test.

  At 5:10 pm we beached at prairie portage and ran across the portage to complete our loop, four days, eight hours, and forty-eight seconds after pushing off. We still had to paddle down Newfound and Moose Lakes, but we were happy to have completed our objective.

  It was not until we arrived at the house of our friend James Ehlers that we learned about how bad the storm and conditions we had experienced were. He showed us photos of roads washed out and destroyed by the same flood waters we had careened down on the Maligne, portaged around on the Falls Chain, battled against on Crooked Lake. 4.5 inches fell that first night of our trip in Ely, and closer to 7 inches in the western portion of our route. Many of our friends, especially the serious paddlers who know what high water means, had been hoping we would reroute and not brave the Maligne River, concerned for our safety, and they were flooding us with text messages all day on Saturday. When we arrived, they were surprised we had completed Hunter’s Island in those conditions. This certainly provided a gravity to our trip that I am proud of, if also a bit anxious about some of the more perilous moments we experienced.

The refrain of our trip is that we were never in imminent danger, but we were never far from it.

by Tyler Suter

Be safe and wear your P.F.D.s at all times on the water. Be prepared for the unexpected.