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Big Stone Wildlife Refuge Scene of Minnesota River and surrounding wetlands--so cool!
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Todd got this beaver right off the bow of our canoe
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On Marsh Lake, in rain
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The water on the right is where we were; the water on the left is where we needed to be. Backtrack we did.
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The mighty Minnesota river, reduced to this canoe size pipe under a back road
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Two wrong turns make a right? (Entry by Scott)
(Jun 5th, 2005) I am sitting in an old house on the shore of Big Stone Lake, about 3 miles north of Ortonville. On the opposite shore is South Dakota. This area was very popular for vacationing around the turn of the century, but seems to have slid off the radar screen a bit sometime during the last century, probably because it’s a ways off the beaten path. In fact we are at this point I think more remote than anywhere else we’ve been on the expedition. Ortonville has almost 2,000 people; the next town that is a ‘big’ town is probably Willmar, over an hour from here.

Tomorrow we are going to try and paddle from where we left our canoe to where I am sitting now. Yesterday we left our canoe in the forest where we took out of the now quite tiny Minnesota River, on the border of the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge. We took out in a pouring rain and spent the next hour trying to figure out how to rendezvous with Todd’s wife, Molly, who was driving on a road where we could see each other but not any through-way. Todd disappeared over a prairie hill and I stood in the rain, with my rain hat on, contemplating the universe. Which is a fancy way of saying I zoned out…

Eventually Molly and the kids and Todd pulled up and we had to figure out how to load our packs. Todd and I ended up heaving them onto the roof of the mini-van, causing his family inside to recoil in fear as our massive bags created small crater-like depressions above their heads. This rendezous had been planned for a few weeks, as our friend Steve Schenten, who worked with us the past few years at North Wind Winter Adventures, had volunteered to cook us a big meal and rent a cabin on the lake.

Yesterday was a good adventure on the paddling side of things; Todd’s last journal entry found us on the north end of Lac Qui Parle at a gorgeous campsite overlooking the lake and prairie. We set off from there and quickly finished off Lac Qui Parle and started up the narrower Minnesota up to Marsh Lake. The channel was surrounded by low grasses and weeds. At Marsh Lake there was a dam we had to portage around; a big version of a low head dam with a dangerous hydraulic. But there in what appeared to be the middle of nowhere, where many people fishing. Which made sense as we saw many fish leaping out of the water, sometimes getting their whole bodies up out of the river.

The air was calm and full of moisture, the clouds low and thick as we continued up Marsh Lake. The river channel intermingles with a series of wetlands on the southern border of the lake, and I knew we could easily miss the entrance to it in one of two ways. We could enter the maze of swamps too early and never find our way out, or we could wait to turn into one of the channels and end up stuck on the lake and miss the river altogether. We chose the first option.

This resulted in us following a channel to a point where we could clearly see a bridge and some parked cars—we knew that meant we’d found the river! Seconds later we paddled up to a thick mess of weeds that covered not more than 50 feet of water between us and our destination. I stood up in the canoe and looked—no way through. Foiled!

We tried closing our eyes and whispering incantations that would somehow teleport us over there, but ended up paddling back and taking left turns til we found it. We at lunch at the landing, in the rain and I promised to study the map more closely for the next section.

The next accidental detour was very scenic, I thought, as it ended with a neat drain pipe sticking out into the water and there were some very nice weed beds surrounding the dead end. I was in the stern and therefore ‘navigator’ for the day…somehow Todd in the bow seemed to not be sharing in my be-wonderment. Maybe that’s because not long before I had made it very clear to him that if we saw a turn to the left we should NOT take it, and then I’d promptly taken the next left over his protests on the reasoning that ‘this left is really way too soon and simply must be before the left that we don’t want to take’. It really had seemed like we’d been making good time, and we were excited for the fisherman who said they’d boat up to find us later to be impressed with our progress. By the time we made it back to the channel and started up, the fisherman were already there and wondering how it was that we were approaching them instead of vice versa. We smiled and explained that we’d been temporarily abducted by aliens and were now safely back on earth, then we paddled quickly by them and disappeared into the savannah-like landscape.

The channel narrowed up in a hurry and soon we were paddling slowly so as to not rupture our canoe when we hit the next pile of logs across the river. We ended up paddling through countless snags, usually through some combination of brute force, nuanced steering and prying, and our now famous technique of ‘shimmy-shuffling’ our boat up and over a log. We actually only had to get out of the canoe to pull it over a log one time. I thought it was fun; Todd I think has a different word that he uses…

By the time we reached the takeout it was 7:00pm and we’d paddled about 18 miles…a good day for us. When we got to the cabin, we found it was really an old summer home and a beautiful one at that. Steve is a gourmet chef we discovered, and he really went all out and made antipasto, cheese fondue and a margherita pizza. The last item he made on a grill, and I had the task of going out into the rain to light the grill. I am reasonably good at Canoeing, but little else and so I asked Steve many of the basic questions of how to light charcoal before venturing off. When I came back I announced with a very pleased tone that I’d successfully lit the charcoal. A while later I told Steve he should go check on it (because I knew he’d come back with many compliments as to my abilities). Instead he came back and said that he thought it odd that I hadn’t pulled the grill away from the side of this historic place but that I needn’t worry, he had pulled it away and the flames had probably only recently started licking up the side of the building.

We’ve come a long ways, over 400 miles now and are nearly finished with our long, uphill climb on the Minnesota River. If we make it to Big Stone Lake tomorrow, we will have 26 miles to go up the lake to Browns Valley, the continental divide. Today Steve and I drove up there while Todd and his family drove around. It was an incredible drive; we could see rain and light and clouds all mixing in a glorious and complex sky above the valley of the ancient glacial River Warren. Big Stone Lake is a long and sinuous lake as it lies in that ancient valley, and I think it will be fun to paddle up it. It’s southern shores are dotted with some cabins and houses, but they seem to drop off as you go north. The shoreline is wooded. Steve and I made it to Browns Valley and scouted out the Little Minnesota River, which starts in South Dakota and flows mostly south into the top end of Big Stone Lake. If Todd and I can canoe up it, we can get to the little town of Browns Valley and then portage a mile into Lake Traverse. From what Steve and I saw, it’s a very small river, with clean, clear water and it flows fairly quickly and is quite shallow. All of which means it will be interesting to try and canoe up it.

Tomorrow should be a challenge as we want to go about 17 miles, most of it on the uppermost stretches of the Minnesota proper, and from what we’ve seen and heard it’s very clogged with trees. This whole area out here is really cool and a nice contrast to the valley we’ve been paddling up for so long; the river is tiny, the prairie is huge…this borderland…

One more thing to mention is Browns Valley Man; it seems in 1933 an amateur archaeologist in Browns Valley found a skeleton on what was thousands of years ago an island in River Warren. Recent dating has put it between 9 and 12 thousand years old; one of the earliest humans ever found on this continent. Pretty cool…we are surrounded by history and geology everywhere we go on this trip..

Oh and finally I also want to mention that the past few days we’ve seen a lot of C.U.R.E signs at various landings on the river; C.U.R.E. stands for ‘Clean Up Our River Environment’ and Patrick Moore, whom we hung out with in Montevideo, is I believe the new president of the club. C.U.R.E. is trying to educate everyone about the importance and value of the Minnesota River and it’s natural resources of rich soil, water, rock outrcroppings, etc. From what we have seen, it is certainly a resource to be treasured and protected, and a place that deserves to be thought about very well and in a long-term way. As many people have told us, it is important to think about the impacts of our actions not just in the immediate sense, but for our children and their children, far into the future.

It’s been so great to get the feel of a place by paddling through it…the pace of paddling and being on the water make for a wonderful vantage point with which to see the world.

This combination we’ve had so far of physically demanding days of paddling and small town hospitality, history and food is pretty wild; in fact Steve has cooked us up another amazing meal tonight so I’ve got to go eat it! The Red River will be easier paddling and less towns, and in Canada the remote half of our trip will begin. It’s a long ways and a long time, so I’m going to enjoy the good company and food while I can.