IMBA Trail Solutions pro builder Stephen Mullins (center) working with CoGGs members at Sprirt Mountain (Photo courtesy Hansi Johnson)

The people of Duluth must have been pretty nice this year. Word came just before Christmas that the Cyclists of Gitchee-Gumee Shores (COGGS) have received a $250,000 grant from a Legacy Amendment fund to jump start development of a new 20-mile mountain biking trail system right in the heart of the city.

The Duluth Traverse will ultimately span the port town from Spirit Mountain to Amity Creek, from the bluffs of the St. Louis River valley to the crashing waves of Lake Superior. When completed, it will be the longest urban singletrack trail system in the nation, connecting several parks to each other which feature their own trail systems.

The Legacy grant comes only after five years of effort. And there are many years ahead and much work to do; this is not a project for the impatient or the lazy. Hansi Johnson is neither of those. One just has to follow his blog to see that (he recently captured several striking photos of riding a extra-fat tired Surly Pug bicycle on the ice of a St. Louis River reservoir).

The Midwest Regional Director for the International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA) has been by all accounts essential to the project’s success so far. Though Johnson lives outside Duluth, he travels the region helping local cycling groups develop trails in their communities. The Traverse will be in his backyard when complete. Johnson shared the news by noting this is about more than just a new riding opportunity:

It is great to see that off road cycling has become a movement about creating better communities, we have stepped out from singly pushing the “trail” and are now pushing “Trails” plural and how they can create positive lifestyles and change lives.

That might seem like lofty description of some narrow paths through the woods, but the plan is ambitious. The COGGS’ website describes a trail network that will improve opportunities to get out in the woods not just for bikers, but hikers, runners, skiers, snowshoers, and even equestrians:

This trail system will feature trail hubs with more extensive trail networks in Lester Park, Hartley Park, Piedmont-Brewer Park, Spirit Mountain and Mission Creek and then have trails connecting them all together.  Our goal for this system is to create the first 100+ mile system of singletrack all within an urban environment.  This will connect communities together via natural surface trails and also create an environment where everyone has trail access within a short distance of their home that they can walk, run or bike on.

It’s easy to see why so many groups and individuals would come together around the vision. In any good partnership, you do more together than what you can do alone, and this one is doing a lot. In addition to Johnson and his colleagues at IMBA and COGGS and its volunteers, key supporters of the project include the city of Duluth, notably its mayor Don Ness, and other trail groups in the city, representing the hikers, skiers, birders and average citizens who want more places to get out in the woods.

COGGS members building a technical section of trail in Piedmont Park (Photo courtesy Hansi Johnson)

The coalition has racked up success before this grant. Johnson told me in an email that COGGS has put vast amounts of volunteers hours into the city’s park restoring and closing old trails, as well as investing grant dollars in infrastructure improvements. This has taken a strain off the parks budget, while still improving the parks. This fall, they strongly supported a Parks and Libraries levy that was approved by voters on Election Day.

Mayor Ness recently proclaimed that he wants Duluth to be the “premier trail city in North America.” This isn’t just because there are a lot of mountain bikers or hikers in the town, but because the trail systems are seen as essential to the quality of life the city can offer, from health benefits to recreation opportunities to tourism dollars.

COGGS chairman Adam Sundberg said in a recent article in Northern Wilds that he sees the system having potential as a riding destination up there with other regional stars, reputation as a good place to live and raise a family: “We can have riding every bit as good as Rapid City, CAMBA [the Chequamegon area], UP of Michigan, but we have a town that is much more attractive for arts, culture, kids’ activities, shopping.”

A billboard advertising the Cuyuna trail system (Photo courtesy Hansi Johnson)

Just this summer, the biggest new mountain biking trail system in the state opened up amongst abandoned mine pits on the Iron Range at the new Cuyuna Country Recreation Area near Crosby. Johnson told Duluth-Superior Magazine that the park’s grand opening weekend this summer saw all the cafes in town entirely sold out of food.

Hopes are high for the Duluth Traverse. Right now, there is a map, trails scattered around the city, a bunch of dedicated folks, and now, some money to get things started, thanks to the voters and taxpayers of Minnesota. The entire system should cost about $1 million ultimately.

With the new funds, the partners will develop an implementation plan and begin work on the trail system at Lester Park. After that they will work on connector sections which will link trail networks to each other. Johnson wrote in an email that the grant will get things “rolling.”

More: View a map of the proposed trail system (PDF).

In Sunday’s newspaper, Josephine Marcotty offered a well-rounded look at controversial new mining proposals in northeastern Minnesota, much of it at the doorstep of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. I have been reading, talking, and writing about sulfide mining for three-and-a-half years now. I am convinced that the extraction of copper, nickel and other metals in the Arrowhead would forever harm large swaths of our state. And the money and minerals do not outweigh that risk.

In her article, Marcotty said Minnesota is facing “its biggest environmental decision in a generation: Whether to open its arms to hard-rock mining, an industry that could bring thousands of jobs — and a record of environmental calamities — to the wildest and most beautiful corner of the state.”

This is indeed a decision for all Minnesotans to make. The Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness has been working for years to educate citizens, to raise awareness of what is proposed and what it could mean for Minnesota’s clean water, and to ensure we act as the good stewards of our land and water that previous generations did. This is necessary so our kids and grandkids will be able to drink from the lake on BWCAW trips, to eat fresh-caught fish, and to wander trackless woods.

This past weekend, the Friends met with officials from Twin Metals along Highway 1, near the Kawishiwi River and Birch Lake, to see where the company — a partnership between junior mining company Duluth Metals and Chilean mining giant Antofagasta — is doing exploratory drilling and to learn more about their plans. The group spent a couple hours touring the woods, talking and asking a lot of questions.

The Twin Metals employees said they intend to build a mine that will not pollute. They didn’t try to convince the Friends representatives in two short hours to forget their concerns, but rather listened and promised continued dialogue. They also spoke at length of “new, modern technology” and a commitment to “doing it right.” They believe they can do this without harming some of our state’s most cherished natural places.

The fact is that nobody opens up a mine planning to pollute. But yet it happens again and again. A 2006 study of such mines found that at least 85 percent of mines in wet environments like Minnesota caused unanticipated pollution.

Copper and nickel are sold on global markets at global prices. Unfortunately, in other countries, there are few environmental protections. This means metals can be mined cheaply, and sold cheaply. Those metals are what Twin Metals, PolyMet and others would have to compete with if they mine in Minnesota. Doing it right affects the bottom line, and digging deep below the earth to extract widely-scattered minerals is expensive in the first place. Preventing pollution carries price tags.

Twin Metals wants to mine in the forests of Stony River Township, near Ely. Something happened in the township two weeks ago that didn’t get much notice. Maybe it was overshadowed by the Pagami Creek Fire news, or maybe the weight of the event just didn’t register. The township’s board of supervisors unanimously passed a resolution calling on Minnesota to enact a moratorium on sulfide mining, and short of that, not allow any mining in the township.

Residents of the township have been hearing from the company and other mining proponents for years and after much consideration, decided they wanted to keep their community the way it is, a rural lake district, not one overrun by trucks and blasting and pollution. In a Duluth News-Tribune article about the resolution (subscription required), one of the supervisors who voted for it said it simply and said it best, “We’ve got clean water and a healthy forest and we want to keep it that way.”

The resolution is non-binding. State and federal governments will ultimately decide whether or not Twin Metals ever mines. But the supervisors of Stony River Township, and the community members who encouraged the resolution, have given an answer to this great environmental decision our state faces: Clean water will always be more valuable than any precious metal.

Related posts:

1. Made to last
2. Wilderness words
3. Bridging the past to the future

A week ago, I was waking up at my campsite on Lake Insula, in the Boundary Waters. It was going to be another beautiful day, the morning light seemingly soft and quiet. I made coffee and enjoyed the view west across the bay, where an old white pine stood tall over blowdown forest — mostly scrubby balsam and birch. Several miles behind the pine, a column of smoke rose from the horizon.

The next morning, the campsite was smoky. It wasn’t unbearable, but made for a scratchy throat. I wondered if we would have to move if the smoke didn’t lift. But by noon, the column was not stretched out toward us, but rose straight into the sky. A big stormlike cloud flowed east over our heads.

That evening, we went out fishing on the lake and watched the sun set behind the plume. I snapped a photo of my friend Wade, in the bow of the canoe, starting at the smoke. I did not imagine it would grace the front page of the Star Tribune just a couple days later.

On Monday, after we had gotten out of the woods, I posted a photo slideshow of the trip on YouTube. It has now been watched more than 2,800 times. The photos literally spread like wildfire as the Pagami Creek Fire blew up from 1,000 acres to 4,500 to 11,000 to suddenly 60,000 and then 100,000 acres.

Ultimately, in addition to the Star Tribune, the pictures showed up on MPR’s homepage, on KARE 11′s broadcasts, on KTTC in Rochester, and even the Door County Daily News, where smoke from the fire was noticeable hundreds of miles away.

Wednesday, I was interviewed by Bill Hudson of WCCO-TV about the experience. The headline for the story on the station’s website was sensational — our trip was neither “harrowing” nor an “escape” — and there were some problems with the chronology and other facts. Maybe I told the story disjointedly, or maybe it wasn’t exciting enough. I posted a full, factual account of the experience on my personal blog.

Now, the fire has moved on and so has the attention. Reporters have flocked to the north woods and there is a considerable amount of on-the-ground reporting being done. I have told my story enough times, anyway.

This fire has grabbed the attention of the whole state, it seems. The Boundary Waters is like nowhere else in Minnesota, nor even the country or the world. And now 10 percent of it has burned.

As far as I can tell from the fire progression maps, it looks like that whole half of the lake where we were camped for three nights was burned over a day or two after we left. A group of rangers out checking for visitors got caught out on the lake when the fire hit and had what sounds like a truly harrowing experience as the fire whipped up a windstorm and forced them to take cover under their fire shelters on a rocky island in the middle of the lake for an hour as hot embers and ash rained down on them. I wonder if that that centuries-old pine across from our campsite on Insula still stands.

This week, I have also thought a lot about the people who live at the edge of the Boundary Waters. I know what the smoke from just 4,500 acres looked like. It appears on the horizon like a mythical creature, out-of-control and possessing incredible destructive power. It is a force like an earthquake or a hurricane and we feel small against it.

The past couple days have been cool and calm, and there has even been some rain and snow, which has given firefighters a chance to regroup and bring in reinforcements. But the next couple days are forecast to be warmer and windier again.

While we were camped on Insula last week, a bald eagle frequently perched in a tree on an island across from us. It spent long hours there watching the lake. As we paddled across the lake on our way out, the eagle flew above us and past us and into the big white pine we had been admiring. I figure its nest was there. I wonder if it still is.

If the fire flares up again, though, I hope it is only white pines and eagle’s nests that suffer, not humans or homes. The boreal forest is meant to burn sometimes; our habitations are simply not.

Related posts:

1. Wild fire
2. “The Firegrate Review”
3. Wilderness tragedy

When four of us arrived at the pair of portages from Lake One to Lake Two on Thursday morning, there were a dozen or so Forest Service personnel scattered along the trails. The Pagami Creek Fire, which had been started by lightning a couple weeks earlier, had moved toward this popular area of the wilderness, and threatened to run north into private property. A controlled burn of about 700 acres had been executed a couple days earlier to prevent the fire from spreading in this direction. The air was hazy, and occasionally a tree could be heard falling back in the woods, the result of either fire or water-softened soils from fire control sprinkler lines.

As I pulled on a Duluth pack, I ran into my old friend Thompson, who has been working as a wilderness ranger out of Ely for the past couple years. He and others were on a public safety crew, ensuring no visitors were harmed by the fire activity. He had been camped on Lake Two for 14 days, and would be heading back to town later that day.

We paddled across calm lakes eastward, soon putting the fire behind us. We arrived at Lake Insula late that afternoon, and picked a campsite featuring a huge beach and a view to the west, toward the direction where smoke from the fire was still visible on the horizon. We stayed on Insula for three nights and the shifting character of the smoke was a source of constant interest.

One morning, I woke up first as usual and started water boiling for coffee. The lake seemed hazier, and the smoke on the horizon less defined than previously. It occurred to me that we were now directly downwind, something I had been afraid would happen. As the morning progressed, it never got very smoky, but I’m not sure we could have stuck it out if that level of smoke had continued. Fortunately, the winds shifted and the smoke rose up off the lake by midday. It continued to blow overhead, and ash and crispy, half-burnt leaves fell on us all day long.

We left Insula on Sunday morning and started paddling back east, first into Hudson Lake and then Lake Four. The smoke plume was massive, and for the first day since we arrived, there was wind, blowing out of the northwest. While carrying the canoe over the quarter-mile portage between Insula and Hudson, a helicopter and an airplane few over, low to the ground. The helicopter passed over us again as we paddled hard against the wind on Hudson. For my friend Eric, who was home on leave from flying Blackhawk helicopters in Afghanistan, and who wanted nothing more than a few days of peace and quiet and certainly the absence of helicopters, the visit was unwelcome but accepted.

At the portage into Lake Four, another party pulled up to land and said the area was being evacuated. That was about all I gleaned, and we continued on our way. We paddled another couple miles before meeting a Forest Service canoe mid-lake. In addition to telling us that the area was being closed to visitors, they took the names of everyone in our party and said they would relay it back to people at the landing, who would check our names off the list when we arrived. We also saw a couple big canoes with motors on the back, an incongruous sight on the non-motorized wilderness lakes.

Crossing Lake Three, we got our best views of the fire and the smoke. We only saw a few distant flares of flame, but the plume had risen to some 25,000 feet in the sky, by pilot Eric’s estimation, and consumed much of the southern horizon. The smoke was luckily blowing away from us, to the south and east, and we paddled under sunny blue skies.

Our progress toward the landing was marked by Forest Service personnel positioned on shore seemingly every half-mile. As we would paddle past, they would talk into their radios. At the portages, groups of the hardhat-wearing young men volunteered to carry our gear over the portages. While I respected that they were just trying to keep the portages clear while dozens of groups were streaming out of the wilderness, I had to politely declined the offers, explaining I don’t come to the Boundary Waters to have other people carry my stuff.

We had another couple miles to paddle on Lake One and met one more canoe of Forest Service staff. The man in the back started by saying, “I’m sure you’re sick of talking to the Forest Service,” and then just confirmed we knew we had to leave.

While the fire was maybe 1,000 acres when we went into the woods on Thursday, estimates were that it was 4,500 acres yesterday. Word comes today that it is believed to have grown to 11,000 acres, fueled by the dry air and strong winds. It is being allowed to burn for the most part, as fires are a natural part of the ecosystem and wilderness is uniquely managed to let natural processes occur. A few efforts are being made to control the fire where it threatens to escape the wilderness and potentially harm private property.

Check out the below slideshow of photos of the fire:

Related posts:

1. Pagami proximity
2. “The Firegrate Review”
3. The Firegrate Review

My journey north on Thursday took me to Two Harbors and then straight north to visit a man who has read everything Thoreau ever wrote and owns a canoe Garrison Keillor once paddled. Friday afternoon was foggy as I drove home via a circuitous route on lonely National Forest roads. I went 20 miles at a time or more without seeing another vehicle.

There was pretty scenery, but there was also interesting scenes. I documented the trip with some photos in the slideshow below.

Related posts:

1. Kinnickinnic River Land Trust site launched
2. Wild fire
3. Pagami proximity

In mid-May, I attended my cousin Samantha’s wedding in Mondovi, Wisconsin. The ceremony was in a small Methodist church. The minister stood before the couple and talked to them in a casual yet thoughtful tone, as if we were all gathered around a dinner table. He said that when he was growing up, living on a nearby farm, they had used baling twine for many purposes. He had learned that you could braid three strands of twine together to make strong rope, but you couldn’t braid two strands. He likened those two strands to the couple, and the third strand to God.

A couple weeks later, on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, I took to the St. Croix River with my wife Katie and our black lab Lola. Katie and I have been paddling on the St. Croix for years. I don’t remember when we first went, but it’s been several times a year for at least the six years we’ve been married. And I’ve been canoeing the river since I was a junior at Stillwater Area High School, when biology teacher Jeff Ranta took a group of us that spring to see a Great Blue Heron rookery near Copas.

Memorial Day weekend, the water was high and the current moving fast. Weaving amongst narrow islands, we drifted and talked about that metaphor the minister had spoken of at the wedding, of the twine braided to rope. It came to me that the St. Croix River is a third strand, braided into our lives. There are surely other strands, too: our families, friends, compassion, words. But the river possesses a mysterious combination of constancy and fluidity. And when there is just the two of us and the dog in the canoe, and the river carrying us forward, I sit silently in awe and wonder at it.

We went back to the river last Saturday. This time there were eight people: four couples, two married, two not, split amongst three canoes. And, of course, the dog. We happened to float the same stretch of the river as Memorial Day weekend. The water was down a couple feet from May, and warm for swimming, but still high enough that beaches and sandbars were few. We let the current carry us, we saw eagles and osprey, a musky was caught and released.

On the trip was myself, fretting about logistics, safety, sandwiches; Katie, gracefully duffing in the middle of the canoe, eating cherries most of the way; Wade, making a sombrero look sensible; Audrey, her fingernails painted red, white, and blue; Slim, often reclining, face to the sky; Nel, not only smart enough to bring coffee but generous enough to share it; Gabe, who dedicated the day to his fly rod; and Liz, steering the angler downstream with a saintly smile. And there was the river, the third strand of twine.

At another wedding this summer, in the woods of Afton, my friend Sunday delivered the sermon for Doug and Heidi. Sunday spoke about what Spiritual Humanism has to say about relationships. It came to mind again as I traveled down the St. Croix on Saturday, in the company of three other devoted couples. Sunday spoke of Plato, and said, “In searching for and recognizing the divine within your beloved, one discovers the divine in oneself, and comes to recognize that, in all its forms, divinity is one and the same.”

That might call to mind the words of Norman Maclean, at the end of his famous story, “Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it.” It also makes me think of another concept in that story (which is arguably about relationships more than fly fishing): that to love is to seek to understand, though we can love fully without fully understanding.

The skies last Saturday were blue and clear. A mile from the take-out, we stopped at a small beach and swam and sat in the water as the sun dropped toward the trees on the western bank. The water was perfect and the silence absolute. I said I thought I might just stay there. But then I figured the mosquitoes would be bad and my own bed sounded better than sand. We got back in the canoe — a wedding gift from our friends — and headed on down the river.

Related posts:

1. Once more to the river
2. St. Croix River parks launch family event summer series
3. How to start your summer

Read on for the latest post on my Star Tribune blog.

Tomorrow is the last day to comment on a Superior National Forest proposal for more mining exploration at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Learn more and speak up at www.preciouswaters.org.

Last June, I spent a day canoeing down the South Kawishiwi River with reporters and photographers from two major Minnesota news outlets. We launched at a Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness entry point a short portage from the Spruce Road, then almost immediately left the BWCAW as we headed downstream toward Birch Lake.

Also in our party was my Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness colleague Betsy Daub and local Ely canoe outfitter and guide Jason Zabokrtsky of Ely Outfitting Company (and his dog Lexee, who I’m pretty sure has spent more days in a canoe than any other dog in the state).

Lexee-dog surveys rapids on the South Kawishiwi River

It was a beautiful, but nondescript, few miles of river. A snowmobile bridge crossed at one point, as did a power line. While we saw a handful of people during our brief trip through the Wilderness proper, we saw no one on the river outside the BWCAW border. We did see mother mergansers nervously herding their tiny chicks around the shallows, dragonflies zipping over the water, and turtles sunning themselves on logs.

Our group was there to see the area targeted by mining companies seeking copper, nickel and other metals in sulfide ores at the edge of the Boundary Waters. Development of such mines in the area have not gotten as much attention as PolyMet, the first company to try to open up such a sulfide mine in Minnesota. PolyMet, further along in the process, is some 15 or 20 miles southwest of where we were paddling.

The river we were on is in the middle of the area of interest for companies including Twin Metals — a joint partnership between Duluth Metals, a junior mining company based in Vancouver, and Chilean conglomerate Antofagasta. The partnership also recently acquired Franconia Minerals, making for a real mining juggernaut.

A sulfide mining drill site near the BWCAW

On the way to our canoe put-in, we stopped at a clearing on the side of Highway 1, where a couple young men ran a noisy drill mounted on the back of a truck. Gray sludge from the drill was pumped into a holding pond excavated nearby. The iconic north woods highway just east of the South Kawishiwi River is lined by such clearings in the woods, a wooden sign with a number nailed to a tree by the road, and red pipes jutting out of the ground, capping old drill holes.

Already, Boundary Waters users are hearing the noise of such drills while on wilderness canoe trips. And Birch Lake, popular for fishing, camping, house boating, and all sorts of other classic Minnesota activities, is really feeling the brunt. Homeowners and resort guests hear around-the-clock drilling, and they fish the lake alongside drill barges.

On our canoe trip, we portaged around a last set of rapids and then stopped at the Outward Bound camp on the Kawishiwi, where they have been sending young people into the wilderness since 1964. A staff member talked to us about how he could often hear the drilling in his cabin at night.

The Superior National Forest is considering a new plan for more mineral exploration in the area. The comment period closes tomorrow on the environmental impact statement for 33 permits to explore for which several companies have applied. This means more roads and ripped-up forest in this area, popular outside the wilderness for hunting, hiking, birding, and ATV and snowmobile riding. More importantly, it sets Minnesota down a path toward giant mines at the edge of the most popular wilderness area in America.

These aren’t the iron mines that “helped us win World War II,” as some are fond of repeating. This is a new beast, with pollution problems that Minnesota has never before encountered. Last June, after paddling the South Kawishiwi, we visited an old site along the Spruce Road where a company had dug up a bunch of rock in the 1970s, seeking copper and nickel. Nasty orange soup was leaching out of the rock pile and into a nearby wetland.

The Friends had the drainage tested in an independent lab, which showed levels of copper, arsenic and other metals and chemicals which exceeded water quality standards and could pose a threat to both aquatic life and human health. This was 36 years after the rock had been excavated, and of course the company that did the digging is long gone.

Certainly, we have heard much about the benefits these mines could provide. Jobs and metals needed for modern technology, primarily. But there is a wilderness cherished by tens of thousands where these metals happen to be buried. And outside that wilderness are thousands of acres of public land — wild lakes and rivers, vast forests. For the many that believe the clean water, healthy forests and wilderness of northern Minnesota is something special, putting it all at risk for a couple decades of mining seems like a poor trade-off.

The mining industry has not given us much reason for confidence, besides a lot of talk about “doing it right.” In addition to the Spruce Road acid mine drainage, there was the PolyMet environmental review, which earned a failing grade from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in February 2010.

The environmental impact statement for the mineral exploration near the South Kawishiwi and Birch Lake is unfortunately flawed, too. It tries to do two things — provide guidelines for even more exploration in the future, and review impacts of the 33 permits up for consideration — and doesn’t do either very well. There is not nearly enough information about how noise pollution in the BWCAW will be prevented, what will be done to ensure local ponds and streams are not de-watered, or how species like the Canada lynx and wolves will be protected. You can learn more on the Friends’ website.

We started and ended our day of canoeing last summer at River Point Resort, located where the South Kawishiwi enters Birch Lake. Husband and wife Steve and Jane Koschak run it, hosting vacationers in quiet cabins, and outfitting canoe parties heading out on wilderness canoe trips. Steve’s dad started the resort as a fishing camp in 1944 and Steve built many of the resort’s buildings himself. Those cabins were built to last.

Learn more about the mineral exploration proposal and comment by the end of the day tomorrow, June 30.

Sunset on Birch Lake

Related posts:

1. Minnesota’s “biggest environmental decision in a generation”
2. The Firegrate Review
3. Wilderness words

Last Friday, I heard the news that a young man was missing in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Ty Sitter had been on a fishing trip to Swan Lake, on the eastern end of the wilderness, with his father and 19-year-old brother. He left camp by himself about 7 p.m. Thursday to do some fishing. The Star Tribune reported:

When he didn’t return to their campsite by 9 p.m., his father and brother began to look for him, finding his canoe upright and unoccupied on the lakeshore. It was filled with 4 inches of water, but had everything Sitter left with — a life jacket, fishing net, tackle box and rock anchor — except his fishing pole. According to the Cook County Sheriff’s Office, the two paddled out and alerted authorities at midnight; a search began immediately.

His brother and father had pledged to not come home without finding Sitter. Very sadly, the young man’s body was located Monday with sonar in about 90-100 feet of water. In a Monday interview with North Shore radio station WTIP, Cook County Sheriff Mark Falk reported that searchers located the body within a minute of starting to use a sonar device. They showed the image to Sitter’s family, who also said they were confident it was the young man. Due to equipment malfunctions, rough weather, and the remote location, it took authorities until last night to recover Sitter’s body.

This is a tragedy. An annual vacation ending up with the worst possible scenario. Sitter was fortunate to have a devoted father and brother, and a fiancee back home who had kept up hope. But nothing changes the fact that the full potential of his life was unfulfilled, and his relationships incomplete.

The sad event brought to mind an essay written by Mike Link, published in Backpacker magazine in 1980 and printed in the Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness’s newsletter a couple years ago. Link, the long-time director of Audubon Center of the Northwoods, made the news last year when he and his wife Kate Crowley marked their retirement by walking the entire way around Lake Superior. Titled “Risk and the Wilderness,” Link’s essay was about a tragedy he had suffered: the death of his son in a kayaking accident in New Zealand. Mike wrote (PDF):

My life has been shaped by risk and the wilderness in ways I never could have predicted.

My son and I used to talk around campfires about grizzly bears, sheer cliffs, storms, distant rivers—the beauty and exhilaration of the outdoors. It was a common love we could share. And we also talked about risk. If a bear kills me, don’t let anyone try to hunt it down, one of us said. If I get lost in the woods, don’t send in the helicopters and search planes, let me find my own way out, the other responded. If I die on a river, don’t let them dam it and steal its life on my account. These were our campfire conversations. More »

My heart goes out to those Sitter left behind. He died in a place he obviously loved, but I’m sure that’s meager consolation: he was simply too young. I know that, on future canoe trips, I’ll tighten the straps on my life jacket and keep the dry clothes handy, and I won’t roll my eyes when my loved ones worry about what I will do if there’s an emergency. And I’ll respect the wilderness not just for its many gifts, but also what it can take away.

Related posts:

1. Wilderness words

A bald eagle chick was briefly kidnapped from a nest on the Mississippi River recently.

A group of folks from the Great River Road Visitor & Learning Center (better known as Freedom Park) in Prescott, the Misssissippi National River and Recreation Area, and the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway are thinking about putting a webcam on an eagle nest at the confluence of the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers, and went to take a close-up look at the nest and its occupant one day last month.

Professional tree-climber Jim Spickler evaluated the nest for a potential camera but also brought the 10 lb., seven-week chick down to the ground for a visit with a researcher, who took blood samples and banded it before returning the eaglet to the nest.

Climber Jim Spickler ascends to the eagle nest

Spickler, who travels all over the globe climbing our planet’s tallest trees and who has helped install several such eagle cameras, rated the Prescott nest as at least a nine out of 10. It’s solidly built, within sight (and transmission range) of Freedom Park, and there are good branches to mount a camera on where there won’t be a risk of the lens being covered in, well, eagle excrement.

Like the very popular camera in Decorah, Iowa this spring, the Prescott camera would let anyone on the Internet watch life in the nest next spring, 24 hours a day. In the video below, Spickler first evaluates potential camera locations, but it’s the the close-up footage of the eaglet at the end that is both fascinating and endearing.

Route, of the National Park Service, has been conducting research into contaminants in our environment, and using blood samples from young eagles on the Mississippi and St. Croix Rivers and the Apostles Islands to measure levels of chemicals.

Eagle populations have recovered to the point the birds were removed from the Endangered Species List in 2007. What almost wiped them out once is still a problem, though: the birds accumulate pollutants because of their diet and the fact that they are at the top of their food chain, which makes them excellent indicators of pollution levels.

If the webcam project goes forward, information about Route’s research will also be available on the website. That seems like an excellent way to mix entertainment and education, and it might inspire viewers to do more to protect eagles, and ourselves.

Taking measurements

The nest camera idea came up about two-and-a-half months ago and is far from a sure thing. Many details still need to be worked out, including permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and funding. Bird expert Jim Fitzpatrick, who runs Carpenter Nature Center just upriver on the St. Croix, another project partner, is working on that process.

Watching the video and viewing the photos, I wondered how the chick and its parents responded to the intrusion and abduction. In an e-mail, Jim Shiely of Friends of Freedom Park told me, “When the eaglet was being captured in the nest the eagles flew overhead. You can hear them on the video. They did not and do not attack climbers except in rare cases.”

Thanks to Jim Shiely (disclosure: my wife’s uncle) for sending the photos and video and providing a lot of information. Photos and video by Jim Spickler, Margaret Smith, and Roger Santelman.

Related posts:

1. President’s Day weekend skiing

The bridge was built simultaneously from each end, and had to line up in the middle. 1911.

On June 1, 1911, construction was completed on a half-mile long, 185-foot tall railroad bridge near Stillwater. Two days later, the first train crossed the bridge. About four still do so every day.

A small group of people visited the bridge on the Minnesota side Wednesday evening, its 100th birthday. The gravel pull-off on the road where the trail leads down to the river was otherwise empty; no other well-wishers had come. But the bridge sees plenty of revelers — mostly 80 or more years younger than itself — on a regular basis. They make circles of rocks in the woods and light fires inside them, then they drink beer and leave the cans as offerings to the bridge or the river or their own self-centered youth.

The place was quiet Wednesday evening, but perhaps the bridge didn’t want a party.

Looking from the Wisconsin side, 1910.

The walk down the bluffs to the foot of the bridge follows an old road that was once a driveway for some cabins, which the bridge has outlived. Stretches of concrete and asphalt reveal its history, but today it is just a scenic trail through thick green woods.

Wayside rests include a stand of cedars overlooking a deep ravine with a spring-feed creek at its bottom; a massive white pine, which probably has the bridge beat for years; and a short set of stairs from the road to the site of a former cabin, where a small ring of rocks encircles charred logs.

When the trail reaches the bottom of the bluff, it crosses the spring-fed creek on a little wooden footbridge, which was askew when we walked across it, tilted at a precarious angle toward the water. That bridge was probably only 10 years old.

The St. Croix River was still up high — the normal pebble and gravel beach underneath the bridge was submerged. A muddy flat spot on the banks featured a circle of rocks with the remnants of a fire inside. And there it was.

June 1, 2011

The High Bridge was designed by C.A.P. Turner, six years after he designed Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge and 15 years before designing the Mendota Bridge over the Minnesota River. It rises out of the wooded islands of the river as if to inspire the trees.

The bridge was there during both World Wars, during the Depression, during Prohibition. Many generations of teenagers have come here to drink beer and make fires, to see the broad valley painted in moonlight, and to look down on eagles soaring over the river.

November 2007

The most authoritative page on the Web about the bridge is probably John Weeks’ site. Weeks has documented in photos, history, and statistics all of the bridges on the St. Croix, as well as on several other major rivers, including the Mississippi. He is fond of the High Bridge:

“The Arcola High Bridge was added to the National Register of Historical Places in 1977. Experts have called this bridge the most spectacular multi-span steel arch bridge in the world. Others compare the magnificent steel work to that of Eiffel’s creations in France.”

Wednesday night, nobody sang “Happy Birthday.” Everyone pulled out cameras or phones with cameras and snapped photos exactly like the ones we have all taken there before, the bridge identical to itself all these years. The only changes are the color of the trees, the clouds in the sky.

Looking from the Wisconsin side, October 2006. Photo by Jim Brekke, used with permission.

The walk back up to the car was a good reminder of our own years — or at least our years of sedentary living. One’s legs burn climbing those 200 feet back to the top of the bluffs. You try to conceal how hard you are breathing.

Later, over Burgermeisters, French Fries, and 12 oz. mugs of cold, light beer at Meister’s on the South Hill, a disagreement erupted about whether a new restaurant in town was going for a “Colonial” or “Revolutionary” America feel. The two holding conflicting opinions were once students of Advanced Placement U.S. History at Stillwater High. Their teacher, my mother, would have been very proud.

Related posts:

1. Bridging the past to the future
2. Sunset in St. Croix country
3. All quiet in Afton