Growing up in Minnesota you would always hear about people taking trips to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) in northern Minnesota. Even the church I grew up in would do a yearly men’s trip up there to fish and camp for a week. However, I was a nerdy little kid who preferred books and computers to being outdoors and so I tended to avoid those types of activities growing up.

As I got older I got a bit more adventurous and started to enjoy more travel to outdoor destinations. I started doing a little bit of camping on and off through high school and when the kids were young. It was mostly just car camping, but I did have a fun couple of nights up north with friends on both the Superior Hiking Trail and in Grand Marais.

As I’ve continued to progress in my enjoyment of the outdoors, and really started to understand my innate desire for adventure, I’ve sought out new and different things to scratch the itch for more and more exploration. A year or so ago I mentioned to my friend Mike that I had never been to the BWCA, despite living in Minnesota almost my entire life. He also had never gone, and so the idea was borne to do a trip as a group (two couples) to see what we were missing out on.

I’ve always enjoyed the planning stages of a trip and for first-timers going into something as huge as the BWCA, planning was of utmost importance. The BWCA is over a million acres in size and has zero roads or other infrastructure apart from the bits on the edge that connect to the outside world. You travel via canoe carrying all of your needs with you as you make your way around 1200+ lakes.

We are all experienced backpackers/bikepackers, but the BWCA would present us with some new challenges and we were excited to try something that none of us were “good at” per se. Therefore, we decided to build our trip around using an established outfitter to help ensure we got launched successfully. Based on recommendations from friends we opt’d to go with Sawbill Outfitters out of Tofte and I reached out to them to get help with planning and equipment.

Based on their recommendation, and permit availability for our launch date, we settled on doing the Lady Chain loop. The outfitter would shuttle us down to Kawishiwi Lake (entry point 37) and from there we would make a journey back through 10 different lakes, many rivers, and probably a dozen and a half portages. The route was well established and would give us a really good sense of some of the different types of adventures that you can have in the BWCA.

We had everything we needed from a camping perspective, so our equipment rental list consisted of two canoes (with paddles) and some portage packs. These are specially designed packs that stay low under your neck so that you can carry them while you’re portaging a canoe over your head. This means that they’re not as comfortable as a traditional backpack, but most portages are extremely short. Our route’s longest portage was 0.9 miles (289 rods in canoe parlance), so backpack fit and comfort wasn’t a big deal.

Our plan had us staying at the campground at Sawbill Lake on Wednesday night, and then getting our canoes and our shuttle over to Kawishiwi on Thursday morning. This would give us up to 4 full days of lake time (3 nights) to get ourselves back to our vehicles. We had done a bit of kayaking and canoeing on local lakes here in the cities to prepare and so all that was left was to pack and hit the road for adventure.

Next entry… launching into the unknown.