A beautiful mid-March Saturday was a weekend calling to get the first taste of spring. In northern Minnesota, spring tastes like maple.

I’ve seen pictures and videos of people tapping trees with cordless electric power drills. To me, that’s an atrocity. There’s only one way to correctly and artfully tap a tree, and that’s with a hand-powered bit brace.

With over a foot of snow still on the ground, I navigated the woods on snowshoes to drill and pound in 30 spiles. The sap was off to a slow start, but the drip had begun nonetheless. (The next few days clouded over and cooled off, so I don’t expect the sap to be off to a run for another week.)

The spiles are a combination of old and new. The dozen old ones were used for decades by my grandfather on the north shore of Mille Lacs. I’m not certain, but I’m fairly sure they were also used by his father in the same area before that.

 

After the spiles were driven, the chickadees called me further into the woods. So with snowshoes on, I headed down and up the ravine and deeper into my familiar wooded grounds. Out of the upland hardwoods and into the conifer bog I went, following my sunken trail from a couple of weeks before. I had expected the track I packed to be riddled with prints of deer, fox, and other passersby. I was surprised to still see very little activity in the woods. Some chickadees, woodpeckers, and ravens were above, and some aggressive penmanship of a pileated woodpecker, but there was scarcely a critter track on the forest floor.

Into the spruce bog I came across an exciting treat. In the shadows of the the spruce, the limp, red wrists of the leather leaf was showing more and more. Even more special, however, was revealed a cluster of pitcher plants among a sphagnum knoll. Red and erect, and even capturing its first bug of the season, I was impressed how well last summer’s pitchers had survived our brutal winter.

It’s amazing how something so tropical-looking can be that hardy for a Minnesota winter. The bog is much more difficult to navigate in the summer- given the soft ground, open water, and swarms of mosquitoes; but I hope to return in spring and summer to find more carnivorous plants, elusive orchids, and other treasures that can only be seen in their natural habitat. In the meantime, it’s back to the maples in hopes of a good sap run during the upcoming days.

A quick little hike about two hours long…

It’s late February, and after a long winter with mere moderate amounts of snow, we’ve had a good series of heavier accumulation.  With six or so more inches fallen on Saturday night, and a 40F forecast for Monday, I saw Sunday as the opportunity to get out in the woods before it all started melting…

Back into the woods, down a familiar ravine and back up the facing hill, I made very slow progress… with over two feet of very fluffy snow, my snowshoes seemed to do nothing. The path I was cutting sank a good foot below the surface. Yet, I’m sure without the snowshoes, I would have found it even considerably harder (but softer?) to trudge.

I checked my owl house. Still no residents, judging from the snow accumulated at the entrance and on the perch. Yet there seemed to be no residents in the woods as a whole. Where normally I might see a network of animal trails on the fresh snow- deer, squirrel, rabbit, fox, and the like- I saw no tracks at all. With all the deep fluffy snow, I imagine it was too much effort for the animals to travel, and so they were all hunkered down. No doubt that evening they would take advantage of my freshly carved trail making for easier passage.

I went deeper into my familiar woods into one of the black spruce bogs. There’s no tranquility like a sleeping spruce bog in the winter.

At one point, I heard the Phoebe-like call of the Chickadee. Later a raven flew over. Finally I crossed some deer tracks on high ground that looked to be from that morning. There was life awake in the forest after all.

I circled back out of the bog and found my way back to crossing my trail in. The hike out was a breeze comparatively, as I could enjoyed the freshly cut trail I had earlier stomped out. I’d like to return in a day or two and see what tracks took advantage of the new thoroughfare.

Here’s a small world follow-up to our Five Guys in a Three-Man. …

Today picture popped up in my newsfeed- a picture of a canvas tent that looked very much like the tent of the campers we passed hiking in on our 2018 BWCA winter camping trip. Of course, a lot of views of white canvas tents on the edge of a boreal shore are going to look vaguely familiar; but this caught my eye as one that looked very much like the guys we saw hiking in. I gave them a passing reference as ‘We passed another crew of chionophiles on the way in‘ during the recanting of our adventure.

Well, as I read through the article, it listed Wood Lake as their location, the same lake we camped; and it listed temperature conditions that were very similar temperatures to what we encountered… I have no doubt, these were the fellow campers we passed on Wood Lake, but he wrote his story better than I wrote ours:

https://www.grandforksherald.com/sports/outdoors/4408085-winter-bwca-adventure-qualifies-extreme-camping

Three strikes and I’m out. Uffda. Maybe I’m just wet (and frozen) behind the ears, but my third winter camping trip for the season and we called it early. Again. For the third time this season. Three for three. Lessons learned, experience earned. – once as a solo, once as a trio, once with five.

We got a late start for the short days of winter, but into the BWCA we hiked, pulling our overloaded pulks behind us. We trekked about two miles in- half was a hilly, wooded descent, and half was flat across frozen lake. We passed another crew of chionophiles on the way in. After reaching and choosing our site, we set up camp and set off to gather wood in the few hours of daylight we had left. With many dead-standing birch visible amongst the spruces, it didn’t seem like it would be difficult to find dead wood down.

 
We had erected two tents for the five guys on the adventure, but we quickly decided to try squeezing us all into the 3-man Snowtrekker canvas tent and leave the dome tent for gear storage. The hike in had been through flurries under a hazy sky, but as daylight disappeared, the sky was cleared and it left a sunset that was well worth standing out in sub-zero temperatures.

Darkness fell and the stars shined brightly. We huddled around a campfire that we were painstakingly babysitting to try and get roaring. It was the same scenario I had already encountered winter camping this season. Wood would smolder and eventually burn down, but never get to a self-sustained roar. We packed in a propane burner to cook supper, which was fortunate with the trickling fire we had going otherwise. Air temperature was -10F and dropping. We kept moving to keep warm.

Finally we gave up on our outdoor fire and started one in the tent stove. The propane Buddy Heater intended for the dome tent was brought in to take some chill out of the Snowtrekker. We stayed mostly comfortable until around 6am when the temperature bottomed out at -27F, not including wind chill. We all felt a little frosty in the feet. The breath of five guys had condensed on the interior of the tent, leaving an eighth-inch of frozen flocking to the canvas. The propane was too cold to get the stove going initially. One of the guys brought a bottle of brandy, which was now frozen solid. When the brandy is frozen solid, you know it’s starting to get cold out. Eventually we got the propane stove going and heated water for hot chocolate and warmed up some pre-made breakfast burritos. A breakfast burrito never tasted so delicious.

Forecast for the day was expected to slowly get warmer, but stay below zero until 4pm. It would peak at one above at 4pm, and then start dropping again with the sun. Our sleeping gear was wet with breath, and we voted to call it a trip after one night. We packed up and hiked two miles back out across the frozen lake, and then up the rolling, climbing hills that exhausted us the second half of the trek out. An adventure indeed, but a little defeating to call yet another trip short this season. Maybe next time we’ll get it right.

As the old saying goes “wet wood don’t burn good.”

You expect wet wood after a rainy day in the summer, but one would think dead wood found in the forest in the middle of January would be dry. Well, one would think wrongly. I think a period of heavy, wet, snow, followed by a January thaw, made for conditions of moisture slowly soaking into the wood and then freezing as temperatures dropped again.

After a relatively easy trek into a dispersed site in the Chippewa National Forest, we stomped down a tent pad and set up my new Snowtrekker tent & stove. The tent was looking a little frumpy; not tight and sleek like it should. I surmised the ridge pole was too short, and after a quick correspondence with Snowtrekker, we determined indeed I received the wrong pole. It was my bad for not setting it up to test before the adventure, but they were awesome to get the correct one shipped right away. Meanwhile, it wouldn’t be there for the weekend, so I fashioned and finagled an extra two feet onto the pole out of some wood from the forest. A minor setback, but I enjoyed the challenge of bushcraft troubleshooting.

Incidentally, this dispersed site had a pit toilet, that upon opening the lid, looked quite foreboding. The only question was whether the ice formations would freeze your bottom or lacerate it first. It was a genuine Fortress of Solitude, from which, I feared, there may be no return. I may just have to write a poem about it.

 

We gathered dead wood, cut and split it, and tried to get a fire going. We got it going easy enough with a magnesium fire starter, but after the tinder and twigs burned up, it settled into more of a smolder. No matter how we blew it or how we fed it, we couldn’t get it roaring. Fire, yes. Coals, yes. But a good cooking fire? Nope. The steaks would have to wait. Either we were incompetent in firecraft, or the wood was wet. I’m hoping and trusting the wood was just wet. We searched for dead and dry, but it seems it was all mostly dead and frozen.

After a long time babying our campfire, earning a little flame and a lot of smolder, we saw daylight was slipping away too quickly. We thought, why be incompetent with just one pathetic fire going when we can fail at two of them? So we fired up the wood tent stove, and with a few of the dryer pieces we got that one going. The rest of the evening was spend relaxing in the tent with food, drink, and poetry- a seemingly good way for a few writers to spend winter camping. We even had the stove hot enough to steam some broccoli with butter. Fancy living.

Through the night one of us got a little sick, and that compounded with the difficulty we were having with wet wood, compounded by the dull ice auger I brought that couldn’t bore worth a darn, led us to call the trip short the next morning. A good time, but lessons learned for next adventure.

Oh, how differently things look from above.  In the plotting of an adventure for an early winter bushwhacking trek, I chose an expanse of undeveloped, public forest in the northern stretches of Itasca County. Aerial imagery showed remnants of logging patches and overgrown paths of various sorts, but certainly little qualified as a trail or a road, save the county road that bisected the sections I had chosen.

From aerial imagery, it seemed like it could be rugged, but a number of faded trails were evident that could be followed for portions of the six-mile trek. Being imagery from a late fall or early spring, the hardwoods were leafless and green made it apparent where the conifers were standing. An entry point chosen off a county road that capped the northern boundary of the terrain would lead down a logging road and fade into the forest where eventually I could emerge again, follow a creek westward on the southern edge of my chosen area, cross the northbound bisecting road, meander through the western half, cross the road back east and find my way back to the starting point. That was the plan. Six miles. Simple enough.

It may have been that we didn’t start the journey in the precise place I had planned, but whatever the case, early into the journey I had only a vague and general sense of where we were. Either way, my friend an I had an adventure.

In the cool morning the frozen snow crunched under our feet. Though we were loud crunching through the silence of daybreak, the start of the trek was easy going as we followed the frozen ruts of a black powder hunter’s truck along a rough but established trail. Wolf tracks and scat crossed our path periodically. We got into some thick balsam and spruce and jumped some grouse, and all was going according to plan. Eventually, however, the trail faded away, and not where I anticipated it to. I squinted at my grainy black and white print-out of the aerial imagery, but it was an imperfect map. We backtracked a bit, and were then unclear if we had started in the right place. A change of plans.

I knew the creek traced the southern boundary of the land I planned to trek, so provided we headed south, we could eventually get some better bearings again. Perhaps, even intersect up the planned route. We bushwhacked southish through hardwoods, and for a while followed a fresh trail of wolf tracks as it lead in the general direction we were heading. Hardwoods turned to balsams. There was simultaneous too much snow and not enough. If there were more snow, we could have been in snowshoes and easy floated over the terrain. As it was, there was just enough to hide hidden snags and pits, which made each step a gamble.

We were already huffing. We came to a stand of leaning cedars and moss-covered knobs. It was the perfect place for a break. And a break wisely taken, for little did we know, the trek was about to get miserably worse. Trudging through a beautiful, but challenging cedar and spruce swamp, the scene eventually brightened up. It brightened up into an endless expanse of alder. Alder. ALDER!

Alder, the scourge of the bushwhacker. What a pain to navigate, especially with only moderate snow cover. These are the things you do not see from a grainy aerial image. From above it looks flat and easy. From the ground it’s a completely different picture. To shorten the story, it was a long and painstaking journey through the alder, until we finally came to the creek. We stopped at a beaver lodge for a break, and then continued along the creek, trying to navigate where the ice was thick enough but the alders were thin enough. Eventually we got to high ground along the creek where monumental spruces towered. We stumbled on some old rusty barrel hoops, a dented and rusted bucket, and other rusted iron from an era past. The should of water rushing over rocks near the remnants of a dam recently removed was needed therapy.

We strayed Northwest on our trek to the road, and passed through an area that had been logged a few years ago. That means a thick stand of sapling poplars, which was like walking through a tight forest of fishing rods. It wasn’t easy. Also from aerial footage, it looked like just a flat gray area, and an easy feat. Once again, experience was much different with boots on the ground versus eyes in the air. We got to the county road, hiked north again and crossed to the other side. We hiked through more young poplar growth shooting up on freshly logged land, and had a pretty easy go of it on a trail. We trudged until the woods thickened and we were in the towering pines. We jumped a number of grouse, but every time I was a little too slow with the sidearm. Eventually we were back into dense, sapling poplars, which was again difficult to pass. That lead to an intimidatingly thick and tall stand of balsam firs, which we bushwhacked until we hit a spruce bog, which opened up to a glasslike frozen beaver pond. We took a break by a lodge, crossed the glass to high ground, and to wrap it up, and a laborsome trek back east across the road and through the woods to where we had begun.

Uffda. We finished the trek and we were exhausted. We couldn’t necessarily say we had fun. We had an adventure… but was it fun? I say adventure is a balance of fun+misery, but this one was leaning a bit heavy on the misery side. In the end one thing was clear: your goals look very different on the ground than they do when planning them from the air.