Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness

This lake country is Anishinaabe homeland, the land of the Ojibwe, who have traveled, fished, hunted, and gathered wild rice across these waters for many generations and who remain deeply connected to them today. The birchbark canoe, the portage routes, and the seasonal harvest of the lakes are woven into a way of life that long predates any map or boundary line, and the region's water routes still follow paths people have paddled for centuries.

In the seventeen and eighteen hundreds these same waterways became the highway of the North American fur trade. Voyageurs paddled great freight canoes loaded with furs and trade goods along the border lakes between Lake Superior and the far interior, and the international boundary itself was later drawn to follow this old canoe route. The Grand Portage, the long carry around the rapids of the Pigeon River, was one of the great gateways of that trade and remains a place of Ojibwe history on the Superior shore.

The bones of this country are some of the oldest rock on the continent, ancient granite and greenstone scraped bare by the glaciers that ground across it in the last ice age. As the ice advanced and retreated it gouged out basins in the hard rock and dammed the drainages with debris, and when it finally melted those basins filled with water to make the thousands of lakes you paddle today.

That glacial history is why the lakes connect the way they do, strung together across the low divides so that a paddler can travel for days by water with only short carries between them. The thin soils and exposed bedrock also shape the forest, a northern woodland of pine, spruce, fir, birch, and aspen that clings to the rocky shores and burns and regrows on a long natural cycle of fire.

The Boundary Waters is home to some of the wildest creatures left in the lower states. Moose browse the shallows and wetlands, black bears range the forest, and this is core range for the gray wolf, whose howl may carry across a lake at night. Beaver, otter, and pine marten work the shorelines, and the waters hold walleye, northern pike, lake trout, and smallmouth bass.

The sound most paddlers remember is the loon, the black-and-white diving bird whose wavering call defines a northern lake at dusk. Bald eagles and ospreys fish the open water, and in the deep quiet of the wilderness the night sky opens up, dark enough that the Milky Way and, on lucky nights, the northern lights fill the sky over the water.

Summer is the main paddling season, with long days, warm afternoons, and lakes open for travel, though it is also the busiest time and the season of biting insects, so a head net and repellent earn their place in the pack. Early summer brings blackflies and mosquitoes, which ease as the weeks go on.

Fall is many paddlers' favorite, when the air cools, the bugs fade, and the aspen and birch turn gold against the dark pines. Spring is raw and quiet as the ice goes out, and winter transforms the whole country into a silent world of snow and frozen lakes, traveled by ski, snowshoe, and dogsled rather than canoe.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.