Man vs. MN

The challenge: 24 hours, five classic outdoor activities, one amazing location. How much winter can one man handle?

Photo by Todd Buchanan

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“I’m Bruce,” says the man behind the counter, “and you’re late.”

He’s right. I blew it. I’ve arrived in late winter at the Gunflint Lodge, on the northernmost edge of Minnesota’s Arrowhead region, lugging $300 worth of newly acquired gear, including three pairs of gloves and mittens, a jacket warm enough to roast a turkey, and snowpants made of Kevlar, the material used in body armor. I am waterproof, cold-proof, and possibly bulletproof. But none of this helped get my butt out of bed on time. I should have bought a clock.

At 2:30 p.m., I was supposed to be ice-fishing. It’s now closer to 4, which is not a big difference on paper but in this game I have created for myself—to drive from Minneapolis to the Gunflint Lodge and pack as many classic Minnesota winter activities into 24 hours as I can—every minute counts, especially since I have no idea what I’m doing. I had always regarded icefishing, snow-shoeing, and other activities involving frozen forms of water as antique, vestigial ventures from the dark days before direct flights to Cancun. When I first discussed the challenge with Bruce Kerfoot, the owner of the Gunflint Lodge, he remarked, “You’re a city guy then?” Worse, I’m a suburban guy, with all the survival instincts of a davenport.

I pull on two of my three pairs of mittens and run down to the frozen shore of Gunflint Lake, where the wind quickly makes a mockery of the Kevlar, cutting through my pants as if through newspaper. I’m met at the shore by Adam Treeful, a fishing guide at the lodge who conveniently doubles as a cook, prepared to fry whatever I haul up from the 200-foot depths. He tosses a giant auger and two buckets—our chairs—into a sled that will pop up into a primitive shelter, then hooks the sled to an ancient snowmobile with a lawnmower-style starting cord and no windshield. It’s a relic from a noisier era, before motorized vehicles were banned from the nearby Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in 1978 and local lodges began marketing quieter sports. My face is frozen before we even get out to the fishing hole.

Adam sets up the shelter in roughly the center of the lake, which is just a mile wide from north to south but about eight miles long, a clear path for westerly winds to swoop in. As the temperature plummets toward single digits, I huddle inside the shelter while Adam stands on the ice with no more protection from the arctic ass-whupping than his hoodie sweatshirt, holey jeans, and reddish beard. No hat, no gloves. This is a guy who calls bull moose out of the woods during the lodge’s Moose Madness outings, affording visitors a closer look. “I imitate a moose in heat,” he says matter-of-factly. Recently, Adam has begun skijoring, a “sport” in which a skier ties one end of a rope around his waist and the other around a large dog, which may or may not stop pulling when it should. Of his dog, Adam says, “The only command he doesn’t know is ‘whoa.’” That seems like an important one, I say. Adam shrugs. Out here, you take what you can get.

If we were fishing another 300 feet north, we’d need passports—the border with Canada runs through the middle of Gunflint Lake and I can practically smell the poutine and guilelessness. Yet it feels like I’ve gone much farther. Ridgelines, like those you’d expect in Montana or maybe Afghanistan, barricade Gunflint Lake from the moderating effect of nearby Lake Superior, giving the area a boreal microclimate that’s ideal for moose, yetis, and anyone else who doesn’t mind getting snowed in six months of the year. Bruce was home-schooled when he grew up here, until his parents feared that he was becoming too isolated and sent him to boarding school. Until recently, the sole road in or out—the Gunflint Trail that runs from here to Grand Marais, 43 miles southeast—was only plowed a couple of times a winter if you were lucky, or you’d have to do it yourself. “You hoped that someone else needed to go to Grand Marais worse than you did,” Bruce says.

For the next two hours, I do this: up, down, up, down, jigging a metal spoon 40 feet below a hole in the ice that keeps freezing shut. Adam, who admits to angler ADHD, runs between the three other holes he’s drilled, shifting our tip-ups, or un-manned lines. Ice anglers, as opposed to summer fishermen, are given a handicap just for showing up—each person can fish with two rigs instead of one and most use their spare rig as a tip-up. When something, hopefully a fish, tugs on the tip-up line, a blaze-orange flag leaps up and flaps giddily in the wind: You’ve got fish! We’re going for lake trout, big salmon-colored fish that like the icy depths of Gunflint Lake but don’t seem to like me. “You’ve got a fish!” Adam shouts as an orange flag shoots up. But like so many other things in this odd corner of the state, it’s a trick of nature, sprung by the wind.

EVERYTHING ABOUT THE LODGE dining room suddenly feels emasculating. It’s rustically inviting, all knotty pine and taxidermied lynx, and the beef stew is terrific. But I’m not eating the fish I didn’t catch. And the massive moose head on the wall seems to be snorting at me; once a state record, it was felled by a lodge employee not with an elephant gun, as I might have thought necessary, but with a single arrow—basically a stick. Nearby, the buckskin suit once worn by Bruce’s famous mother, Justine Kerfoot, hangs beside a photograph of her straddling a moose, which she killed, I assume from her defiant expression, with her bare hands.

Nowadays, Gunflint Lodge is the most luxurious of a string of remote resorts on the Gunflint Trail, offering elk loin for dinner, sorbet between courses, and comfortable cabins with big stone fireplaces. In the winter, food is set out for the deer, which lounge outside the lodge like package tourists in matching outfits.

But it wasn’t like this when Justine’s family, rich folks from Chicago, bought the lodge as a lark nearly a century ago, then moved in when the 1929 stock crash compelled them to sell their home. Justine became the first white woman to grow up in the area. Indian guides worked for the lodge and Bruce was cared for by an Indian nanny. There was no electricity then, no running water, no phone service. With the creation of the BWCAW, in the mid-1960s, the wilderness here became a place to be visited, not harvested, and the motorized-vehicle ban cemented the locals’ reliance on tourism. “We licked our chops and got behind silent sports,” Bruce says. Snowshoeing, ice-fishing, snowmobiling—what were survival tools only a generation ago became the great winter pastimes of the north woods.

After dinner, I head back into the snow on a night hike to communicate with the area’s original residents—wolves. My guide is the youthful lodge naturalist, John Silliman, who grew up in suburban Roseville and is perhaps the most unassuming man ever to sport a Fu Manchu. Or, for that matter, to battle wildfires, as he does nearly every summer, including the devastating Ham Lake fire that spread from the Gunflint Trail in 2007 to become the region’s largest forest fire in at least a century. But these are only the beginning of John’s credits. After ascending by moonlight for nearly an hour, the snow crunching beneath our boots like dry timber, John lets loose a wail that multiplies the shivers running down my spine. He lifts his ear-flap hat to listen for a response. Nothing.

“You want to try?” he asks, but what comes out of my mouth sounds like Casper the Friendly Ghost—wooOOO!—being devoured by wolves.

Suddenly John yanks off his cap, cups his hand to his ear. I hear it, too—a lonely howl answering back. It could be the sled dogs housed nearby. But it also could be their progenitors, as near as the other side of the ridge.