Before this summer, Miles Larson had limited experience with whitewater paddling, even though he’d canoed hundreds of miles on trips offered through Camp Widjiwagan, a YMCA-sponsored camp based on Burntside Lake near Ely, Minnesota.
A senior at Grand Forks Red River, Larson, 17, recently completed a canoe trip through portions of Woodland Caribou Provincial Park in Ontario and Atikaki Provincial Park in Manitoba on the Bloodvein and Berens rivers as part of the camp’s Advanced Explorer Canoe program.
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Both rivers flow into the east side of Lake Winnipeg, and the Bloodvein is known for its challenging rapids.
The trip of nearly 300 miles – which included 29 days “on trail” – was the highlight of a camp session that began July 15 and wrapped up Aug. 20. This was Larson’s sixth summer attending Camp Widjiwagan – or “Widji,” for short – the combination of two Ojibwe words roughly meaning “friend or partner” and “journey or path.”
The two wilderness rivers, which parallel each other, both were “very beautiful places,” Larson said, but also very different, even though they’re only about 25 miles apart.
“The Bloodvein River is more rough around the edges and it kind of pushes through everything around it,” he said. “But the Berens is more, like, savvy almost. It just flows in between little cracks in the rocks and there’s more angles and different features to it than the Bloodvein has.
“It was really cool to see the differences.”
Fellow travelers
Joining Larson on the trip in three canoes were four fellow campers and two counselors. He’d traveled with Zack Danielson, one of the counselors, on a previous canoe trip, and two of the campers – Noah Landy of the Twin Cities and Felix Carnine of Toulouse, France – were part of Larson’s crew on a canoe trip last summer that began near Ignace, Ontario, and wrapped up near Grand Portage, Minnesota, a trek that ended with the nine-mile slog that gives the Grand Portage its name.
“We did the Grand Portage on the last day – day 21 – and that was really crazy,” Larson said of last year’s trip.
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The Advanced Explorer Canoe trip on the Bloodvein and Berens rivers was open by invitation-only, based on previous paddling experience. Knowing some of the guys on the crew from the get-go made the trip less intimidating, Larson says.
“It was easy to kind of instantly connect with them, and it kind of made the bonding a little bit easier,” he said. “It was a long time to be away from home.”
Departing from Johnson Lake – the gateway to Woodland Caribou Provincial Park – near Red Lake, Ontario, the paddlers started the trip on a series of “flat water” lakes before entering the Bloodvein River at Artery Lake near the Ontario-Manitoba border. From the Bloodvein, the paddlers traversed a series of connected portages and water bodies to reach the Berens River.
‘Super, super anxious’
Despite a day of practice before the trip navigating fast water on the Kawishiwi River near Ely, Larson admits he was “super, super anxious” at first about running rapids on the wilderness rivers. Being the “duffer” – the person who sits in the middle of the canoe and doesn’t paddle – was even worse. With seven guys on the trip, only one person had to “duff” at any given time, Larson says.
He was the duffer on the first big rapids they had to navigate.
“Duffing is so much worse,” he said. “You’re not in control at all. The first set I duffed, I was hyperventilating. Everybody else was like, ‘Yeah, that was sick,’ and I was like, ‘Shut up, no it wasn’t.’
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“By day three or four, I was getting more used to it, and by day 15, I was like, ‘where’s the next set (of rapids)?’ ”
The paddlers wore helmets and went down on their knees in the canoes to lower the center of gravity whenever they ran a set of rapids.
“If you stay in your seat, the center of gravity is a lot harder,” Larson said. “It’s harder to turn, it’s harder to paddle and you’re able to paddle way faster when you’re on your knees.”
By following the “EAT WORMS” safety formula – an acronym that stands for “Energy, Attitude and Time” and “Water, Obstacles, Route and Markers” – the paddlers assessed each set of rapids they approached to decide whether to shoot or portage.
They only “dumped” – canoe-speak for capsized – once during the trip, Larson says. That occurred on the Moose Bone Rapids, a stretch of whitewater on the Bloodvein renowned for its challenges. Things were pretty intense for a few minutes, he says, but getting back on track didn’t take long, and they managed to retrieve most of their gear and supplies.
“(Dumping) kind of helped my nerves a little bit,” Larson said. “That was one of my biggest fears of the trip. It’s not as bad as it may seem. It’s scary, but it’s OK because it happens.”
On the water
Typical days started about 6:30 a.m., with breakfast before breaking camp and hitting the water. Breakfast usually consisted of items such as oatmeal, powdered eggs or a concoction they called “Farmer’s Breakfast,” which typically included summer sausage, eggs, cheese, sausage “TVP” – short for texturized vegetable protein – “and that’s basically it,” Larson said.
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Whoever was most tired or wasn’t feeling well usually sat in the duffer position, Larson said, at least to start the day.
“Then we’d paddle and portage and paddle and portage and paddle and portage,” he said.
They’d stop for “TL” – trail lunch – sometime between noon and 2 p.m. and set up camp for the evening between 5:30 and 7 p.m.
“We’d make it about 15 to 20 miles a day, which is a pretty good day,” Larson said.
Fish – mainly walleyes and northern pike – that were swimming around just minutes earlier provided a welcome reprieve from the TVP and other dried fare during some of the meals.
“We got some decent fish,” Larson said. “A couple of the days we were catching catfish, which was a little weird, but other than that, it was OK.”
The canoes, made from a plastic laminate called ABS – short for Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene – weighed about 70 pounds each and were the lightest items to carry on the portages, Larson said. They also carried about 700 pounds of rations with them on the trip.
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“At the beginning, people were begging to take the canoes (over the portages), because portaging canoes is fun,” he said. “It’s really fun to be able to flip it up and then put it on your back.”
No time for misery
There wasn’t much time to be miserable on the trip, Larson says, but he had a few rough days after developing a bad case of hives following 30 hours of rain.
The condition eventually was diagnosed as “stress hives.”
“My body wasn’t able to become warm like it should have, and so for about two or three days, I was just struggling – feeling really itchy, feeling really swollen,” Larson said. “Two days after the rain, my face completely swelled up. My whole body was like a block. It was really weird, and I felt really hot and my feet hurt just by standing and walking around. My hands were tingling all the time, and it hurt to paddle.”
He spent an entire day in the duff position and slept 14 hours one night.
Parents aren’t contacted unless there’s a real medical emergency, and Larson’s condition gradually improved. Despite everything that could go wrong on a wilderness canoe trip, Larson’s mom, Meredith Larson, says she never worried about her son while he was on trail.
“People ask me all the time about how nervous we are when he’s gone,” said Larson, North Dakota assistant attorney general. “I can honestly say I am never nervous about him at camp. I’m way more nervous at home for teenage life than I am about camp. Camp does not stress me out at all.
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“Miles has always excelled outside. We’re an adventurous family.”
After six summers, Larson’s canoe trip on the Bloodvein and Berens rivers could be his last with Camp Widjiwagan, although he says he’d like to take the camp’s most advanced canoe trip – a 48-day session on the Arctic rivers of northern Canada and Alaska – next summer.
The trip carries a hefty price tag, though – nearly $12,000. “It sounds awesome, but it’s expensive to go,” Larson said.
Whether he takes the Arctic canoe trip or this year’s trek is his last with Camp Widjiwagan remains to be seen. Regardless, Larson says, he’ll never forget his years at camp, the adventures he’s experienced and the friends he’s made.
Seeing a wolf, a bear and trumpeter swans, looking up at the night sky and marveling at northern lights dancing overhead from the vantage point of the Canadian wilderness, are among the memories he’ll always treasure from his trip on the Bloodvein and Berens rivers.
“I love ‘Widji,’” Larson wrote in a final journal entry from this year’s trip. “It will be a magical place I don’t think I will ever forget.”
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