The Boundary Waters: One Point One Million Acres of Silence

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness has no roads. No motors on the water. One point one million acres of connected lakes, rivers, and portage trails pressed against the Canadian border in the northeast corner of Minnesota, where the only way to get deeper into it is to paddle or carry.

The Ojibwe harvested wild rice on these lakes for centuries before European contact. They fished walleye and lake trout from canoes built of birch bark. The rice beds in the shallower bays are still there. The wild rice is still harvested, by Ojibwe families and others, in late summer. The rights to do it are written into federal treaty law, a fact the courts reaffirmed in nineteen ninety-nine.

Sigurd Olson, who guided canoe trips out of Ely, Minnesota, for decades, spent thirty years in political combat to protect this water. Resort owners wanted roads. Outboard motor manufacturers wanted engines on the lakes. Mineral companies wanted access to the ore beneath the watershed. Olson won, mostly, and the nineteen sixty-four Wilderness Act gave the Boundary Waters its federal designation. He was in Washington when the law was signed.

The mining battle never fully ended. Copper and nickel deposits lie in the rock just outside the designated wilderness boundary. Mining permit applications have come and gone since the nineteen nineties, each time provoking a political fight over whether the watershed can absorb an industrial operation without contaminating the lakes. The fight continues.

What Olson called the singing wilderness, the sound of wind on water and loon call at dusk, is what most visitors come for. On most portages, you will not see another person.