BWCA Border Route Trip of a Lifetime

thanks guys. It’s timely that this post was brought back to the top as we’re in the process of planning our trip for this May where we will complete the loop with the Pigeon River and Grand Portage.

We have a late May permit for Duncan EP and will go into Rose and spend 2 nights there, then > Rove Lake > Watap Lake > Mountain Lake and spend 2 nights there, then > Fan Lake > Vaseux Lake > Moose Lake > North Fowl Lake > South Fowl Lake and spend 2 nights there. I reached out to the grand marais DNR fisheries office and got some intel on the Fowl lakes and theres supposed to be good walleye fishing there, so I’m excited to fish those new waters as we didn’t fish Fowl on last year’s trip.

Then after the Fowl Lakes, we will embark on the ~13 mile Pigeon River and spend a night dispersed camping at Fort Charlotte, followed up the next day with the almighty 8.5 mile Grand Portage finishing with a well deserved splash in Lake Superior.

This spring is shaping up to be much better conditions for flow rate on the Pigeon with the minimal snow we’ve got this winter. Talk about a 180 from last year. In fact, if spring runoff is as light as I think it will be, we might actually be struggling with low water and having to drag the canoe over sections of rocks and low water. Its quite remarkable how the balance in life is so finite.

TheFamousGrouse wrote:

I look forward to your epilogue, from the Pigeon River, over Grand Portage, and the (brief) splashdown in Superior. I’ve wanted to walk the Grand Portage someday, just really interested in the history.

I couldn’t agree more. The history of the Grand Portage absolutely fascinates me. I will definitely be thinking about the voyageurs who walked the trail hundreds of years before me as I embark on that 8 mile portage. It’s incredible how they were able to navigate through the same waters and trails that I went on but they did it with handmade canoes and extremely primitive gear. I would like to read more on the voyageurs history so if anyone has any book recommendations, please share!

jwellsy wrote:

Any aurora lights?

Unfortunately, after 10 hour/25 mile travel days, a hearty dinner cooked over a campfire and a couple nightcap whiskeys, we crashed pretty early every night. I’m sure we could have caught glimpses of lady aurora had we been able to stay up late.

Dutchboy wrote:

I’ve always wanted to boat the entire Missouri River, I don’t know why and I doubt I ever will but it is something to think about.

You should do it! A few years back when there was a story about those who guys traveled down the whole Mississippi, I was fascinated with the story and wanted to do something similar. Ironically, the mighty urban Mississippi scares me a lot more than the border route’s 200 mile route in extremely remote wilderness. Someday down the road when I’m able to take more time off work, I’d like to do something like paddle the entire perimeter of Lake Superior.

There’s a pretty cool space weather website that has an aurora forecast map that shows how far South and intense the aurora will be as it moves around the Earth.
Press the play button on The Aurora graphic.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov
If that graphic showed a high probability of some red aurora over my location, I’d probably set an alarm to see it.

Gitchi Gummi wrote:

The history of the Grand Portage absolutely fascinates me. I will definitely be thinking about the voyageurs who walked the trail hundreds of years before me as I embark on that 8 mile portage. It’s incredible how they were able to navigate through the same waters and trails that I went on but they did it with handmade canoes and extremely primitive gear. I would like to read more on the voyageurs history so if anyone has any book recommendations, please share!

I think you would love this book:
Disappointment River: Finding and Losing the Northwest Passage.

In this book, Brian Castner retraces Alexander Mackenzie’s famous expedition of 1789. This was Mackenzie’s attempt to find the fabled northwest passage via the unexplored river that now bears his name.

The tie-in to Minnesota is that word of this mythical river that ran to the west reached Mackenzie via voyagers arriving at Grand Portage loaded with furs and stories. By 1789, eastern Canada and the US had been over-trapped and voyagers were moving farther and farther north and west to find prime beaver trapping. Eventually, they discovered a huge river that appeared to run to the west. If that was the northwest passage, proving it was the biggest feat a man of the fur tread like Mackenzie could accomplish.

The book alternates between Mackenzie’s history in the fur trade and in exploring and Castner’s modern-day retracing 1200 miles of Mackenzie’s canoe route down the river and ending in the Arctic Ocean.

I agree, thinking of what these explorers and voyagers accomplished without a map is beyond incredible.

Fished Mountain and Moose back in the early ’80’s. Good laker action in both – although smaller @ 1-4# size. Caught many from shore and could see other lakers following the hooked fish as I reeled them in.

I haven’t been around this site in a few months. I needed a break as some posters here can really take the fun out of it for me.

The reason for this post is this last week I completed another 8 day bwca trip where we planned to pick up where we left off last year and attempt to finish the pigeon river and grand portage parts of the border route. We had a permit to enter into Duncan and the plan was to spend a week making our way east out of the BWCA, into the Pigeon River and finishing with the Grand Portage and jumping into Lake Superior.

With the low snow winter and early spring, the water level of the Pigeon River was tracking especially low for the time of year and it was looking like we’d have a nearly perfect flow for hitting the pigeon river for the several weeks that were leading up to the trip… then the Arrowhead got absolutely pounded with rain on the evening of May 21st, only 4 days before our entry date. The flow went from ~600 cf/s to almost 4,000 cf/s overnight. We needed the flow to be at or under 1,000 on 6/1 to be able to safely hit the Pigeon River. With the recent BWCA tragedy over at Curtain falls (which we passed on our trip last year), caution was even more front and center on our minds this year.

We spent the first several nights of our trip on Rose Lake. Incredibly beautiful topography and scenery in that area. I can’t say enough good things about this area. We trolled for and caught lakers on both Duncan and Rose Lake – biggest being around 12 lbs. Our campsite was right on the border route trail and we took the trail to the rose lake portage one afternoon and stumpled upon a dry bag that looked like it was ransacked by a bear. For those that don’t know, Rose Lake is very well known for bear problems. So I slept a little uneasy that night knowing there was fresh bear sign less than a mile from camp.

After our nights on Rose, we moved east 20 miles to Moose Lake (the one on the Canadian border, not the crazy busy Moose lake entry lake) and spent a couple of nights there targeting walleyes. This big move day was the only day on the entire trip we had rain and we were completely soaked to the bone after we were done with the big travel. It rained all day so any firewood was soaked so we had a pretty weak fire that night but everyone slept great being tired from the travel. We didn’t have much luck with walleyes on Moose – caught a few including one 3-4 LBer, and also caught several pike and bass. Another really beautiful area with hardly any traffic – I think we saw 2 other canoes the whole time we were on Moose.

Next stop was moving about 6 miles to the island campsite on the North/South Fowl Lake border. This was a very shallow lake – I don’t think it gets much deeper than 10 ft on the US side with pretty much everywhere we could find maxed out at 7-8 ft. Definitely a different style lake than I’m used to walleye fishing in the BWCA. The sites on Fowl Lake are heavily used and it was very evident that the water was high when we were there as many trees on shore were in standing water. The walleye fishing on Fowl was better than anywhere else on the trip but still nothing to write home about. We caught enough for 2 fish frys. Turns out that lake is all about the lowlight period right before sunset – makes sense why the fishing during the day was super low. At about day 6, we were really questioning our decision to portage a LB of leeches (plus the water) ~40 miles into the wilderness.

We were getting nightly texts via my garmin inreach informing us of weather and more importantly, the flow on the Pigeon river. It was looking like we might be in the clear to be under 1,000 cf/s until we got that heavy rain on our travel day from Rose to Moose. Our last night on Fowl, we got the flow text and it was at 1,230 cf/s and if we decided go forward with the plan, we’d be hitting it the next morning. We decided the flow was just still too high for what we were comfortable with doing in a Kevlar canoe and decided to not do the pigeon river and GP. Incredibly bummed that we missed out 2 years in a row but on the flip side, I’m happy to go home safely at the end of the trip. We are going to do the Pigeon and GP on a 1 nighter sometime this summer when high water is out of the picture.

Here is the graph of the Pigeon River. The red line is 1,000 cf/s that we were targeting as our go/no-go decider. You can see it dropped below that threshold 2 days after we were out of the bush. Bummer but oh well. I still feel incredibly grateful for being able to experience the BWCA wilderness. It gives me a mental re-set that I can’t get anywhere else in the world. I can’t explain how much different your headspace gets being alone in the remote wilderness with some good friends and most importantly, being unplugged from phones/social media/elections/emails/etc. Its really a freeing feeling to slow down and move at your own pace for a week.

One thing I will say is that in our 8 days in the BWCA, we didn’t see one other person/group wearing a life jacket. Not. One. Person. It blew my mind considering how at the time, they still hadn’t even found the bodies of the 2 missing canoers from Curtain Falls. It’s a rule in our group that everyone wears one. If you don’t wear one, you should.

Lastly, with the exception of a couple swampy portages, bugs were nearly nonexistent on this trip. I didn’t use bug spray one time. I do treat all my clothes with permethrin, so that helps, but zero bug spray applied. Over my last 3 BWCA trips in May/June (2023 and 2024) consisting of 19 days in the wilderness, I have not applied bug spray once in those last 3 trips. I feel very grateful for that incredible string of good bug luck.

Cheers fellas!

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Bummer you couldn’t complete it, but sounds like a great trip nonetheless! Care to explain the thought process on the 1,000 cf/s? I understand it being too low, or way too high, just curious the reasoning for that threshold.

As far as life jackets, in my limited BWCA experience don’t a lot of people use them as a cushion to sit on? I’d hope after the recent tragedy people wear them now, especially in canoe, but I recall the logic being that sitting on them provided some benefit while still keeping them close.

Great read, and a bummer you couldn’t finish, but all the more reason to go back… Welcome back to the site.

Sounds like an awesome trip again. Glad to see you post again, I know it gets a bit much at times.

Nice to see you post gitchi, and I always enjoy reading stories from these trips.

Great story gitchi, sounds awesome!

Yeah great trip and great report! Glad you made a wise choice on flow rates. It can be hairy when the landings are flooded.

Fantastic journey Gitchi glad everything went pretty well. Sounds like a fun adventure.