Introduction:

Aqua Blazing: A term made popular on the Appalachian Trail. It references the idea of  paddling a section rather than hiking when a river mirrors the trails.

I think the idea of this current adventure first  bloomed from hearing that term. The idea was followed up by a deep desire for Aqua Blaze “redemption” (see AT Blog #4 for more on that dumpster fire of an epic failure). Then it really came to fruition as we were contemplating a new version of the “Triple Crown.” In our circles, the “Triple Crown” refers to completing the Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, and Continental Divide Trail. We completed those and had also bicycled across the country, so we got to dreaming while we were on the last trip. What if a new version of the Triple Crown was completing at least one of each of the following: cross country hike, cross country bicycle, and cross country paddle?

It didn’t take much research to realize that the Mississippi River is the longest single river in the country. So the plan was set. (Other than the 6 years it took for us to be about it rather than talk about it.)

The Crew: The original squad was lined up to be the same as our last couple hikes: Michigan, Snapper, Boo Boo, and I (T-Funk). For more info on these fools, refer to any past blogs of former excursions. Somewhere along the planning stage, we added our dear friend Mike D. Mike is a Louisiana native living in Florence. He has a way with words unlike anyone else. One example: he says that he’ll “have a tub” rather than “take a bath.” He also makes the best gumbo that will ever grace your tastebuds.

As time grew closer, Michigan and Snapper had to back out due to various reasons at home. Promotions came up at work that were too good to walk away from. Going to miss them terribly on this one. However; Mike, Boo Boo, and I were still resolute to head north. We were ready. We thought we were at least. Then, one of the craziest weeks of my life began.

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Day 1: It took some logistical magician’ship to even get to this point. Flying? Naw… 17.5 foot canoe. U-Haul? Sure! For the low price of $1,789 for the 1 day you’ll use it. So you turn to the logical conclusion of renting a car. Turns out they don’t like you renting a car when it’s one way for 1,136 miles. BUT, I found a loophole. If you pick up and drop off at big’ish airports, the algorithm seems to let it slide for some reason. $236 compared to $1,789 being the second best option? Yes please.

Back to Day 1: Wake up at 6am to drive to the Huntsville airport to pick up the rental. Huntsville is over an hour away. However, this is the unfortunate requirement to live within the loophole. We pick up the rental in Huntsville at 8am. The clock starts. We have the car for exactly 24 hours or the price doubles. We drive the hour to Florence to actually load up and leave for the trip.

This goes relatively smoothly. We strap my canoe to the roof of the car. Boo Boo’s inflatable paddle board goes in the trunk (yes, I know, you’re confused, we all are, more info to come). The plan for Mike is go ahead, drive up, and to secure a used boat close to the starting point.

We set off. Easing into higher speeds and sharper turns. I’m still traumatized from the nightmare of getting my canoe home from buying it in Atlanta (different story for a different time). It’s an 18 hour drive to northern Minnesota and we’ve already used 3 hours of our 24 hour window. 3 hours to spare if we drive straight there. That’s with no stops, no issues.

Spirts are high. Things are going well. The weather is nice and the canoe has not flown off of the roof. No big issues until around midnight…

Day 2: Around 12:30am the weather starts to look nasty in the middle of nowhere Iowa. Hundreds of lighting strikes in front of us and barreling our way. The wind starts to roar. The canoe starts to growl and shift on the roof. Folks, I’ve driven through plenty of bad storms. This is different… We come to a complete stop on the highway. Even at a standstill, the wind is turning the canoe sideways on the roof. We are sincerely worried that the car is next. Turns out the storm is classified as a “derecho”, a term I wasn’t familiar with. Look it up, wild… That eats up a good bit of our “extra time”, so the hustle is on.

Sunrise in Minnesota is beautiful through our sleep deprived eyes. We make it to the Bemidji airport with 3 minutes to spare. By “returning” the car and re-renting it for the day, we can avoid the extra 1 way fees. We still have to get to Lake Itasca which is 45 minutes away.

We head that way and drop everything off at the lake. Now, we still need to procure a vessel for Mike. We scour Marketplace, Craigslist, and even try to buy a boat from the rental place on the lake. We find a canoe for sale at (of all places) a used car lot in town. It’s a great boat at a great price. 45 minutes back into town, secure the boat on the now empty roof, and 45 minutes back to the lake. We are finally set. We are all there and have all of our gear on the bank of the lake. One issue… we still have the rental car. It’s late afternoon. Option 1: Drive to return the car and get a taxi back to the lake. Option 2: Get some rest at the motel we passed with a putt putt course beside it (that sells beer?!) and start in the morning since we haven’t slept for 30’ish hours. Option 2 it is.

Day 3: We catch a ride to the lake with a Native American who teaches us how to forage and eat the local cherries right off of the bush. We are getting our gear organized beside the lake and a group of official-looking people walk up to us. We explain what we are attempting. They are super-pumped. They are shooting a drone video to promote the park that day and would love to follow us as we start the trip. Sure! Why not.

We paddle across the lake to the official headwaters of the Mississippi River. It starts as a tiny little creek running over some rocks on the backside of Lake Itasca. There is monument signifying what we are about to attempt. It reads, “Here, 1,475 feet above the ocean, the Mighty Mississippi begins to flow on its winding way, 2,552 miles to the Gulf Of Mexico.” We get a group of Mennonites(?) to take a picture of us at the monument and the adventure officially begins.

Within the first 50 feet, we have to portage around a water-level foot bridge. Portaging is the act of getting out of your boat and carrying it on the bank around an obstruction in the river. This will (unfortunately) become an important term to remember. The Mennonites(?) help us with the portage and we are off again. The looks on their faces… “They are going to do this for 3 months?!”

To preface what comes next, it’s very important to divulge the following tidbit. A month or so before this, a storm unlike any other ravaged this area. The winds reportedly got up to Category 3 hurricane levels: 120 miles per hour. It has been estimated that the Bemidji/Itasca area lost approximately 9 MILLION trees. A month later, they are still cleaning up the roads. So it goes without saying, clearing the river was not a priority.

So we had a decision to make: Start at the actual beginning of the river, or take the easy/reasonable way out and start where the river gets wider and fallen trees would affect us less. I couldn’t imagine not starting at the headwaters, so here we were. Mistake?

Back to Day 3: It’s astonishing how narrow the beginning of the Mississippi River can be. At times, 2 feet wide and 1 foot deep. This is not ideal for the fallen trees. Chaos ensues as we take our first hairpin turn straight into a fallen tree. Gear goes everywhere and we have to reassemble. This is going to be a long day… We pass under a bridge where the film crew (for the park promotional video) is waiting and we inform them of our issues as we pass. They yell “oh we’ve been watching!” That drone was capturing what could be a modern day remake of the 3 stooges taking on the Mississippi River.

The day continued on like this: narrow, surprise trees, disasters, portages, etc. We give up on making our destination at 8pm, set up camp, lick our extensive wounds, and fall asleep to sound of the Mississippi blasting fallen trees.

Day 4: We have just made it to the beginning of the “rapid section.” If it even needs to be stated, rapids and fallen trees don’t mix well with 17.5 foot canoes loaded down with gear. 3 miles of some of the most technical paddling I’ve ever done, and that includes my whitewater kayaking days. We make it through the rapids to be dumped into a deep, swampy section.

Boo Boo and I meet at a rare landing where we could get out and stretch the legs. Some time goes by, but we decide we are going to wait on Mike to continue on, no matter what. After 3 hours, Mike SWIMS up to the landing with his canoe full of water. He got thrown out at the last rapid and had to swim for miles because there is no way to get back in the canoe in swamp section.

We help get him out of the water and spend a few hours drying his gear. He turns around at one point for me to see that the back of his shirt is covered in blood. I ask him “what happened to your back?” He doesn’t know what I’m talking about. I tell him to pull up his shirt. I find the culprit. 3 of the biggest, plumpest leeches I have ever seen in my life. They have been feasting on Mike for hours. I walk over, slap all of them off, and say “you don’t want to know, trust me.”

We continue on to try to make up our mileage needed for the day. The portages continue. The sun is setting. Morale is at an all time low because there is nowhere to camp in this swampy section. Everyone sticks it out and we finally find an area to crash.

Day 5: Mike wakes up to all sorts of pain and just feeling “off” in general. He’s unable to start that day. Fortunately there is a nearby dirt road where he can make it out to the highway to hitch a ride, get to town, get checked out, and take a couple days off while waiting for us to arrive. We say our “see you soon’s” and Boo Boo and I paddle down river.

This day can be dubbed as the “dead end day.” Apparently the storm didn’t only cause trees to fall… It also shifted entire sections of the swampy areas. We are paddling on like normal, and then, all of the sudden, the river just ends. We scramble to look at satellite images on Google maps. We are still in the MIDDLE of a clear river according to the maps. This part of the story is hard to explain. You can’t get out. The river is 20 feet deep. These impromptu “reed islands” are blocking your way and the only way through is brute force. (By the way, I’m calling reeds/cat tails those plants with corn dogs attached to them.) The effort it takes to get through these things without being able to get out your boat was stressful to say the least. It happens at least 7 additional times on this day.

We finally come to the end of this section only to be greeted with the false sense of security of a “wooded section” rather than “swampy section.” We quickly realize that we are entering the epicenter of where the storm hit when we hit a behemoth of intertwined fallen trees that we deem “the final boss of portages.” After not being able to get around this worthy adversary, we backtrack and paddle upstream looking for a bail point.

We make it to a road and begin walking ourselves and all of our gear the 4.5 miles to the next town. Fortunately an angel named Bill Larson finds us, picks us up, and shuttles us to a motel in town.

Day 6: We wake up to bad news. Mike is hospitalized. Turns out that he has 3 broken vertebrae in his back on top of being clinically dehydrated. His adventure has to come to an end. We hit up our angel (Bill Larson) to see if he can take us to visit Mike. We go and see him, administer hugs, and do the see you soon’s. As depressing as this is, we know the show must go on. We’re going to miss you out here, Mike.

We go on to paddle our longest day yet. 31 miles. This is to set us up for “success” for one of the toughest/most dangerous days on the river: Lake Winnie. We make it all the way to beginning of the lake so we can get up early and hit it while the wind is low.

Day 7: Let’s start with some background info on Lake Winnibigoshish (Winnie for short). It’s 67,000 acres in size. You cannot see across the lake unless it’s a nice day. Weather does whatever it wants here. During ice fishing season, it’s big enough to accommodate 25,000 fishermen, RV’s, snowmobiles, and have labeled roads. That’s really all that needs to be said.

We wake up to our extra-early alarms to get a jump on the wind. Nope! It was storming. We snooze as we see that it’s “supposed” to pass. When we finally get going, the conditions appear to be acceptable. We paddle through the reeds out to the main water. We are greeted with constant 1 foot swells. This is concerning so we decide to take the “safe” route: hugging the bank. Unfortunately, hugging the bank on Lake Winnie means basically doubling your miles rather than cutting straight across. Either way, we take the responsible approach.

We are dealing with it. Then, the wind starts to pick up after a few miles. I can’t explain it, but the wind begins to push me out toward the middle as much as I fight it. Before I know it, I look around and realize the severity of my situation: I’m over 2 miles from shore, being pushed out further, and the swells (waves) are as high as 4 feet with white caps. Then it hits me: if I go down, it’s 65 feet deep, and I’m being pushed toward the middle of a lake that I can’t see other side of. The closest boat is a commercial fishing boat that’s a visual speck a couple miles away. You’ll be proud to know that I put my life jacket on in this moment. At one point, I take a mental break from analyzing each and every swell to look down at the water. I get the strangest feeling of vertigo knowing there are 65 feet below me. It’s like I would instantly fall all the way down if I flipped. Vertigo is not an ideal feeling while you are trying to surf a wave every 2.3 seconds in a canoe. I put my phone around my neck because I knew I’d need to call 911 the moment I toppled over from any of the constant waves.

I know that sounds dramatic, but I swear: it falls under the top 5 times that I have been scared for my life. Long story short, we make it across. There is a campground at the end of the lake. They let us camp and shower for free. They give us a beer, and drive us in their golf cart to a bar a couple miles away. We get a hot meal, proper buzz, and a very illegal ride back to the campground with some lovely humans when the bar shut down.

What… a… week…

Until next time, do what you love.

T-Funk