Name of Your Activity

Date: April 23, 2005

Location: Pow Wow Trail, North of Isabella in the BWCAW

Activity Report Author: Larry Pederson

Activity Report Detail: 

Last weekend(4/23) I, along with Bonnie Riley, Don Clark and Maynard Lagace, backpacked in a few miles on the Pow Wow trail to camp and do some trail maintenance work.  We accomplished everything we had set out to do and had a great time out in the woods.  After returning home I knew I had to go back up there and see more of that trail.  The part that we hiked in on was the remains of old logging roads from the days before the Boundary Waters became a wilderness area.  The trees have taken over the roads but it is easy hiking with few rocks or roots.  Don and Maynard talked of not being able to follow the trail up on the northern section due to lots of blow down trees from the big storm.  They made it in about 18 to 20 miles and couldn't follow the trail and had to back track all the way out and ended up spending most of the night out there in the rain.  After checking my calendar when I got home I realized if I wanted to do the trail this year is would have to be the next weekend.   Since the trail is about a 22 mile loop with a 2 mile out and back section at the start I thought I would go in the opposite direction (counter clockwise) and if I got to a point of having to back track I would only be in 8 or 10 miles and could easily get back out again rather than ending up with a 40 mile trip from the other way.  I had also seen about 6 miles of the trail going the other way so if I took a long time getting that far I was confident I could find my way out in the dark.  I had read a couple of reports from people that have hiked the whole trail and they recommended only going in a clockwise direction because of a couple of turns that are easy to miss in the first few miles.  I was confident in my map reading ability and really wanted to get through this section with as much daylight as possible.

Friday I left directly from work and made it to the trailhead just as it was getting dark.  I would sleep in the back of my truck and then get an early start in the morning.  I drifted off to sleep with visions of bears on the top of the truck trying to get my oatmeal I was going to have for breakfast.  Luckily no bears showed up and after a big breakfast and a couple of cups of fresh coffee I was ready to hit the trail.  I checked my watch as I hit the trail, 6:07, about 14 hours of daylight left.  The first couple of miles of trail I had seen before and knew most of it is runable so I did run most of this hoping to get a few easy miles in fairly quickly in case I needed more time later. I made it to the split in the trail in about half an hour, quite a difference from the hour and a half with a fully loaded pack.  I still had a pack but was down to the bare minimums-what a difference a few pounds makes.

I took the trail to the right.  22 miles with no shortcuts to get back to this point.  The tricky turns that I had read about were in the next several miles so I checked the map and compass quite often.  Being completely overcast it was difficult to get a feeling for which direction you were heading, luckily these old logging roads followed pretty much a straight line.  After a little over a mile I came to the first of the tricky turns.  No real problem finding this one.  I push on crossing several swampy areas, my feet are wet and will remain that way the rest of day.  In another mile or so I come to a huge beaver dam.  The trail follows along the dam for several hundred yard and just as I get to dry ground I see a small arrow on a tree pointing off into the woods.  This is sort of a marshy area with lots of tall dead grass.  I can barely make out a trail.  Is this really the trail?  Up until this point the trail was very easy to follow because of the ATVs that have driven through (so much for non-motorized travel in the BWCAW) but they continued on north rather than following the trail.   I could run just about everything up to this point but for about the next 12 miles it would be only walking.  This would be some of the roughest trail I have ever been on.   It was just after getting on this rougher trail that I would have my only animal encounter of the day.  A really big moose wanted to share the same trail but when he saw me he decided I wasn't worth fighting it for and crashed off through the brush.

I am still making pretty good time up to South Wilder Lake but then I start getting into some of the area of the blow downs.  There are still many of them across the trail and it's slow going with having to climb over or crawl under all these dead trees.  I push on to North Wilder where I find the worst of the blow downs.  There are places that I just jump from tree to tree above the trail and in a few spots have to backtrack to find the trail.  Too many miles of this and it will turn into a very long day.  I think this is the area where Don and Maynard lost the trail.  I definitely would not be able to find my way through this in the dark.

Once leaving North Wilder the trail was easier to follow but there were still many blow downs to climb over and my feet were beginning to feel the effects of all this as well as the constant rocks on the trail.  At Horseshoe Lake I stopped to filter more water.  I figured I was about half way through now and it wasn't even noon yet. A few more miles of this really rough stuff and then I should be back on some  of the old logging road trails.  The trail along some of these next several lakes was more of the really rocky stuff but much less blow downs to climb over.  Finally near the south end of Superstition Lake the trail is back on the old logging roads.  This would be really great trail to run fast on but my feet hurt from the miles of rocks so about all I can do is shuffle along, but it still feels good to be moving a little faster.  I stop to fill my water bottles again at the fancy new bridge at Diana Lake.  From here on in I have seen the trail and know there will not be any trees to go over or rocks to kick.  As I make it back to the split in the trail and head south to the trail head it starts to snow really hard.  It had been spitting a few flakes all day but now it was starting to stick to everything.  It looked more like November than the last day of April.

I made it back to the truck with plenty of daylight to spare.  10 hours and 15 minutes for the approximately 26 miles.

Will I go back again?  Definitely!  This is an absolutely beautiful trail in one of the most wild and remote areas in the country.  Of course now there are several more of these remote trails in the Boundary Waters that are calling.

Larry Pederson

Zumbro Falls MN