Sa m Cook Tri e s to Sl ee p on th e Grou n d By Er i c C h a n d l e r Canoe trip from Basswood Lake near Ely. Nellie, nine weeks, helping Sam Cook evaluate a possible site for sleeping on the ground. | SUBMITTED
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n 2018, Sam Cook retired after 38 years of writing about the outdoors for the Duluth News Tribune (DNT) newspaper. Almost three years later, we asked how it was going. “There aren’t any days that I wake up and think, ‘Well, what am I going to do today?’ Let’s find the clothes we need and get going, you know?” Cook said. “Here’s how sick I am. I keep track of the number of nights I sleep on the ground every year. This has to be in wild places, it can’t be in your backyard.” Cook’s earned the right to do what he likes after publishing outdoors articles for the DNT for 1,976 weeks. Starting in 1980, he wrote story after story, week after week, year after year. That is 38 deer season openers, 38 fishing openers and just about everything in between. Cook’s career in outdoor writing is admirable and will be impossible to imitate. It all started in the small town of Sabetha in the northeast corner of Kansas. Cook was born there in 1948, but his family moved every few years to places like Topeka; Grand Island, Nebraska; and Omaha before finally moving back to Sabetha for high school. “Dad was kind of always looking for a better situation. We were pretty poor,” Cook said. “It was hard to move that much, but I think in some ways being the new kid over and over again might’ve provided me some strengths that came through when it was time to go out and meet a lot of people and interview them.” Two important things happened to him as a high school sophomore. First, he met 18
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Cook [CENTER] on a Boy Scout canoe trip, 1964, to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. | SUBMITTED his wife Phyllis. “I was sitting next to her in biology class. And we started dating and never stopped. We were kind of meant to be, I guess,” he said. And second, that same year of 1964, he made his first trip to the Boundary Waters. “We made a nine-day trip up into the Quetico and all over. To a kid growing up in Kansas...it was just unbelievable,” Cook said. “To hear a loon for the first time. It just about knocked your socks off. The memory of that trip stayed in my mind. Phyllis and I didn’t get back there until ‘73 after we were married. Once we made a trip up there, we started thinking about moving up. We both quit our jobs in Topeka after five years and moved to Ely to work for a canoe outfitter for one
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Duluth’s David Spencer [LEFT] and Cook await a float plane pickup on the Winisk River in northern Ontario, 1991. | SUBMITTED
summer. And I’m sure our folks thought we were nuts, you know?” That 1976 foray led to a job working for the Ely Echo newspaper, then a daily newspaper in Longmont, Colorado, and finally the DNT in 1980. “We wanted to get back to Minnesota,” Cook said. He listed two big reasons for his plentiful writing opportunities here: increasing outdoor recreation options and Duluth’s spot on the globe. First, the growth in activities. “If you look at what’s happened over that time period in the outdoors, it was phenomenal. It wasn’t just going to be hunting
and fishing. It was going to be paddling and hiking and anything you could do outdoors,” said Cook. “I just decided that was all going to be part of it. And it was going to be male and female and it was going to be young and old. I just wanted it to be very inclusive and I think that’s how we are in the outdoors up here. What’s come on since I started that job with sea kayaking, mountain biking, hiking, the trails; everything just blossomed during that time.” Second, Cook sang the praises of the region. “You also had just so many places to go. You could be an outdoor writer in Des Moines or Kansas City or someplace and not have what we have in our backyard
