CAMPING ADVENTURES We spent three nights camping on the western side of Trout Lake in the Boundary Waters. The first night was blissful. Then, history repeated itself with an absolute beast of a storm. | CHRIS PASCONE
Shelter from the Trout Lake Storm By Chris Pascone
Everybody who’s ever gone tent camping has a story about “that storm” barreling through camp in the middle of the night. You never forget it, once you’ve lived through it. I think going through these big storms in a scrawny tent is part of the allure of camping for many of us. I have unwittingly made living through big storms into a family tradition, and I know I’m not the only one. I remember tent camping once with my parents in Porcupine Mountains State Park in Michigan, when I was 7 years old, and a vicious thunderstorm ripped into us at 5:30 in the morning. We were right on the shore of Lake Superior, and my parents evacuated me from my sleeping bag into the truck so they could take down the absolutely flooded tent in the pouring rain. The storm was loud and furious, and we drove to whatever nearby town had an early-morning café open. I still remember the panic in my parents’ voices as they rushed me into the truck for safety. Thirty-four years later, I was camping with my own two daughters and three of our family friends on big Trout Lake in the western Boundary Waters. We paddled in from Lake Vermillion, then headed halfway up the deep, 8,000 acre lake. There we found a nice campsite on the western side of Trout to call home for three nights. The first night was blissful. Then history repeated itself in a roaring, tempestuous way. Keeping the family tradition alive and well!
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JULY 2022
Everyone was sleeping soundly until suddenly, at 2:47 a.m., an absolute beast of a storm whipped up on the lake and tried to flatten our campsite. I spent the next two hours lying on my back propping up the tent poles with my feet and legs while 60 mph winds pounded our poor structure relentlessly. The whole while the girls (8 and 10 years old) were sitting up wide-eyed in their sleeping bags, contemplating how the wind can be THAT loud, how the lightning can strike THAT close, and how the rain can fall THAT hard. It was terrifying. As I worked my legs to keep the tent from buckling in half, I was imagining the newspaper headlines the next day: “Campers Turned into Human Pancakes after Getting Pulverized by Storm.” I’ve never been good at story titles. We heard a rattling, banging sound in camp: the wind was powerful enough to lift my canoe off the ground and move it up the rocky shoreline. Those who’ve portaged my 75-pound Bell Northshore know this is no easy feat. We all got through that storm, but not without having some fear struck into us. That’s part of the tradition. None of us got any more sleep until it started getting light out at 5 a.m. and the storm subsided. Later that morning, bleary-eyed and staggering, all we could talk about over coffee and backcountry cinnamon rolls was the power of the storm we had just been through. In retrospect, I was happy my friends and family went through it together. It was a
NORTHERN WILDS
My daughter passing the time with a game of frisbee. | CHRIS PASCONE formative experience for my daughters, and even for the adults. We tested a big lake and it tested us back. We needed each other to get through that storm. That’s our tradition. Meanwhile, little did we know that less than a mile away from us, on the same Trout Lake, the drama was much more intense, as a party of nine people from St. Paul literally made the pages of the Star Tribune newspaper after a funnel cloud touched
down right in their camp and smashed 20 trees to pieces on top of their tents. Miraculously, none of the campers were injured, but they had to abort their trip after one night (of a five-day trip) because their tents and belongings were ruined. Trout Lake, folks—it’s a different world up there.
