Traveling the Highways & Byways with Bill Graves Tower, Minnesota T he late Charles Kuralt wrote from Ely, Minnesota: “You could paddle a canoe to the end of Moose Lake and camp overnight and put the canoe in another lake the next morning.
You could cross that lake, and camp for the night, and paddle across another lake the third day. You could keep this up, visiting a different lake every day for a hundred years, and you still wouldn’t get to all the lakes.” He was writing about the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness – “a million acres of wilderness with no roads, no buildings, no sign that human beings have ever been there, except for some Indian pictographs and maybe ashes from an old campfire.” All motors are banned – outboards, airplanes, generators. It’s even against the law to cut a branch off a tree or bring bottles or cans into the area. Groups of more than ten canoeists must split up and go in different directions, same deal if the group has more than four boats.
Established by Congress in 1964, the Boundary Waters run north from Ely well into Canada. The U.S. Forest Service, which manages our part of it, says that more people visit this Wilderness than any other in the country, about 200,000 annually. (There are 662 Wilderness areas in the U.S.) While some regions draw hikers in the summer – skiers and dogsledders in winter – at least 75% of the visitors come to paddle canoes. Kuralt’s assertion of a lake-a-day for 100 years may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Looking beyond the Boundary Waters, Minnesota claims 10,000 lakes, but it’s more like 15,000. Throw in the lakes of Ontario and Northern Wisconsin and there are certainly more lakes up here than I want to count or will ever see. Highway 1 runs from the shore of Lake Superior up to Ely, than on west across the state. Twenty miles west of Ely, it passes through Tower-Soudan: two towns that grew up on opposite sides of the tracks, but today accept living together, yet hyphenated. Tower was an end-of-road railroad town, populated, in its early days, by miners, loggers and explorers. Main Street was mostly boarding houses and saloons. With two miles of woods between them, Soudan was a company town, owned by the Oliver Mining Company, of US Steel. If you lived in Soudan, you lived in a company house, shopped in the company store, and the man-of-the-house worked in the company mine. Tower’s Main Street today is not abridged from what it once was, as they have been most towns its size – less than 500 people. There is still life behind the
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