We hadn't seen our friends Jerod and Mylynn since our trip to Dublin together a couple years back. We decided it would be a great idea to rent a houseboat and tour some of the lakes in northern Minnesota for a few days. I had never been on a houseboat before, but Erynn had and she was extremely excited about this trip. You can find additional pictures of this very same trip from Jerod's page here.
Here are Erynn, Mylynn, and Jerod in front of the sign for the town, Crane Lake, where our adventure started. Crane Lake is a little tourist town at the very northern edge of Minnesota and mostly caters to holidays makers.
As I said, we were way, way north, and we reached the "End of the Road".
Thankfully, Jerod took care of most of the arrangements and found this great outfit, Voyagaire Houseboats, on the Internet. They had a decent restaurant, nice hotel, great service, and a ton of houseboats for rent.
Here we all are on the bow of our baby, Knot-a-Care, which served us well over the three days we were out on the lake. If you're interested in the specs of the boat, checkout the Voyagaire website, and we got the Suncruiser 360. You can also see the Tufte's dog, Sebastian (a black lab), sitting peacefully in front. This picture was actually taken at the very end of the trip and the dog was pretty beat down. He spent most of the three days deflecting all of the bug's attention away from the humans. At one point during the cruise, the dog even tried to imitate my friend Scott Dunbar by trying to Swim For His Freedom!!!
There are really only two slices of humanity on the chain of lakes, Crane Lake and Kettle Falls. They are at opposite ends of the lakes and are separated by roughly 30 miles of twisting and turning water. Here are Jerod and Mylynn in front of the ranger station in Crane Lake. The US-Canada border slices through the middle of the chain of lakes, and on the US side is Voyageurs National Park. Click on the link to read more about the park itself.
Once underway, we basically didn't have anything to do or anywhere to be for three days. The relaxation for all of us was great. We all got a chance to drive the boat, which had a top speed of 7.4 mph as measured by Jerod's GPS. At the start of the trip, Erynn made it quite clear that she had no desire to drive the boat, but somehow she ended up being the first (doesn't she look tense?). Ultimately, we figured out it was almost impossible to do any damage to anything on the trip unless we were remarkably stupid.
We stopped shortly in Canada mostly to just say we did it (plus Jerod needed some batteries). For the entire trip, Canada was just off our right side only a few hundred yards away. We also went to expand my collection of passport stamps. Click here to see the stamp from Fort Frances, Canada.
We spent a lot of time fishing, hanging out, and playing cards. Erynn even managed to get a tan (not easy, mind you). Here we can see Jerod and Mylynn in the bow of the little aluminum launch that we also rented with fishing poles at the ready.
I thought I was "King of the World" for a while because I caught most of the fish. We caught all small mouth bass except for the one 19" Northern Pike on the right. They sure were big when I was pulling them into the boat, but they don't look very big in the pictures.
But the true winner of the fishing competition was Erynn with this 15 inch small mouth. She caught it from shore with a leach and bobber. Simple. Tasty. After we got back to base, we asked if this was in fact a large fish, but apparently for these lakes it was just a medium sized fish!!! You'll be glad to know that the traditional gender roles applied during this trip. Jerod and I cleaned the fish and the women-folk cooked 'em.
At the top of the lakes is Kettle Falls, which was an old logging town that now just served pleasure boaters. The falls were blocked by a couple dams to regulate the water level. Above is Erynn in front of the sign for the park.
Here is the gang in front of the Kettle Falls Hotel that has been completely refurbished and now serves great apple pie and ice cream.
Here is a shot of one of the dams holding back the lakes. You can see by the white lines on the rocks how low the water has been.
Overlooking the dam and the lower lakes is a nice observation deck. We all posed for a couple nice pictures in the beautiful sunshine. The day of these pictures was probably the best of the entire trip.
© 2003 Doug Rathburn