Paddling across White Iron Lake, I looked up at the sky, cloudless and blue. Then I glided around a bend and spotted them: a pair of slim maple trees, rising from the rocky shoreline, burst into a brilliant orange.
It was still early. Mid-September. In this northern edge of Minnesota, just outside Ely, most of the trees still shimmered green. But from our canoes, my paddling group witnessed hints that autumn, in all its brilliance, would soon arrive.
"It's the perfect time to be up here," one of our guides, Devan, later told us.
"Oh, you say that to all the groups," laughed Georganne, who had trekked here from Oakland, Calif., with her husband and two 20-something sons.
But the weekend would back up his claim: Comfortable temperatures. Fewer people _ and perhaps more important _ fewer mosquitoes. And those slim, orange maple trees, with more to come. It was as if all the forest's color had gravitated toward the water.
We had gravitated there, too. We had come to canoe, to explore just the edge of an epic wilderness of lakes, rivers and rapids. This trip, put on by Wilderness Inquiry, proved more easygoing than my past pack-and-portage excursions into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Each evening, we returned to a cozy lodge on a pine-covered peninsula on White Iron Lake.
The weekend had been billed as an "amazing trip for leaf-peepers." As the trip approached, swaths of the Department of Natural Resource's color-coded state map _ which Minnesotans eye each fall _ had begun turning yellow and orange. But the Ely area?
Stubbornly, disappointingly green.
Still, as the van headed north, I hoped.
Our canoe guides, manning the wheel and the music, picked a song I seized as a good omen. In aching harmony and amid a steel guitar, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss sang: "Leaves were falling just like embers/ In colors red and gold they set us on fire/ Burning just like a moonbeam in our eyes."
We had other goals besides leaves, of course. One man in our small group, the pediatrician from Oakland, had brought his wife and sons to experience the sight that as a Minnesota youth he had fallen in love with _ "the view of a sunny lake from underneath a portaged canoe." Karen, in her 70s, wanted to explore her beloved Boundary Waters with the help of a guide and the comfort of a bed. Devan, always quick to identify a bird in flight, hoped to see a bull moose.
I craved time in a canoe.
My camping and canoeing trips had relied, for too long, on men who boasted more gear and experience than I had. Who knew how to start a fire despite the rain and _ if I'm being honest _ were willing to carry the canoe on their shoulders from one lake to the next. On this trip, I vowed to pay more attention to the maps and the weather and the knots used to tie up canoes. I wanted to be able to venture into the Boundary Waters on my own next time.
The two Wilderness Inquiry guys, clad in Chaco sandals and sporting tans, let me look over their shoulders as they marked their maps and made their plans. But Karen, who had navigated this part of the state many times before, became my guide, too.
