Thither & Yon

This is a somewhat lengthy narrative about the trouble I had making plans to go canoeing and camping in Voyageurs National Park. If you have money burning holes in your pockets, you will not have the same trouble I had. If you’re trying to plan a canoeing trip in Voyageurs on a budget, this blog post might be helpful.

Read along for fun, or if you’re just here for practical tips, you can navigate by this handy Tips Table of Contents!

Tip #1: If you want to camp, you need a boat.
Tip #2: The NPS is does not provide any boats.
Tip #3: Inexperienced paddlers should camp on the easy lakes.
Tip #4: If you want to camp, you need a bigger boat.
Tip #5: It’s going to cost you some money to get access to a boat.
Tip #6: Staying at the Kettle Falls Hotel might be a better idea.
Tip #7: Getting a reservation at the Kettle Falls Hotel takes some doing.
Tip #8: You can rent a canoe at Kettle Falls.
Tip #9: Don’t pick a camp site too far from your starting point.
Tip #10: The campsites really are all gorgeous.
Tip #11: Reserve your campsite before leaving home.
Tip #12: Make sure you have a useable map.
Tip #13: Bring rain gear.
Bonus Tip: ???

Now, read on for the backstory and all the Tips in full detail!

In our marriage, Dustin is the trip-planner. He is excellent at it. He can arrange hotels and flights and cultural itineraries like a boss. When I try to do these things, I get tangled up in the details, or (more often) derailed by the fact that so many things cost money. My role is usually to be moral support, or just a very appreciative beneficiary of all his hard work.

When we started doing National Parks-centered road trips last year, though, I finally found my travel-planning niche. It turns out I’m pretty great at planning visits to National Parks, complete with reservations for permit-restricted adventures, backcountry campsites, and frontcountry back-up plans. Is this because such adventures usually cost much less than airplane- and hotel-heavy itineraries? Definitely possible.

But then I started planning a trip to Voyageurs National Park, located on the US/Canada boundary waters of northern Minnesota. From the pictures and reviews, it’s easy to see that this is a gorgeous park, and from my hunches based on its location, it seemed to be one where we’d be unlikely to battle crowds. (This hunch is confirmed by the park stats: Voyageurs had fewer than 250,000 visitors in 2021 – making it the 13th least-visited of all the National Parks).

I’m no stranger to remote and less-visited parks: we spent an incredible three days in North Cascades last summer, which is the 4th least-visited of all the parks, and Great Basin (11th least-visited) last spring. Low-traffic parks are amazing opportunities for solitude and up-close encounters with the best of the US’s natural wonders. We’ve got our eyes fixed on Alaska for next year (representing 7 of the least-visited parks because they’re SOOO far away).

But Voyageurs.

I spent two days on the Voyageurs’ nps.gov website trying to figure things out. They do a good job giving you the general gist of things, but the practical specifics kept eluding me. I sent a message to their facebook page asking if there was someone I could talk to. They sent a helpful reply referring me to the webpage. I called the visitors center and talked to someone who had never gone camping before, and could not answer my questions and did not seem inclined to help me find someone who could.

So. To maybe save you some of the irritation I felt while trying to plan this trip, I am presenting to you the answers I struggled to find.

PRO TIP #1: All camping opportunities inside the park – both front and backcountry – require use of a boat.*

This is one of the first things you’ll learn about this park when you begin researching your camping opportunities. The three enormous lakes are the whole point of this park, which was created to protect and preserve the “customary waterways” used by Native Americans and later French fur traders as the borders of the US started to take shape. The park is all about boating. A couple state park campgrounds are accessible from the mainland, if boating is not your thing.

*In fact, “all” is no longer quite correct. As of summer 2022, there are now two campsites you can hike to on the mainland. But really… you’ll miss the best parts of the park if you skip the boat.

Got your own boat? GREAT! You will be totally fine to plan your dream visit to this park, as long as you make sure you know everything you need to know about preventing the spread of invasive aquatic species as you move your boat between bodies of water.

Or are you, like me, one of the sad, boatless masses? No problem, you have options! You can charter a boat tour, rent a boat (canoe, kayak, paddleboat, houseboat), or hire a water taxi.

PRO TIP #2: the Park Service at Voyageurs does not provide any water transportation services from the mainland.

This took me ages to figure out because I just couldn’t believe it: if you want to get on a boat that takes you from one point to another, you will need to pay a third-party service. There is no getting around this.

The nps.gov site will confuse you because they do offer canoe rental for backcountry camping – BUT – these canoes are located along the backcountry trails on inland lakes somewhere between the trailhead and your campsite. The thing is, though, you need a different boat to get to the trailhead in the first place. All of the backcountry trailheads are on the other side of a big lake.

The Park Service also provides some guided boat tours, which you can reserve through recreation.gov and which offer nice, interpreted cruises around some of the lakes, returning to the same point from which they departed (the Kabetogama or Rainy Lake visitors centers).

But that isn’t what we wanted. We wanted to go out to some lonely little island and camp among the moose and stars and have the most glorious campfire. In my mind’s eye, we glided across peaceful waters in a pair of kayaks, easy to paddle, easy to pull up on a rocky little beach, easy to tuck away for the evening.

So I started hunting for boat rentals. The Park Service page provides a list of approved commercial services you can choose from. The list is long, and is complicated by being arranged by lake. That means that, for starters, you have to know which lake you intend to paddle on, which means knowing where you want to camp. I was already stymied because I wanted to base the location of my campsite on how easy it would be to get there.

PRO TIP #3: The best campsites for inexperienced paddlers are along the shores of Kabetogama or Namakan Lakes.

If you are visiting Voyageurs by driving up through Minnesota, the campsites located along the Kabetogama and Namakan lakeshores are by far the easiest to access. Additional considerations: the visitors center at Kabetogama is open all year, while the Ash River (Namakan Lake) visitors center is only open during the high season. If you plan to visit Kettle Falls, however (see below), Namakan Lake is where you want to be. Rainy Lake, the third large lake, is harder to access for the casual visitor, and gets more wind and weather than the other two lakes.

PRO TIP #4: If you want to camp, you need a bigger boat.

My kayaking dreams foundered and drowned when I realized how difficult it would be to transport camping gear in a kayak, so I started perusing the list of approved commercial services looking for someone who would rent me a canoe.

The list mentioned many outfitters that rent canoes, but as I started clicking through to their websites, I found that most commercial services are far more interested in selling you a fishing tour than they are in renting you a little canoe. The ones I did find rent mostly by the hour. If you want to keep a canoe all day, you’re looking at around $85/day.

PRO TIP #5: If you don’t have your own boat, be prepared to pay a healthy fee to use someone else’s boat.

I gulped. My preferred plan was to be out for two nights, three days, meaning $255 worth of canoe rental fees. Suddenly camping – usually a very inexpensive way to adventure – was looking a little cost-prohibitive. Maybe a water taxi, then, and we’d just skip the hands-on part of the water experience?

Nope. Water taxis are more expensive and even harder to find than boat rentals. There are no water taxi services that shuttle people between fixed points on a regular schedule. If you want a water taxi, what you’re basically doing is chartering a private boat. Water taxis, then, would run us anywhere between $80-240 per person per trip. That means two people who want to both go out and come back might pay up to $960 for the privilege of getting to sleep with the mosquitos next to a lake. Even on the low end, we would be talking about $320.

This park, quite simply, caters to two groups: devoted fishers who already own boats, and people who just want to drive to a couple overviews and buy some swag in the gift shop in order to check the park off their lists. The people in the middle, who want to get their toes a little wetter (only metaphorically!) are in a tough spot.

(Am I overstating how tough this is? It is easier if you’re not a cheapskate, but even if you don’t mind paying a thousand dollars for a water taxi, you still have to arrange all the logistics yourself. Maybe I’ve gotten too comfortable letting other parks hold my hand.)

I nearly threw up my hands and declared the project a loss at this point, but my breakthrough came when I went to make a reservation at the Kettle Falls Hotel.

PRO TIP #6: A stay at Kettle Falls Hotel is a nice compromise between being a fanatical fisherman with your own boat and being a tourist who never gets off the mainland.

The Kettle Falls Hotel is remote (totally our bag) and old-school. We love finding places to stay in national parks that are out in the middle of nowhere (Phantom Ranch in the Grand Canyon, Sperry Chalet in Glacier, LeConte Lodge in Great Smoky Mountains), and the Kettle Falls Hotel seemed to fit that bill. It’s located on a spear of the US peninsula that juts out over the Canadian border so that, when you’re staying there, you’re on the only part of the US mainland located north of Canada. Super cool and – since they offer in-house water shuttle service for guests – it’s a way to avoid having to find your own water transportation.

The hotel’s water shuttle costs $45 per person for a round trip. $90 instead of $320 or $960?? Yes please.

PRO TIP #7: You can’t reserve a room at the Kettle Falls Hotel online. You have to call. Start calling early, and keep trying.

I started calling the hotel on a Thursday morning. No one answered either of the two telephone numbers provided, so I left a message stating my hoped-for date and requesting a call back. No one called back, so the next day I tried again. Still no answer. I tried two more times that day. No answer.

I kept calling. I tried four or five times every day. Yes, we’d reached the end of the summer season, but their last day was nearly a month away. Were they exhausted and didn’t want any new reservations? (I ran a B&B for ten years, I get it. But…)

I tried calling so many times, that when someone finally answered the phone on Tuesday of the following week, I was so surprised I couldn’t remember who I was calling or why. I got my act together and requested a room for the following week. They had one available! I paid a deposit for the room and the shuttle service, and felt my whole trip-planning spirit lift.

PRO TIP #8: You can rent a canoe from Kettle Falls Hotel.

On a whim before I hung up, I asked, “Do you happen to rent boats?”

“Like, what, fishing boats?” he asked.

“No, like, kayaks or canoes?” I was still a little stuck on kayaks.

“Oh, right. Yeah, we have those.”

“What is the rate for a day?” I asked.

“Uh… that’s, what, like, $15?”

“For the whole day??” I said, then immediately tried to back-peddle on the surprise. “That, uh, sounds very reasonable. Would it be possible, say, to rent a canoe on the day we check out, and keep it until the following day so we can camp for a night? And then take the shuttle back a day later than usual?”

My friend on the other end of the line had a little trouble parsing this request (I don’t blame him), but ultimately decided that yes, we could shuttle in on Tuesday, stay the night at the hotel, rent a canoe on Wednesday, paddle out to a campsite, paddle back to the hotel on Thursday, and take the shuttle back to the mainland then.

SWEET.

So the price tag on our itinerary wound up looking like this:

Double-Occupancy Reservation at Kettle Falls Hotel: ………. $90
Water Shuttle for 2 to and from Ash River VC: ………………….. $90
Kayak Rental from Kettle Falls Hotel for 23 hours: ……………. $15
Frontcountry Campsite Permit, 1 night: ………………………………. $26
Frontcountry Campsite Reservation Fee: …………………………….. $10
TOTAL FOR ONE HOTEL NIGHT AND ONE CAMPING NIGHT: $231

$180 for the hotel stay, $51 for a canoeing and camping adventure, basically. In a world where I hadn’t discovered Kettle Falls, it could have looked like this:

Frontcountry Campsite Permit, 2 nights: …………………………….. $52
Frontcountry Reservation Fee: ………………………………………………. $10
Canoe Rental from Commercial Outfitter for 3 days: ……….. $255
TOTAL FOR A TWO-NIGHT CAMPING TRIP: …………………….. $317

Or, if we’d wanted to get a little fancier, like this:

Backcountry Campsite Permit, 2 nights: ……………………………… $32
Backcountry Canoe Rental, 2 days: ………………………………………. $28
Backcountry Reservation Fee: ……………………………………………….. $10
Water Taxi service on first and last days: …………………………….. $320
TOTAL FOR A TWO-NIGHT BACKCOUNTRY CAMPING TRIP: $390

You could, of course, choose the more expensive water taxi option even if you want to frontcountry camp, but here’s a note on why it doesn’t work the other way around:

PRO TIP #9: If you’ve never canoed before, or if you only paddle rarely, don’t choose a campsite more than a mile or two from your starting point.

The backcountry trailheads are about 5 miles and 10 miles from the Ash River visitors center, or 10 miles and 20 miles from the Kabetogama visitors center. And once you get there, you have to hike several miles then maybe do some more paddling before you arrive at your campsite.

We’ve done a fair amount of kayaking in our travels, though only on our travels. We don’t own kayaks. We don’t go out on the lake every weekend. Our paddling muscles are not regularly tuned. Canoeing is not that different from kayaking on a fundamental level (you only paddle on one side at a time and you have to be a little more careful about tipping over), but that doesn’t change how well you are prepared for it if you don’t do it all the time.

Our unpracticed muscles did just fine until the wind picked up and we found ourselves in a current pulling us the wrong direction. You can’t make a lot of progress under those circumstances. At one point, I found myself nearly weeping with the frustration of using weak, angry muscles to try and power against current and wind. We were less than 20 feet offshore, which meant I had an excellent perspective on all the progress we weren’t making with every painful stroke.

We did a grand total of about 8 miles of paddling (1 from the hotel to the campsite, 6 on an exploratory adventure, then 1 back to the hotel in the morning) and I felt absolutely murdered the next day.

If you’re still reading this blog post, it’s because your adventure is meant to be fun, maybe even relaxing. You’re here for the scenery, the wildlife, the sunsets, and the campfire. You are not here to prove your physical prowess to anyone, and you should not create more suffering than necessary through your choice of campsite, especially since:

PRO TIP #10: The campsites really are all gorgeous.

You simply cannot go wrong. Choose a campsite that’s relatively easy to reach. Go early, set up your camp, and then if you want to do more paddling, you can always take the canoe out for a mid-day trip without having to worry about reaching your campsite at a reasonable hour or before you’re too tired to set up. Then if you paddle yourself to dock-flopping exhaustion, the only task left before you is to light the fire and roast the s’mores.

If you plan to start your canoeing-to-camp adventure from Kettle Falls, allow me to personally recommend the Kettle Portage campsite. Catamaran would also be an excellent choice, though it was closed for repairs for the 2022 season.

Speaking of choosing campsites:

PRO TIP #11: You have to reserve your campsite online and print your permit.

You can’t just show up and take any old free campsite, especially in the heart of the summer. Reservations are required, and you are also required to print your own permit, which means you need to plan far enough in advance to have access to a printer.

The nps.gov site will walk you through the steps, but you make the actual reservation on recreation.org. In September, we had a million choices. I suspect if you want to camp in July, you should probably start planning a little more than a week ahead of time.

PRO TIP #12: Download the GPS maps before you go or have a reliable paper map with you and know how to use it.

Data signals exist in the park… sometimes and in some spots. They are not reliable. Make sure you have a plan for always knowing where you are and where you need to go. Turns out Canadians are just as unhappy to have Americans sneaking across their borders as Americans are to have Mexicans sneaking across ours. Turnabout, eh? But seriously: it is illegal for an American to go onto shore on the Canadian side, even on accident. It looks like the Canadians probably aren’t as big of jerks about it as Americans are, buy why risk it?

PRO TIP #13: Bring rain gear.

Weather can change in a hurry in places where so much water hangs out. While we were there, the forecast called for morning showers and clear afternoons, but we got mix-and-match sun and showers all day.

And if you’re inexperienced paddlers, chances are you’ll splash each other a bit as you row. Rain gear, at the very least, will help keep your butt dry.

A turn in the weather can cause paddling conditions to become quite dangerous, as well. Know your skill level, and be prepared to make back-up plans. Fighting adverse wind and currents is one thing, getting your canoe full of gear flipped over is a much, much bigger problem. Wear your life vests. Don’t be a hero.

BONUS TIP: Screw packing light.

Despite the effort required to reach these campsites, most of them are designated “frontcountry” because you can pull your boat up, hoist your bags up the dock, and set up shop. That means you can leave your ultralight gear at home. Bring your own pillow. Bring that cooler full of beers. Bring a package of fresh brats. Bring all the marshmallows you can carry, and a whole cord of (locally purchased from an approved retailer) firewood because you can.

Backcountry experience, frontcountry luxuries.

And of course, the best and most cliched tip of all: don’t stress it, and have a fabulous time.

If you have an interest in hearing about the actual fabulous trip we had, stand by for the next blog post. You don’t want to miss Dustin’s astral photography.