BOUNDARY WATERS CANOE AREA WILDERNESS—A pilgrimage is a journey to holy land where a person seeks deeper understanding of self in relation to nature, community, and purpose through transformative encounters with God.
With that mission in mind, 14 pilgrims organized by the men’s ministry of the Lutheran Church of Hope gathered at 5:30 a.m. on a Tuesday morning last month in West Des Moines to embark on a nine-hour, 570-mile journey to northern Minnesota to experience one of North America’s most pristine destinations: the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW).
Writers throughout the ages have described immersion in nature as a spiritual experience, and we sought similar revelations rather than a simple vacation from the burdens of home.
“[T]his value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer…” transcendentalist writer Henry David Thoreau wrote in an 1857 diary entry. “It is as if I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely encouraging, though invisible, companion, and walked with him.”
Wilderness Canoe Base, operated by Lake Wapogasset Lutheran Bible Camp, Inc., is a camp and retreat center affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). Guides offer faith exploration and experiences based on two islands on the north shore of Seagull Lake, an entry point to the boundary waters in the Superior National Forest. Seagull Lake, which is six miles long and 2.5 miles wide, is situated at the end of the Gunflint Trail, 54 miles northwest of Grand Marais, Minn.—the closest town. The base hosted 780 campers and retreat-goers last year.
After a similar sojourn in 2019, I determined to learn a deeper history of the Boundary Waters to better appreciate the experience in the present day. This journey with strangers featured people on many different paths. Whether boss or employee, retiree or recent college graduate, we all sought both solitude to discern the Spirit’s message and the joy of communion with fellow men among God’s creation.
Purists may not consider the Boundary Waters a true wilderness. The maze of glacier-cut lakes and time-worn trails is preserved but not untouched by humans. The U.S. Forest Service periodically clears portages of obstructions. Regulations require camping only at designated sites with fire grates and government pit latrines. No roads or cars mar the landscape, but the sky sometimes shatters the illusion, as high-altitude planes and satellites still bear witness to human activity. We passed our first night at base camp around a fire watching SpaceX-launched Starlink satellites stream across the sky.
For many of us, the allure of a wilderness escape is the possibility of modest yet profound experiences—days void of modern distractions such as cell phones, work email, bills, politics, traffic, and other hallmarks of the daily grind. Relationships with family and friends are necessarily paused. Rather than track time with watches, our bodies’ internal circadian rhythm adapted to the cycles of the sun.
The Boundary Waters’ interconnected waterways traverse more than 1,100 lakes and unspoiled forests. It’s the largest American wilderness east of the Rockies and north of the Everglades. Powerful glaciers sculpted the landscape over an immense period, revealing landforms and rocks as well as molding thousands of streams and lakes, interspersed with islands. This network provides unique opportunities for long distance travel by watercraft—a rare experience within the continental United States.
The Boundary Waters features more than 1,200 miles of canoe routes for peripatetic paddlers to navigate with more than 2,000 campsites as waypoints. Exploring the boundary waters requires simplifying basic needs to the essentials—or whatever can fit in a Duluth pack. Travelers only need water and food, shelter, and clothing to meet nature on its own terms.
“‘Wilderness’ is as much a state of mind as a physical condition,” Robert Beymer wrote in a guide to the area first published in 1979. “The disquieting drone of motors fades into the past, and one enters a world of only natural sensations.”
As a wave of COVID lockdowns brought cabin fever, an increasing number of Americans are discovering the Boundary Waters. Travelers surged more than 16 percent from 2019 to 2020, when 165,918 people launched journeys from more than 70 designated entry points. The surge in people brought what the Forest Service defines as “resource damage.”
The government imposed a quota of 5,700 permits in 2022 to better manage the problem of people cutting live trees, improperly disposing of human waste, leaving trash at campsites, failing to secure food from wild animals, and disrupting experiences with oversized groups.
The Boundary Waters landscape features some of the oldest exposed rock in the world, with some areas dating as old as 2.7 billion years. The last glacial advance and recession lasted from roughly 100,000 to 10,000 years ago. Humans have used Boundary Waters routes for millennia—at least 8,000 years. First Nations, cultures who settled North America, as well as French-Canadian Voyageurs explored the more than one million acres of lakes, rivers, bogs, and forest wilderness in what is now northeastern Minnesota following along nearly 200 miles of Canadian border.
After border disputes between Canadian and American settlers, Congress passed the Webster-Ashburton Treaty to establish the international boundary along a compromise fur trading route in 1842. The area has not always been wilderness. Trappers over-harvested the area of beaver, otters, fox, mink, and martens—impacting the region’s biodiversity. Loggers clearcut native red and white pines, and miners prospected for gold, iron, and copper.
Indigenous cultures included the Sioux and Chippewa (Ojibwe) Nations, who practice an unknown-to-outsiders faith tradition known as Midewiwin. The boundary waters lies within the 1854 Treaty Area where Chippewa maintain rights guaranteed by that accord.
Ernest Carl Oberholtzer first traveled to the boundary waters in 1906 after doctors told him he had perhaps less than a year to live after a diagnosis of heart damage due to rheumatic fever. He wrote numerous articles and stories with the nom de plume “Ernest Carliowa,” a nod to his Davenport birthplace.
“I felt better with every stroke of the paddle,” said Oberholtzer, who paddled more than 3,000 miles that summer and lived another 68 years.
“Ober,” as he was known, lobbied lawmakers against development in the wilderness, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him the first chairman of a government commission to set policy in the border area. An advocate of indigenous culture, Oberholtzer spoke fluent Ojibwe.
The plan he devised to protect the boundary waters ecosystem persists today. The federal government established the Superior National Forest in 1909, and in 1930 Congress passed the Shipstead-Nolan Act, which recognized wilderness as a public interest value worth of protection and prohibited logging within 400 feet of Superior National Forest shorelines.
Oberholtzer’s life work culminated with the inclusion of BWCA in the National Wilderness Preservation System, after Congress passed the Wilderness Act of 1964, and its expansion by 68,000 acres in 1978. His efforts also led to Ontario’s government granting wilderness protection to Quetico Provincial Park in 1972 and the establishment of Voyageurs National Park in 1975. Today, that combined ecosystem protects 2.4 million acres of Great Lakes hardwoods and northern conifer forestland.
“A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain,” conservationists and lawmakers wrote in the text of the Wilderness Act of 1964, a rare instance of poetry in congressional prose.
The common name of this wilderness—the Boundary Waters—offers visitors from the continental United States the closest experience possible to the edge of civilization in America. Most mobile carriers have no service. There’s no WiFi or crowds of people. Few structures exist besides campsite fire grates and government latrines.
Adherents of every major world religion crafted a creation narrative to reconcile the complex glory of the natural universe with their cultures, to give a collective purpose to people as stewards of these kingdoms. To learn these stories is to seek to understand God.
Language allows ideas to transcend time and space. This ability—through language—to ponder the past and the future is distinct to humans. Our languages evolve, and it’s part of the experience in wilderness to relate it to others. But words fail. They are a poor facsimile to immersion and self-discovery. Nonetheless, it’s instructive to read the writings of great authors who have struggled to relate the Boundary Waters experience in the English language.
“All of us have a second chapel, where there are no walls or stained glass. Yet it is a place where we may sense God in a personal way so intense we feel a reconciliation we have never felt before,” Jim Klobuchar, a former newspaper columnist, wrote in When We Reach For the Sun. “Human beings have tried for thousands of years to discover tangible proof of some higher and benevolent being in their lives. The search has led us into impenetrable thickets of theology. But we may be closer to the discovery than we realize. If God is peace, then why should it be so hard to understand what it is that stirs us with gentleness and thanksgiving on the forest trail?”
Encountering God in wilderness is a recurring theme in both Old and New Testament scripture. Biblical wilderness unfolds in liminal spaces—boundaries between civilization and primal zones, where human routines are suspended, identities shift, and spiritual rebirth is possible. As chronicled in the Old Testament, the wilderness features chaos, temptation, and danger while offering revelation, sustenance, and solitude.
“Remember how the Lord your God led you through the wilderness for these forty years, humbling you and testing you to prove your character, and to find out whether or not you would obey his commands,” reads Deuteronomy 8:2.
Jesus ministered in urban settings, yet many transformative experiences for him and his disciples happened outdoors in wilderness. Linking Jesus’ journey in wilderness with his Israelite ancestors’ covenant with God, these themes emerge again in the Gospels.
After John the Baptist, who lived in the wilderness, baptized Jesus in the Jordan River, the Spirit led Christ into the wilderness to be tested by Satan, as chronicled in Matthew 4:1, Luke 4:1-2, and Mark 1:12-13. In this story, as in the tradition of Moses, the wilderness is both a place of struggle and a place to forge new identity—in Jesus’ case as the human and divine son of God.
“The Spirit then compelled Jesus to go into the wilderness, where he was tempted by Satan for forty days. He was out among the wild animals, and angels took care of him,” reads Mark 1:12-13.
In two millennia, countless American writers and theologians have sought to relate scripture from the Old and New Testament to divine truths about the modern human condition—often relying on nature as a universal experience to bridge the time divide.
“Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium,” writer, conservationist, and boundary waters guide Sigurd F. Olson wrote in his first book, The Singing Wilderness.
In an age of supersonic planes, luxury yachts and Teslas, there’s still something special about travel via aluminum canoe.
“The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten. It is an antidote to insecurity, the open doorway to waterways of ages past and a way of life with profound and abiding satisfactions,” Olson wrote. “When a man is part of his canoe, he is part of all that canoes have ever known.”
Thoreau viewed nature immersion as a form of prayer. He kept two journals: one for facts and another for poetry. He hoped a day would dawn when they would merge. However, he found that the deeper he dove into facts, the further he drifted from poetry. In his seminal work, Walden, Thoreau observed a paradox: the primal need for us to explore the mysterious unknown while preserving the mystery.
“We need the tonic of wildness…” he wrote. “At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us…”
Paul Gruchow, a cigar-smoking Lutheran writer and chronicler of the wonders of the Boundary Waters, died in 2004 at his Duluth home by a drug overdose suicide at age 56 after completing a memoir about mental illness, Letters to a Young Madman. His family said he attempted suicide four times since 2001.
Nearly two decades after his death, Gruchow’s writing illuminates the clarion call of the wild. Many of his most profound passages mark his struggle to understand the human mind amid a lifelong battle with depression.
“We confront in wild places evidence of powers greater than our own; this evidence humbles us, and in humility is the beginning of spirituality,” wrote Gruchow, a former newspaper editor, aide to Rep. Donald Fraser (D-Minn.), and news director for Minnesota Public Radio. “Wildness matters not because it alone is sacred but because it arouses in us the sense of sanctity that makes visible the sacredness of everything else in life. When I go there, I retreat into the wilderness of my own brain, transcending the limits of living in a world of words or of my own kind alone and reveling in the grace of the wild.”
Gruchow observed that wildness is a state of being that is concrete and primary while wilderness is a state of mind that is abstract and derivative. To ignore, repress or deny the expression of the wildness of our minds and bodies is to “live in a disintegrated self,” Gruchow wrote in the 1997 book, Boundary Waters: The Grace of the Wild.
“When the self disintegrates, so does the ability to see the world realistically. The paradox is that the person without a whole sense of self inevitably becomes delusionally self-centered. At the extreme, in mental illness, all of a person’s available energy is required to keep the pieces of the broken self together, leaving none for relationships with other living beings,” wrote Gruchow, who taught English composition at St. Olaf College.
“What is true for individuals is true for cultures, too…” Gruchow continued. “A symptom of the emotional illness of the American culture is that it is able to make so little room for wildness, that it is commonplace to assert that whatever is not preoccupied with humanity, whatever is not subverted to the service of humans or contrived for their amusement, is boring, irrelevant or escapist. The delusion of the primacy of the human in all things defeats healthy culture as the delusion of primacy of the self in all things undermines the health of individuals. One important reason for preserving wilderness remnants… is that such places remind us that human-centeredness is a delusion. They keep us quite literally sane.”
In The Body and the Earth, Wendell Berry observed that humans’ well-being depends on accepting the perception that we are small relative to the universe. This appreciation of and dependence on wilderness regulates pride, as it limits the temptation to try to be gods.
“Grace is the manifestation of a favor from a superior force,” Gruchow, a Berry disciple, wrote. “The favor we receive in this transaction is life—the possibility, that is, of seeing—and the superior force by which we are endowed with it is the all-seeing Creation: the great wildness at the heart of the universe. We are heirs of the grace of wildness.”
My intent on this pilgrimage was to develop my mind’s eye, to imprint memories that transcend time. Immersive, sensory experiences in nature inspire us because in wilderness we see, smell, hear, touch and taste things before known only to God.
After a night at base camp, we set out for three days and two nights on trail. We selected a campsite on Grandpa Lake and caught enough Northern Pike for the eight of us to feast.
“The humblest fare, when you have been active out-of-doors all day, invariably tastes like a feast,” Gruchow wrote. “Food never seems closer to sacrament than then.”
The next day we portaged to the open expanse of Saganaga Lake, coming within sight of the Canadian shoreline. On our third day on trail we scaled the Palisade cliffs for panoramic views and glided over water perfectly mirroring the sky. On our return to base camp, we refreshed ourselves with three cycles in a sauna on Dominion Island—jumping into the frigid lake after each sweaty session.
While not exactly a baptism, for many of us this closing ritual signaled spiritual rebirth, as we left with a deeper understanding of the way of the wilderness—and the way of God—than when we arrived.