You're a Different Person Up Here: Impressions of the Border Route Trail

“You’re like a different person up here.”

“You and your dad: you’re both so much more relaxed in the Boundary Waters.”

“You are in your element.” 

(apocryphal, but I trust the source) “Jame is so different in the Boundary Waters. He just seems . . . lighter.” 

Before I started out on the Border Route Trail, I wondered how I would feel, being on my own in the wilderness. I knew the trail was gnarly, and I knew that I would be out there for a long, long time without much contact with anybody else. I have experienced moments on the trails before, in Colorado particularly, when I knew I was alone, and my mind played tricks on me. Little noises made me jump. My imagination gave me images of a mountain lion pouncing, or me breaking an ankle and being stuck. 

So I was pleasantly surprised by how comfortable I felt on the “trail” now passing, slowly but steadily, beneath my feet.

In a way, the Boundary Waters is where I am most at home. And so, as people have done from time immemorial, I feel happy and proud to be fighting for it in my own small way. 

At Home on the Edge of Things: Impressions of the Border Route

Pre Dawn on the BRT

I don’t feel like I could do full justification to my 10 hours on the BRT if I tried to do a traditional trip report format. Instead, I will try to convey, as much as I can, the impressions that I remember, those that stick most vividly in my mind, from the 35 miles I traversed that day. I would say “ran,” rather than “traversed,” but as you will see that would be inaccurate.

A Trail that Demands Attention:

The first mile of this trail was the easiest. Easy even at 4:30 in the morning, when I started my day in the pre-dawn. 

It was not the easiest mile in the usual sense. It wasn’t the easiest because it was the first. It wasn’t the easiest because it was downhill. In fact, it is almost all uphill. No, the first mile is literally the best mile of trail, at least in the half I ran. 

For that first mile, the trail shares a path with the Magnetic Rock Trail, which must get much more traffic than the Border Route as a whole. It it the quintessential trail: a path through the brush that has been worn down to the dirt, easy to follow and packed enough to hit a good pace. Soon enough, the monolith that gives the trail its name loomed out of the growing light, a stark outline against the glow in the east, and the Border Route Trail turned south on its way towards the Cross River. 

Magnetic Rock 

With that turn, the trail reveals its true nature: a “vague path through the woods,” as the GearJunkie team called it. 

See the trail?

The course of the trail was not that difficult to follow, in general. In an area like the Boundary Waters, the brushing efforts to either side of the trail were readily evident: an area of much lower growth four feet wide, winding through an otherwise trackless area. But the trail demanded attention. I picked up my pacer in this section (my brother in law), because I’d heard that there were a number of intersecting trails, making it difficult to follow the correct trail.

Map Check. Photo: Steve Snyder

I was glad for the second pair of eyes, because even with the help, I missed the trail twice, and had to backtrack to get back to the BRT proper. Amusingly, the second time we missed a turnoff, a mistake that would see me running an extra mile, I only noticed we were off-route because the trail was too well-trodden and too clear. Whoever marked the ski trail in the same blue as the Border Route made, in my opinion, a poor decision. 

While prior attempts at the 24 hour mark on this trail have seen navigational problems and mistaken routes derail their attempts, I found most of the trail easy to follow. But as I have said, it demanded constant attention. Twice in the Wilderness section of the trail I let my attention stray from the trail in front of me, both times while fiddling with my GoPro camera to try to get some footage of the trail and record my thoughts. 

Each time, when I looked up again, I found myself disoriented, completely unsure if I was still on the trail. The first time, up on the ridge above Gunflint Lake, I had to backtrack, downhill, until I found that most useful of clues: the telltale sawed ends of a cleared deadfall. The second time, in the Alders, I caught a glimpse of the dopamine-inducing blue flagging that marks the trail throughout its length, which assured me that, while the trail was not in evidence under my feet, I was still on the correct track. 

A Wilderness Trail

The Border Route is, in nature as well as designation, a Wilderness trail. 

Beyond being faint, the trail is lightly used. 

At least by humans. 

Moose, on the other hand, seem to use the trail far more than people do. Rarely did I travel more than a mile or two down the trail without seeing moose sign. Their huge, splayed prints in the mud, more reminiscent of the hoofprints left by horses than by the dainty tracks of deer that I see when running closer to home, helped define the course of the BRT in many places. I quickly gave up trying to avoid their scat on the trail, there was simply too much to bother. 

And then there were the Alders. 

I had read about this section in my pre-run research, with numerous trip reports, as well as the guidebook itself, warning about the difficulty these plants created.  The warnings did not do these trees justice: I was truly unprepared for the true obstacle these would present, both physically and mentally. Through one quarter mile section of the trail, these saplings had grown across the trail to the point that they were weaving together, right at eye level, and I had to push forward and up to make any progress. This was, not coincidentally, the point where I started to fully realize the magnitude of the task I had set myself. 

It was also the most discouraging portion of trail for me. But brighter times were coming. 

Even though it is wilderness, the Border Route is still a trail, and people backpack, hike, and even run on even this trail. 

After running all morning, 25 plus miles, seeing nobody but my crew and a pair of boats 400 feet below me on the lake, Stairway Portage felt crowded. I ran into my first pair of backpackers just before the falls. These two were backpacking the full length of the trail. When I told them where I had started that morning, they were visibly impressed. 

“That’s where we’re planning to end up  . . . three days from now.” 

Shortly after that, there was a family of four who must have hiked in on Caribou Rock Trail and were having lunch by the falls.

And then I had to shake my head to be sure I’m not hallucinating. There, on the trail in front of me, was Jon Storkamp, the race director for the Superior Spring and Fall races, and the Zumbro race that I had dropped out of just six weeks before. He had run out with two others on the Caribou Rock trail. When I told him when and where I had started, he told me “that’s a damn good pace out here!”  The three and a bit miles had taken them two hours to cover, a slower pace than I was making so far. 

Of course, I had to take a selfie. 

A Changing Trail

The Border Route is changing. Over the past 20 years, it has been subject to several fires and the 1999 storm known as “The Big Blow,” which saw 100mph straight-line winds down hundreds of acres of trees like matchsticks.  For a long time after, this meant that the affected areas were much harder to navigate, with new deadfall often falling across the trail, and less to differentiate the trail from the surrounding wilderness. 

In the years the fires and blowdown, though, the transition forest has started to spring up. Where once there were acres of pines, there are now crowded stands of deciduous saplings, some over ten feet tall. Brushing efforts have made the trail more open and easier to follow, but I found that the easiest way to follow the trail through much of this section was by looking for where the deadfalls had been cleared. 

Burnt trees and new growth. 

There is little stands out as clearly as the clean line of a sawn tree in the middle of the Boundary Waters. 

The forest has also shifted character from the older-growth pine to young aspen and birch. Beautiful, but exposed to the sun. 

And there is another change going on. The sad possibility is that the pines, which generally move in after the first stage forest of fast-growing deciduous trees, may never come back. The climate is warming, a fact that I couldn’t keep far from my thoughts on an 85 degree day in May in northern Minnesota. With this warming, the types of trees that can survive here will inevitably change as well. Pines may give way to birch and maples, and eventually to the scrub-oak forest we see so much in the southern portion of the state. 

A Stunningly Beautiful Trail

Through all of that, and even though I was moving quickly and concentrating on my end goal, I could not stop marveling at just how beautiful the Border Route is. 

Early morning on the BRT Photo: Steve Snyder

Ed Solsted and company, who broke the trail in the 70s, set the trail up to take advantage of the gorgeous vistas that the cliffs of the Gunflint and Rose Lake areas provide. The trail primarily follows ridge lines, from vista to stunning vista. The highlight of the trail for many is the course it takes along the high cliffs above Rose Lake, in the middle of the 40 mile section of trail that passes through the Boundary Waters. 

And the views are worth every step of the climbs it takes to get there. Trudging through the forest, the view suddenly opens up, and you look out over just a tiny sliver of the United States, over the watery border into the vast area that is the Quetico in Canada: mile after mile of lakes and forests, stretching to the horizon. The only sign of people I saw from the Rose Lake cliffs, where I had stopped to remove and readjust my socks and shoes,  were the two boats I mentioned earlier. From this high up, I couldn’t even hear the whine of their motors as they traveled the lakes. 

A small, uncharitable voice in the back of my head said “cheaters.” 

But I found the true beauty of the trail revealing itself in every step. The trail was so faint much of the time that it hardly disrupted the forest surrounding it, and unlike some trails, it seemed to belong in the wilderness, rather than cutting through it. Even as I pushed myself to try to hit my pace and make my cutoffs, I could not help but feel how privileged I was just to be out on the Border Route, at the edge of things, moving so easily through such a beautiful place. 

Looking back now a week later (as I write this), my impressions of the trail are of birds calling all around me as I make my way through the pre-dawn darkness, of the rising sun flickering through the trees as I followed it east, of the faint trail rising (how does it always seem to be rising?) ahead of me, wending its way through the forest, and of water, always water, falling in streams across the trail, or lapping quietly at the shore of lakes as I picked my way among the roots of cedars along the shoreline. 

Above Bridal Veil Falls

I think I’d like to go back, some time, and do a slower trip of the Border Route. Maybe take a whole three days. 

In summary,: the Border Route Trail is stunningly beautiful, unapologetically wild, and not to be underestimated. I wouldn’t say that this trail beat me, but it certainly tested me.