There’s something about a river that flows up that feels subversive. Like the maverick path of a black sheep, its lonesome boldness catches your attention while challenging expectation. I live in Wisconsin, where I’ve found my bearing by putting pen to paper after putting a canoe on water. Here, one becomes accustomed to rivers running south, west, or east. By and by, nearly every drop of rain ends up eventually into Lake Michigan or the Mississippi River—the natural boundaries with which the badger state is blessed, east and west.
But there is one river in particular that does flow up and is unlike any other stream I’ve ever paddled—the Bois Brule. Like a liquid needle pointing toward the Polaris, it is a singular stream that sings with magic and metaphysics.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
Located in the northwestern nook of the state, about 25 miles east of Duluth, Minnesota, the river is a five-hour drive from my home. Thus, traveling to the Bois Brule feels like a pilgrimage, but also a homecoming—for I find the spirit of true north every time I make the trek.
For starters, the Bois Brule is a boreal river that begins as a soggy bog barely wide enough to paddle through, surrounded by lugubrious droops of conifer boughs and alder thickets, lush green ferns and fuzzy moss, mellifluous springs and seepages. These very wet headwaters ensure reliable levels year-round as they act as a slow-release sponge.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
Once, I had a romantic notion of finding the proverbial font of the river’s origin, first by boat then by boot; both times I’d be humbly disabused of penetrating such a primeval lair. Such secrets are best left to the river itself.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
Only 20-odd miles later the river cascades down bedrock so ancient as to make the imagination ache—and rewards intrepid paddlers with nonstop rapids for miles on end. But the river’s swansong is how it empties into the inland sea that is Lake Superior, lazy and lackadaisical.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The Bois Brule flows as a symphony composed of four connected but distinct movements, and its four day trips align in perfect progression thanks to convenient and thoughtful accesses. Together with two separate public campgrounds, paddlers can devote a long weekend to the Bois Brule alone but feel like they’ve paddled several different rivers.
For the last 12,000 years—once the glaciers of the last Ice Age beat a steady retreat—humans have inhabited its banks. The Archaic period led to Copper Culture, thanks to copious deposits of the precious mineral found along the Lake Superior basin, which initially yielded tools like axes, knives, and fish hooks, but later inspired personal ornaments. Woodland culture would be defined by the many sacred burial mounds left behind.
The Ojibwe migrated to the area in the 17th century, and it is from them the river received its modern name—Wiisaakode-ziibi (wee-sah-KOH-day zee-bay), meaning “burnt woods river.” They traded animal pelts—moose, elk, beaver—with French voyageurs for wares like kettles and colored cloth. The French adopted the river’s name in their tongue—bois brulé.
What fire inspired the name is lost to history. But a serendipitous vestige of the river’s incendiary past lies in its present geology, where Keweenawan basalt and gabbro underlie the bedrock. These Precambrian igneous rocks are like fossils blasted from a furnace of volcanic happenings 1 billion years ago.
Poetically, an unfathomably massive lobe of glacial ice would begin to melt around 13,000 years ago, resulting in a torrential flood. This in turn catalyzed a galvanic scouring of the river valley southward through which the Bois Brule now flows north, resulting in a steady, heady drop of 300’ in 16 miles.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The most popular and paddled trip on the Bois Brule is near its beginning—what I like to call the allegro of the first movement—which features a veritable smorgasbord of natural springs, boulder gardens, 19th-century cedar estates, skinny lakes, frisky riffles and even some Class I-II rapids.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The setting at times feels readymade for a Wes Anderson film, where balsam fir, spruce, and pine line the banks like perfect pinnacles, pointing heavenward like so many gnomes’ cone hats. Wooden footbridges reticulate a miniature kingdom, many A-framed and inducing Adirondack country.
Nearby roads named Hakkinen, Kauppi, and Leppaanen—definitively Finnish—also invoke a Scandinavian feel.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
Invariably, a rustling wind will flare your nostrils with the sweet scent of juniper and gin. Black ash and red maple meld with white cedar. Elsewhere, loud brown logs comprising boat houses are accentuated by pops of bright green doors above which mantles bony wreaths of antlers invoke Valhalla. The palatial estates here are all grandfathered in the 52,000 acres that total the state forest surrounding the river. No fewer than five U.S. presidents have visited or temporarily resided here.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The “Meadows” comes next. A sweet and unassuming interlude of birdsong and solitude that flows quietly past one sinuous bend after another, the river here follows the path of less-paddled. Unsurprisingly, it’s a terrific place to lure trout. Brook trout are native and share the river with brown and rainbow trout, as well as Coho and Chinook salmon, all of which migrate upstream from Lake Superior.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The third movement of the river—the quintessential scherzo—is the most challenging, where rapids ranging from Class I to III course continuously for miles. The geology here is especially astounding: the river tumbles down erosion-resistant bedrock laid out like a descending staircase.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
Many paddlers go for a swim here, reluctantly. It can be an utter melee of the picturesque and picaresque. Or it can be a place to lean into your jitters while testing your skills to stay upright and relatively dry.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The final movement of the riparian symphony is an experience limned by the sacred. Here, you’ll whisk past boulders and small rock ledges as the river meanders around dramatic tall clay banks, terra cotta colored surrounded by pleasing palette pops from aspen, birch, and maple. On a crisp autumn morning, fueled by a campfire breakfast of eggs, bacon, and coffee, perhaps even a fresh fried fish, the kaleidoscope of colors is positively haunting.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
The current beneath you disappears altogether in the final mile, and the air cools considerably as you approach the mouth of the river at the enormous bounty of Lake Superior—an atavistic vestige of the oceanic ice that melted and made this landscape over 10,000 years ago. You’ll feel the presence of the lake before you see it, before its unbelievable vastness envelops you. The water is as frigid as it is lucid, and the words of Sigurd Olson float to the surface: “The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten.”
The definitive adagio, this final clip of the river is every bit as luminous as it is numinous. Here, there is no harbor, no breakwater, no buildings. The Bois Brule slips into Lake Superior the way rivers are supposed to find the sea—a natural phenomenon that is otherwise unparalleled in Wisconsin.
A beautiful beach with a tall dune overlooking the largest freshwater lake in the world provides an idyllic location for reflection. Or genuflection. If you were to follow the river backwards from here, 44 miles upstream, you’d be in a cedar swamp as wild and wooly as it was before settlement. This is a remarkably short distance for a major river; mile for mile, I know of no other as rich in diversity or dazzling in register as the Bois Brule.
(Photo: milespaddled.com)
Every river tells a story, though few have a narrative arc as progressive or incisive as the Bois Brule. From a slow saunter to a tumultuous gauntlet to a redounded coda, the Bois Brule embodies multitudes but sings as a chorus in one voice. Forged by fire and consecrated by ice, sublime and sublimated, the river of burnt woods hums with awe, yawps with triumph, and retires with poised grace. Its waters ground my soul, helping me find true north. And even though the river is nowhere near where I live, each time I’m there it feels like I’ve come home.