THE RIVER of BURNT WOODS

Some say the world will end in fi re, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire.

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 and challenges expectations. I live in south-central Wisconsin, where our rivers mostly run south and west, eventually ending up in the Mississippi River. One becomes accustomed to this arrangement, gravity governing all things. But there is a particular river in northern Wisconsin that flows north and is unlike any other stream I’ve ever paddled. Its name is Bois Brule.

Cascading down Class II-III rapids.

PHOTO CREDIT GREG GINN

Steeped in superlatives – it’s uniquely aesthetic, historic, uproarious – the Bois Brule is a singular stream that possesses multitudes. It’s also a formidable five-hour drive from Madison, so traveling up feels a bit like a pilgrimage. To be sure, it’s a privilege to do this; instead of backpacking across a harsh landscape, I drive my canoe-strapped Subaru listening to U2’s Joshua Tree. But it’s no less a necessity for my soul. After all, returning to the river is a kind of homecoming, and my favorite season to visit this old friend is autumn, once the hubbub of summer is in the rearview and the cool kiss of crisp nights makes the leaves blush. We all have rituals; this one is one of mine.

Located in Douglas County halfway between the Minnesota state line and the Bayfield Peninsula, the Bois Brule is a boreal river that begins in a tea-colored bog as wide as a boat is long and often barricaded by unruly alders, so it’s best to explore its headwaters by boot along a boardwalk. Enclosed within the Brule Glacial Spillway State Natural Area (SNA), it is a trip back in time, surrounded by white cedar stands and black ash swamps, lush green ferns and fuzzy moss, and sponge-dense springs and seepages. The river ends at a primitive beach on the south shore of Lake Superior, the vast inland ocean of North America. Wild and rugged, the only discernible development is the rough road that takes you there. The setting is definitively northwestern Wisconsin, but you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s the Pacific Northwest.

From soggy bog to sandy beach, the Bois Brule is about 50 miles long and almost surrounded by state forest. The river flows like a symphony of four connected but distinct movements, and its four day trips align in perfect progression thanks to convenient access points. Together with two separate public campgrounds located along the banks, paddlers can devote a long weekend to the Bois Brule alone but feel like they’ve paddled several different rivers thanks to its swift shifts in character. Honestly, it’s best to do it this way, in sequence, to appreciate its full complexity.

Each section offers something unique that the other three do not, and the river offers something for all paddlers – though not all paddlers should attempt select stretches. The most popular segment runs from County Hwy S to County Hwy B, about 8.5 miles long; what it lacks in public land is offset by attractive boat houses and aesthetically splendid 19th-century “cottages.” Its most challenging section runs from the Copper Range Campground to Hwy 13, also 8 miles and change: an adrenaline run of continuous action, spiking at two sets of Class II-III rapids as the river cascades down bedrock so ancient it makes one’s imagination ache. In between is a meditation of quiet meandering past tall grass meadows, while the finale is a splash of light rapids sweeping past tall clay banks before the awesome maw of Lake Superior.

Well before Royalex or Kevlar superseded fiberglass and aluminum, birchbark canoes first plied the waters of the Bois Brule, paddled by various peoples who’ve inhabited its banks once the glaciers of the last ice age began to retreat. 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. A scant 600 years ago, Woodland culture would be defined by the many sacred burial mounds left behind and still found today.

The Ojibwe migrated to the area in the 17th Century, and the river received its modern name from them: 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. By and by, present day Northwoods culture would come to pronounce the river as “bwah brool” – and often drop the first word altogether, calling it “the Brule” (resulting in the unnecessary obfuscation of the other Brule River in Wisconsin along the border of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula).

One of the more photogenic boat houses.

PHOTO CREDIT BARRY KALPINSKI

What fire inspired its 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 worthy of Noah hopping in a Wenonah. This in turn catalyzed a galvanic scouring of the river valley southward through which the Bois Brule now flows north, leading to a steady, heady drop of 300’ in 16 miles and exposing the Copper Range.

Launching from the Stone’s Bridge Landing at County S – let’s call it the allegro of the first movement – paddlers will be served a smorgasbord of natural springs, boulder gardens, skinny lakes where the river swells, riffles and quick-pivot Class I-II rapids in narrow, curving sweeps, and of course the historic cedar estates. The setting here at times feels readymade for a Wes Anderson film, where balsam fir and spruce line the banks like perfect pinnacles, pointing heavenward like so many gnomes’ cone hats. Old wooden footbridges reticulate a miniature kingdom. Even the boat landing signs evince a font and feel of yesteryear. Downriver roads named Hakkinen, Kauppi, and Leppaanen – definitively Finnish – call to mind a Scandinavian vibe to the sylvan scenery. At times, it feels like an amusement park ride.

This is all very intentional. To modify the oft-quoted line of Sigurd Olson, when a person is part of their canoe, they are “part of all that canoes have ever known.” To experience the river today is to come as close as possible to touching its waters a century ago.

Invariably, a rustling wind will flare your nostrils with the sweet scent of juniper. Black ash and red maple meld with white cedar. Elsewhere, loud brown logs boasting boat houses are accentuated by pops of bright green doors above which mantles bony wreaths of antlers invoke a veritable Valhalla. The palatial estates here are all grandfathered in the 52,000-acre state forest. No fewer than five U.S. presidents have visited or temporarily resided here – many to fish for touted trout. Brook trout are native and share the river with stocked brown and rainbow trout, not to mention familial salmon – Coho and Chinook – swimming upstream from Lake Superior. If you don’t want to try your luck luring in a lunker, the folks at the Hungry Trout Inn will be more than happy to take your order of sauerkraut and sausage pizza or their double Waino burger.

Two pitches of rapids punctuate this most-popular section of the river. The first is called Wildcat Rapids, dropping 10’ in 300 yards and suddenly spitting you out onto Lucius Lake, a thrill that will make the most stoic soul smile. Later, more technical Little Joe Rapids rates Class II and drops 6’ in 40 yards, where the narrow, winding river whisks you headlong towards boulders like bumper cars. In between, paddlers pass a landing called Winneboujou, or “Great Hare” – all the more apropos should their boat be a Mad River canoe with its white rabbit icon.

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 the less-paddled. It doesn’t feature the cedar wonderland or historic estates, or any real rapids for that matter. Rather, its allure is mere serenity.

The third movement of the river – the quintessential scherzo – is the most challenging, where rapids ranging from Class I to III course continuously for eight miles. The geology here is especially astounding: the river tumbles down erosion-resistant bedrock ledges laid out like a descending staircase. Two sets of complicated rapids make up the run, each with four distinct ledges. The first is called Lenroot, a good warm-up before the trickier and more technical one called Mays. Boats often flip here, leading to a melee of the picturesque and picaresque. Conversely, it can be a place to lean into your jitters while testing your skills to stay upright and relatively dry through frothy standing waves. But be prepared for things to go south as you continue paddling north.

The final movement of our riparian symphony – the adagio – is an experience limned by the divine. Here, you’ll flash past modest boulders and little ledges as the river meanders around tall clay banks – terra cotta-colored and surrounded by a pleasing palette of birch, maple, and aspen (also known as poplar or popple). On a sunny but cool 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.

The current beneath you disappears altogether in the final mile, and the air cools considerably as you approach Lake Superior – an atavistic vestige of the oceanic ice that melted and made this landscape so many millennia 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 again float to the surface: “The way of a canoe is the way of the wilderness and of a freedom almost forgotten.”

Purists will scoff at ascribing “wilderness” accolades to a place where roads are hardly far away, and even a small dam must be portaged around. (The dam prevents invasive sea lampreys from venturing upstream and plundering trout populations). But no one would argue that the Bois Brule doesn’t possess a sense of wilder-ness.

The river’s swansong is lackadaisical; the only care here is wind and wave. But the landscape is a grand panorama every bit as luminous as it is numinous. There is no harbor, breakwater, or buildings. The Bois Brule slips into Lake Superior as a river should, a natural phenomenon otherwise unparalleled in Wisconsin. A scraggly beach with a tall dune overlooking the largest freshwater lake in the world provides an idyllic location for reflection. Or genuflection. Bear Beach SNA stretches half a dozen miles west of the mouth along the lake’s lip, offering combers a seemingly endless sweep of sand and driftwood, forested woods to the water’s edge, and sunsets to unhinge your jaw.

If you were to follow the river backward from here, some 50 miles upstream (half that as the cormorant flies), you’d be in a cedar swamp as wild and woolly as it was before settlement – and 400’ higher in elevation. These are remarkably short and steep metrics for a major river.

Backpackers and day-hikers come here, too, of course – most notably along the North Country Scenic Trail. This national trail winds through the state forest for 16 miles and includes the Brule-St. Croix Portage Trail – one of the oldest trails in the entire Upper Midwest – a tough 2-mile tread along an imperceptible continental divide that separates the north-flowing Bois Brule from the south-going St. Croix River (and thus links the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico). Afterhours Trail System caters to cross-country skiers as well as bicyclists and hikers in the non-winter months. But all this seems like an afterthought. It’s the river that beckons me and my canoe, the river I must return to.

Every river tells a story, though few have a narrative arc as progressive as the Bois Brule’s. From a saunter to a tumultuous gauntlet to a redounded coda, the Bois Brule 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. Like a liquid needle pointing toward Polaris, its waters ground my soul and helped me find true north. And even though the river is nowhere near where I live, each time I return, it feels like I’ve come home.