The Trail That Refused to Disappear

On long wilderness trails, disappearances rarely happen all at once. A season passes without clearing, and brush begins to encroach into the corridor. A beaver pond rises, a windstorm drops spruce across the path, or a fire burns through jack pine and balsam. In a place as remote as Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW), neglect accumulates quietly until hikers stop coming, route-finding becomes nearly impossible, and the forest reclaims the trail.

Derrick Passe first through-hiked the Kekekabic Trail in the spring of 1999, just months before the July 4 Boundary Waters blowdown flattened millions of trees across northern Minnesota. “The Kek”, as many who know it call it, runs 39 miles between the Gunflint Trail and Snowbank Lake Road, crossing one of the most remote hiking corridors in the Midwest.

Passe, who answered questions by email before heading out on a canoe trip of his own, seemed to prove the point before he even began explaining it. “After the 1999 Blowdown, I thought that I might be the last one to ever do it as I doubted that the trail would ever be reopened,” he wrote, reflecting on his decades of work with the Kekekabic Trail Club.

The trail did reopen, but not because the wilderness made it easy. Under pressure from volunteers, Passe said, the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) joined the Kekekabic Trail Club in reclaiming the route, with the club flagging the trail through blowdown and maintaining sections on either end while Forest Service hotshot crews addressed the sheer volume of downed trees across the center and eastern portions. The damage still changed the club. Closures tied to fire danger kept people away, and an organization that once had nearly 200 members shrank to only a handful. In a designated wilderness where new trails are difficult to establish and old corridors can vanish quickly, saving the Kek became less a recreational project and more an act of preservation.

The Kek began in the 1930s, developed by the Civilian Conservation Corps and the USFS for fire-watch protection and forest management. The route originally provided access to several fire lookout towers around Kekekabic Lake, from which the trail takes its name. Forest Service maintenance of the Kek as a hiking trail ended in the 1960s, and volunteers later restored the corridor to the edge. Bruce Mellor led an early effort to keep the trail open in 1986, and in 1990, volunteers organized as the Kekekabic Trail Club, with Martin Kubik, Steve Cinnamon, and other 3M employees providing early leadership. Eric Campbell, now president of the Kekekabic Trail Chapter, said the Forest Service had once been close to letting the route go entirely. “If we had lost the trail back then, it wouldn’t be here anymore,” Campbell said.

Today, the Kek is part of the North Country National Scenic Trail, following a 2019 federal route adjustment that formally added the Kekekabic, Border Route, and Superior Hiking trails to the national trail system. Permit data from the Superior National Forest suggests use of the two primary Kek entry points, Kek East and Kek West/Snowbank, has risen substantially since the late 2010s, rebounding from 121 combined permits in 2018 and 144 in 2019 to a pandemic-era spike of 376 in 2020, with use remaining above pre-pandemic lows in the years since. Campbell attributes part of that rebound to a deliberate shift by the chapter: keeping the trail clear enough that hikers can enjoy the wilderness experience without the fear of getting lost. “About ten years ago, we just made a real concerted effort,” he said. “We’re just going to get the trail cleared and keep it cleared.”

For hikers considering the Kek, the practical realities matter as much as the romance. The eastern trailhead is off the Gunflint Trail northwest of Grand Marais, while the western trailhead is at Snowbank Lake Road east of Ely. Most through-hikers plan on three to four days, though pace depends heavily on conditions, weather, and how much time a person wants to spend absorbing the route. A BWCAW permit is required for overnight use; during the main season, quota permits are required, and self-issued permits are available outside that window. Transportation between trailheads requires planning, and because interior access is possible only by hiking or canoeing, mistakes in timing, route choice, or gear are harder to correct than they would be on a trail system closer to roads.

The Kek is not impossible, but it does require hikers to understand where they are going. It has no road crossings, no ranger stations along the route, no easy bailout points once a hiker commits to the corridor, and cell service that should not be relied on for emergencies. Permanent trail markers are not allowed in the BWCAW, so blue flagging and rock cairns mark select difficult sections where hikers are most likely to lose the route. Detailed maps, downloaded GPS tracks, extra battery power, hiking poles, and realistic daily mileage matter here. The chapter also posts current trail condition reports online, a practical necessity on a route where beaver activity, high water, blowdowns, brush, and seasonal growth can quickly change what hikers encounter.

The trail itself changes character as it crosses the wilderness. The eastern half, from the Gunflint side toward Agamok Bridge, is rockier and more exposed, with sections shaped by the 2006 Cavity Lake Fire and 2007 Ham Lake Fire. Campbell said hikers there may find themselves “walking or hiking rock to rock sometimes,” and the guidebook’s section descriptions read almost like a record of disturbance and recovery: burn scars, alder thickets, beaver dams, old-growth white pine remnants, abandoned logging traces, waterfalls, rocky overlooks, evidence of the 1999 blowdown, 2016 windstorm damage, and reroutes around waterlogged ground. Farther west, the route enters older forest, crosses abandoned railroad grades, and eventually reaches the Snowbank side, where shorter loop trails draw day hikers and weekend backpackers who may never attempt the full Kek.

By 2014, parts of the trail again needed reclaiming. Passe had met Dan and Ruth Dorrough at a North Country Trail Association celebration in Duluth, and they convinced him to guide them across the route. They had hiked roughly 2,500 miles of the North Country Trail by then, but as Passe later learned, much of that had been done as day hikes with shuttles rather than continuous wilderness travel. When the group started from Snowbank Lake that September, they found sections affected by the Cavity Lake Fire, Ham Lake Fire, and a smaller 2012 fire near Strup Lake almost unrecognizable, with alder, aspen, and other vegetation six to eight feet high. “Fortunately, Dan had a GPS track of the trail that we used to refind the trail when we lost it,” Passe wrote. Afterward, volunteers began working section by section to reclaim the corridor, gradually increasing maintenance trips until the club could clear the entire route each year.

Just as that effort seemed to be stabilizing the area, straight-line winds hit the western end in fall 2016, flattening what Passe estimated was as much as 85 percent of the trees along some sections. He worked with the Forest Service to flag the buried route that fall, then got his spouse’s and his boss’s permission to spend a month in May 2017 working on the trail inside the BWCA. For part of that month, he was joined by volunteers from the Conservative Anabaptist Service Program, a crew of Mennonite men ages 18 and 19 and their 34-year-old leader. The Forest Service brought food to the crew weekly while they cleared the Kek, the Disappointment Trail, and the Old Pines Trail by hand. Earlier volunteer efforts had often grown from the club’s base of 3M employees, whose trips were built around intense long weekends, but later partnerships expanded the reach through programs such as the American Hiking Society’s Volunteer Vacation program.

Campbell said most work trips require paddling into the Boundary Waters or backpacking to remote sections while carrying full camping gear, plus loppers, handsaws, and, occasionally, large crosscut saws, with everything done by hand because motorized equipment is prohibited in designated wilderness. A crew of seven to nine people might clear only three miles during a full trip. “The trip to the trail often involves 6-10 portages, 10 miles of paddling, back-breaking days on the trail, nipping alders and cutting deadfalls from the trail,” Passe wrote, adding that crews work rain or shine, usually in May before heat and bugs arrive in force. The volunteer base is both impressive and fragile; Passe recently worked on a section requiring 10 miles of paddling and eight portages just to reach the site, and the crew ranged in age from 66 to 82.

The chapter has made progress bringing in younger leadership, Campbell noted, particularly as North Country Trail work expands around Ely, but recruiting remains difficult when many trips require several days away from work, family, and ordinary obligations. The next major chapter is extending the off-road trail from Snowbank Lake toward Ely, with initial environmental work completed by the Forest Service and volunteers preparing to begin building a new trail west of the Kek. For hikers, the result is a wilderness route that still feels raw without being lost. Campbell said the chapter has tried to change the old perception that the Kek is only for people who want to suffer or prove something. The trail remains remote, rocky, wet in places, and psychologically demanding because once hikers commit, there are few easy exits, but he believes experienced backpackers should not be intimidated by its reputation. “If you can take a canoe trip in the Boundary Waters, you can hike the Kek,” he said.

Campbell first noticed the Kek as a faint, brushy line crossing Boundary Waters portages during canoe trips, a trail that looked almost abandoned yet kept drawing his curiosity. Passe said trail work has become almost instinctive after decades in the woods. “Me? I was cursed with a need to clear trails around 30 years ago,” he said, explaining that he cannot walk around a fallen tree without wanting to move it, pass through brush without breaking stems away from the tree, or step through a wet place without thinking about drainage. For Passe, the Kek is no longer only a line on a map. “Why the Kek? I could (and do) hike the trail in my mind from end to end,” he wrote. “It contains memories of moose, bridges, people, and laughter. Long after I stop hiking the trail physically, I will have the memories and friends that I have made there.” A trail that has nearly disappeared more than once doesn’t need a better reason to survive.