Hudson Bay Expedition 2005
Article for the Lantern's Light
By Scott Miller

My friend Todd Foster and I have worked together at Many Point on and off since 1994. This past summer I was the Ten Chiefs Camp Director and he ran the Health Lodge. The past three years I was the Camp Director at North Wind Winter Adventures, a winter camping program at Stearns Scout Camp. Todd was the Assistant Camp Director. We have a lot of experience working together at camp, and in the past few years have taken many canoe trips together, too. On May 1st of this year, Todd and I are embarking on a very, very big canoe trip. We will be leaving from his backyard on the Sauk River in St. Cloud to canoe over 2,000 miles to York Factory, on Hudson Bay (about 1,000 air miles due north of the Twin Cities). Todd got the idea for the trip from a book he found in the library while researching winter explorers for North Wind. The book was 'Canoeing with the Cree' by Eric Sevareid. Todd was amazed to read about a big-time canoeing adventure that started right in the Twin Cities. 'Canoeing with the Cree' was written in 1935 about a trip taken in 1930 by two Minneapolis boys-Eric Sevareid and his friend Walter Port. Eric went on to a distinguished career as a newsman on CBS from the 1940's through the early 80's. After reading the book, Todd suggested to me that we re-trace their trip.

After thinking over Todd's proposal, I concluded that he definitely is crazy. He proposes ideas that many people would find outlandish, and he does it routinely. Even crazier- he is usually serious. He said 'we should do this trip', and I knew that I had to actually consider it. I put my mind to agonizing for 10 days and solicited the opinions of everyone I could find. I weighed. I deliberated. I fretted. No one seemed overly encouraging about the idea. Apparently no one has informed Todd that a person is supposed to grow up, get a 'real' job and not have fun anymore past the age of 25. Finally, I realized that if I said 'yes' it would mean postponing getting a 'real' job even longer. I could go back to Many Point and work at North Wind again! I decided to vote for wahoo, to vote for craziness, to vote for not 'growing up', to vote for camping and canoeing and being young and having fun. I said yes.

Even though Todd had the idea in October of 2003, we determined not to go until the summer of 2005--the '75th anniversary'. That meant we had a year and a half to plan-enough time to think through every possible detail, for hours on end. We love this. We determined that true modern day adventurers always have a website, so we recruited my roommate at the time, Lloyd Cledwyn, to design a site for us. In return, I agreed to work on the house he'd just bought that we were living in. The house, at the time, made the house from the movie 'The Money Pit' seem like a finely appointed mansion. To top it off, my handyman skills are inversely proportionate to his web building skills. Lloyd is basically a professional web designer; people cringe and run away when they see me trying to hammer a nail. Fortunately, Lloyd was a very good sport about all this.

Next we set out to get ourselves in the paper. We got the outdoors writer from the Grand Forks Herald to take an interest, and then we finagled our way into the St. Paul Pioneer Press. From there we got into the St. Cloud paper, the Mankato paper and the Wilmar paper. Now we are working on the Star Tribune. Then we reasoned that with Mr. Sevareid having worked from CBS, WCCO should cover us. And after many phone calls, they are going to film us training on the Mississippi in a few days and then in a classroom, for a feature story. We have discovered that if you want to be in the news you have to have a good story and you have to sell yourself and be persistent. I always thought that reporters just covered the best news they could find, but nowadays it's just as important to market yourself to the media. A strange world.

We've also gone after sponsors. We are still hoping to get a corporate sponsor, but have already gotten some great paddling gear and food donated to us. We were used to using the same old gear we had bought as young Scouts, but love what we have now. For example, the waterproof gear we have is really great. It's fun to be warm and dry while paddling in the middle of a huge rain storm-something we did last spring on the Flambeau River in Wisconsin. We brought along two fellow Many Point staffers, Eric Henderson and Chris Mielke. They were still using their 'old' gear and they were wet and cold. Todd and I could not stop talking about how amazing our new gear was. For some reason, Chris and Eric started to give us really menacing looks on the 2nd straight day of rain.

We saw a sign warning that the river had been contaminated with E. Coli. Have you ever seen or heard the commercial for Riccola throat lozenges? It involves a sprightly lass yodeling the word 'Riccola' as she prances about the mountain tops. We changed it to reflect the circumstances of our trip-yodeling 'Eeeecoli' as we made our way downstream. It was funny every time. It was! Ok, maybe you had to be there.

We've also been having fun researching all the logistical details of our trip. We practiced paddling upstream on the Minnesota River (we will paddle its 330 miles for the 1st 'chapter' of our expedition). A Father and son showed us a 50 pound catfish they had caught. We scouted out the famously curvy and muddy Red River of the North (and were warned to look out for farm dogs). And we learned that 300 mile long Lake Winnipeg, the '3rd chapter' of our trip, is known for it's big waves, wind and rocks that jut out from shore in jetties up to a half mile long (gulp!). In preparation for the 500 miles of wilderness rivers northeast of Lake Winnipeg, we took a whitewater canoe class. We did not swamp our borrowed, empty, specially-made-for-whitewater canoe in a small rapid on the Snake River here in Minnesota. It didn't happen. No. It didn't. Don't be ridiculous.

We've also given lots of presentations to schools, scout troops, classrooms, business groups, etc. Not long ago we returned to the small town of Climax, MN on the Red River. We gave a presentation in the K-12 school gymnasium for the older half of the school. The principal of the school told us she would bring the projector to the meeting of the Climax Community Club (CCC) that night, if need be-an excellent example of small town people sharing resources that you just don't see in bigger towns anymore. The CCC had a short business meeting after our presentation. I've never seen a business meeting that was so much fun. You could tell these people really liked each other, and they all knew when they could or couldn't schedule the next meeting ("no, the 16th won't work, we've got a JV basketball game"…etc.) One of them looked me in the eye and said 'I come from a long line of Norwegian peasant farmers'. They said we would be forced to accept baked goods as we paddled past their land. My kind of people.

Now, with two months to go, we are buying and packing food, planning re-supply stops, ordering lots of maps, finalizing our gear list and trying to raise money to buy a laptop computer and other technological stuff so we can update our journals on our website as we go. For a minimum of a $15 donation you can get an expedition T-shirt or a copy of 'Canoeing with the Cree'. You can order off our website (see below).

We are also planning a launch party to be held at Fort Snelling State Park on Saturday, May 7th. You are all invited! The morning of the launch party, people will be able to paddle a section of the Mississippi with us. We'll have more information about the launch party on our website at www.hudsonbayexpedition.com Also on our website you'll find more information about our route, a map, historical information, our mission and objectives, our trip itinerary, our sponsors, journal entries, pictures, etc.
You can also sign up to receive our e-mail updates on the website. We hope you will follow along! You can also e-mail us at paddlers@hudsonbayexpedition.com

If going on the trip is half as fun as planning it has been, it's really going to be great. Thanks to all of our camp friends who have been supportive of us as we try and pull off this crazy adventure. Maybe we'll even see some of you when we pass through Fargo/Moorhead on about the 7th of June. Also, we hope to see everybody at the Spring Fling. The hardest part of our trip is not being at camp this summer-

Keep the wick trimmed
and the flame burning hot,
Keep the lantern strung high-
we'll miss all of you--a lot.