The Keweenaw Peninsula rises from Lake Superior somewhere out there:
Way out there, where Copper Harbor lies hidden beyond the curvature of Earth.
Back on the Trans-Canada Hwy, the next stop is as far north as Superior's shore gets. That'll be some one hundred and fourteen plus road miles north/northeast from Grand Portage, well past the reach of Minnesotan branding.
Sometimes, you'll hear Lake Nipigon called the 'sixth Great Lake'. It's mighty big, but I don't buy that branding either. Still, via the once mighty Nipigon River, it's Superior's largest tributary.
The river pours the region's lifeblood into the freshwater sea near a place that used to be known as 'Red Rock House,' named for a fur trading post. The town is now and presumably forevermore called Nipigon.
I knew the river by reputation before ever going anywhere near the north shore. That's where in July of 1915, a Dr. Cook caught (what's still maybe) the World's Record Brook Trout.
Regardless, it was one big brookie. The stuff of northwoods legend. That tale reached me as a young boy, hundreds of miles south on a distant prairie.
Today, you can't even see the skin mount they made of the actual fabled fish. That burnt in 1990 when the Historical Museum that housed it caught fire. But there's a replica don't 'cha know, which you'll find in the restored museum.
After passing through the small town with the river's name any number of times on my way to somewhere else, in 2012 I finally headed upriver.
Broad and wide, the Nipigon is about what you'd expect from a once wild river that's been damned. The rapids where Dr. Cook caught the famous fish have long since been swallowed by deep water, or I'd have gone all the way north just to sit under a tree next to them.
Like so many fish that start at the big lake, I made it to the first of four major dams.
Having seen more than enough, I turned tail and ran. That's the farthest north on this continent I've ever traveled.
Established in 1978 and encompassing some 725 square miles, Pukaskwa is the wildest place I've been. Maybe, the wildest place I ever will.
There's one thin road out of Marathon that ends in a loop around a campground near Superior and a visitor center on the Pic River at Hattie's Cove. Same thin road out, northbound.
In the rest of the vast park, you're on your own.
So impressed was I after our first visit I thought a canoe trip on the White River starting in the town of White River (surprised?) and paddling through Pukaskwa's wild heart would be a most awesome way of getting to know the real place.
No doubt, it would have been that.
Except it meant 50+ miles with 21 portages along the way, over what had to be an exceptionally well-planned and trained for seven days, minimum. Because once you've traversed the wilderness and reached Superior alive (provided you did), from the mouth of the White River you've still got some miles of open water to paddle before reaching safe harbor.
In other words, should the wind be onshore at the end of the daunting, week long river journey, you're stuck there at the hard edge of nowhere for who knows how long.
Reliant on only your wits for the duration, because the canoe won't go.
In case you're wondering what that'd sound like:
Sounds a lot like like 'Hahaha, stupid canoeist' to me.
After the Bear Story, my ardor to confront unbound wilderness armed with only my wits and a canoe died a sudden death.
Flat water turned out to be plenty magical anyway. And there's now a hydroelectric dam on what was the fully wild White River, so neither I nor the river are what we used to be.
Ah, well.
They say that among the collection of debris pictured below, if you look hard and long you'll maybe find a vintage log or two that still bears the brand of its original owner. It's said such logs remain the owner's property in perpetuity, no matter where you find them.
That's what they say.
I decided long ago that even rolling so much as an ankle at Pukaskwa wouldn't be smart, so never ventured to look. But from safe vantage, it seems like an entirely reasonable version of perpetuity to me…
I've been privileged to stand on a razor rock edge between mighty Superior and its wildest land, where both tossed me boreal forest air kisses while I gazed vaguely south beneath an brilliant sky.
That's no small thing in a life.
As is true of everywhere else along the big lake, before the trappers, loggers, miners, fisherman and other tourists, there were First Peoples.
The next town east out of formidable Pukaskwa is the birthplace of Winnie the Pooh and so much for Indian Country today. Maybe have lunch in White River.
Then when back on the road headed toward the Soo and after a few hours of a whole lot of nothing passing by you get road weary, perhaps you'll think that before white folk cleaved their way through it - leaving little islands of civilization named after rivers and where cartoon bears were born - there was no lasting culture here at all.
No matter. Voyage on and you'll soon enough be disabused.
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