Church camps & the BWCA
Memoirs of a Tracy Kid
The primary focus of this and next month’s column is a special place in Minnesota that many of my readers might not have ever visited or even be familiar with. It is a gem found only on the border between Canada and the United States called the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness on the Minnesota side of the border. There is a companion park called Quetico Provincial Park on the Canadian side of the border. The BWCA is a huge wilderness area exceeding a million acres. It contains over a thousand lakes and 1,200 miles of canoe routes, and is only accessible via canoes. But first, I’d like to share with my readers how I first found the BWCA.
During my childhood growing up in Tracy, church was an important constant in the Hubbard household. Both my parents were members of the Tracy United Methodist Church where they first met and later got married. Sundays always started with Sunday school, and we were never late because mom was a long-time Sunday school teacher, as were many of my regular teachers in the Tracy School System. Once the school year ended in late May, it was always followed with a week of morning Bible school at most churches in Tracy.
Bible school was typically for grades K-6. After you became a teenager, instead of Bible school, many of us from all the different churches would spend a week or two at a church camp during the summer. The Methodist Church Conference in Minnesota owned several church camps, most located on one of Minnesota’s many lakes. These camps were operated throughout the summer, usually starting and ending on a Sunday when our parents would drop us off and later pick us up.
My favorite summer camp was Decision Hills, an especially popular camp for the Methodist high schoolers throughout Minnesota. It was located on George Lake near Spicer, Minnesota. It operated throughout the year and catered to both high school students and adults. In addition to some yearround lodges, it contained a cluster of smaller campsites each with 2-4 hogans, as we called them, scattered around a central hub where the dining hall and bathroom/shower facilities were located. These “hogans” consisted of wooden floors with a canvas-like tents draped over wooden arches which supported the tents. They were large enough for 4 cots so each campsite ended up with around 15 kids plus a counselor who had his/her own hogan at each campsite. These counselors were usually young Minnesota ministers or college students who wanted a summer job.
While researching this column, I found a “firstperson” account of life at this camp from post cards I had mailed to my parents while I was at this camp during the summer of 1963 when I was 14 years old. Mom had kept them in a memorabilia box she created for me from my youth.
I attended this camp along with a group of my church friends from the Tracy Methodist Church. According to my post cards, my tent mate, Allen Cooper, and I were at the Chipmunk Hill campsite with Reverand Andrews from Slayton as our camp counselor. Dick Drackley and Randy Vogel were at the Sherwood Forest campsite; Ron McDaniel, Sherry Lynch Gutmann, and Cheryl Snyder Odegard were at the Terrace Heights campsite; and my swimming buddy was at the Cedar Hills campsite. We were assigned swimming buddies on our first day at camp and were required to always swim with our buddy in the lake using the “buddy system” for safety reasons.
The week of camping in our little hogans involved lots of outdoor activities including swimming, canoeing, archery, volleyball, tether ball, softball, and plenty of time around campfires. Breakfast, lunch and dinner were held in a big rustic dining hall with generous helpings of food. Nobody lost weight at one of those camps! After our meals we always sang camp songs and you could always tell which were our favorite songs by how loud our combined voices were. We also had two daily devotional periods led by a Methodist minister. It was a fun week that went by way too quickly. Many new friendships were made with other young people from Minnesota, and even some kids from nearby states, including Iowa and South Dakota which didn’t have their own church camps on a lake.
I also remember a weekend retreat we had to Decision Hills with our Methodist Youth Fellowship (MYF) group, led by longtime local farmer, Eugene Hook, and his wife, Mary Alice Hook. It was during the winter in the mid 1960s and we slept in a large heated lodge with bunk beds. Eugene and Mary Alice must have been saints to lead our rambunctious MYF group for several years while I was in Tracy High School. On more than one occasion, we tested their patience when my buddies Dick Drakley, Randy Vogel and I were doing something stupid like singing a trio rendition of Amazing Grace way off key, usually egged on by coconspirator, Ron McDaniel.
Unfortunately, Decision Hills met the same fate as the Lake Shetek Boy Scout camp I discussed in a previous article. Due to declining church membership, especially in the youth age group, and an overall declining interest in camping by younger kids, the camp grounds, which included 71 acres, was sold in 2017. Fortunately, it was sold to an evangelical church which is continuing the religious legacy which lasted for over 60 years as a Methodist Church youth camp and adult retreat.
My last year attending church camp was an especially enlightening experience which has lasted a lifetime. The summer before my senior year, I signed up for a wilderness canoe trip in the Minnesota Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA). Our group included 5 boys and 4 girls, led by a Methodist pastor and a female lay person who were our guides and chaperones. We were all the same age which is how the groups were organized, and the groups couldn’t be larger than 12 people as that was all the people allowed on any single campsite in the BWCA. In addition to limiting the number of people at a camp site, a permit was required to enter the BWCA and those permits were capped each day to avoid overcrowding. All camping was at a designated campsite. This prevented too many people traveling throughout the BWCA on a particular day as the number of designated camp sites was limited to only one or two on any particular lake unless it was a very large lake. The most important limitation in the BWCA was no motor boats of any kind were permitted -- you could only travel in a canoe using paddles! These restrictions still apply today. Kayaks are permitted but there is no room for gear so they aren’t practical for anything other than a day trip.
All the kids taking part in the canoe trips each week were ferried by their parents from throughout Minnesota to the Coon Rapids Methodist Church where we boarded a school bus. The bus took us to a Methodist Church in Duluth where we spent the night in the church basement on cots. The next morning, we got up early and took the bus to an outfitter on Sawbill Lake which is a southern entry point into the BWCA. After getting our canoes, camping gear and enough food for 5 days, we got a short orientation on how to board and paddle a canoe, and proceeded to our first campsite which was on the north shore of Sawbill Lake, several miles from of our starting point.
Thus began a daily routine of setting up camp. On our first day of wilderness camping, the first order of business was how to handle the lack of bathrooms in a co-ed environment. Our seasoned guides explained that the proper etiquette was for the males to go 15 rods to the left of the campsite facing the shore and the females would go 15 rods to the right. Also to avoid overcrowding, we always kept one roll of toilet paper on an overturned canoe which we used as a table – if the roll was gone, it was necessary to wait for your turn. Also, you needed to be at least 15 rods from the water to avoid polluting the pristine waters. If you aren’t familiar with the “rod” form of measurement, it’s roughly the length of a canoe – 16.5 feet. Today there is one pit toilet at most designated campgrounds in the BWCA and a fire grate. This wasn’t the case back in the 1960’s.
While the guys erected the tents, the gals gathered firewood for cooking and gathering around a nice campfire after dinner. If you were fortunate enough to have a Boy Scout group stay at your campsite previously, it was possible to find a large pile of leftover firewood already available. Our drinking water was taken directly from the lake, at least 50 feet from the shoreline. We never boiled the water and didn’t have any water purifiers. The water was so clean at that time that it wasn’t necessary. You could see the bottom of lakes 50 to 100 feet deep in these clear waters. We all shared in the cooking responsibilities and cleanup. One necessity before going to sleep each night in our tents was to go on mosquito patrol and kill any mosquitos that might have followed us into the tent. Fortunately, the tents had good zippered screened doors which kept the bugs out at night. Although the days were long in northern Minnesota during the summer, hearing the low hum of millions of mosquitos beginning right after sunset meant being in bed shortly thereafter! We all went to sleep with the haunting calls of the loons, an experience unlike anything else.
Each day we would canoe from lake to lake using trails to portage our canoes and backpacks from one lake to the next. We all used sunscreen to avoid sunburn as the water reflected the sun from all directions. DEET insect spray was also a necessity during portages to keep the mosquitoes at bay and to keep big black horseflies from biting your ankles while canoeing. We had fresh food for the first two days and then we ate rehydrated freeze-dried food, supplemented with fish we caught along the way. Boy was that fish from the fresh water lakes delicious – nothing like the bottom dwelling bullheads fished out of Lake Shetek.
This daily routine repeated itself over a week canoeing through some of the most beautiful wilderness still easily accessible in our great country. Minnesota’s BWCA is a precious gem that must be preserved for future generations. There is nothing quite like it other than the Quetico Provincial Park, Canada’s mirror twin to our BWCA.
Next month: The danger confronting the BWCA.
