Boundary Waters, MN

July 2025

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, MN

In late July of 2025 my wife and I went on a 4 day canoe trek through the Boundary Waters. It was a lot of fun and a big adventure for both of us. In the video we truncated the incident where we lost our boat, but my wife took the time to write a detailed account of it here. Enjoy!

Click to check out the video of our adventure

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The Incident

After we landed our amazing new camping spot with a great view of the lake (foreshadowing - this comes in handy later!), we decided to paddle out to a large rock sitting about 1/4 mile from our site, to lay like lizards in the sun and do some swimming. The water was still and the weather was perfect. 

Once we found a spot to pull our canoe up onto the rock, we made our way to the top to see the views - beautiful! After a couple of minutes, the wind suddenly picked up and not 5 seconds after I asked Bobby how our boat was looking (he said it was rocking a bit, but fine), he was pointing and yelling as our boat was pushed out onto the lake. After a quick calculation, I declared I would go after it and jumped from the rock in the direction of our canoe. 

I swam as hard as I could, looking up every few seconds to see if I was getting closer. At first, I thought I was, but soon I realized the boat was floating away faster than I could swim, and I was getting uncomfortably far from the rock and the wind was pushing me out. We both agreed I wasn’t going to catch it, and I made my way back to the rock. We watched as our canoe floated out of sight… 

In shock and panicked by what had just happened, we stood huddled together trying to figure out what to do next, as our minds played out multiple disaster scenarios. Not making it back to our daughter was the most terrifying. Bobby pulled out his phone and - miraculously - he had cell service! I told him we needed to call 9-1-1 and he looked at me like “but that’s only for emergencies!”, and I said “this IS an emergency!”. As context, the Boundary Waters is a vast network of lakes with over 1,200 miles of canoe routes, no location markers and few entry points. We’d only seen a few groups in the couple of days we’d been there, and there are no hiking trails to speak of to take you back to civilization. We were STUCK in the wilderness with no way to get out… 

The 911 operator was very kind, and said he could see exactly where we were (thank God!) and told us they’d send out rescue to get us by the next day, but that we had to swim back to our camp site. Although we knew that was the safest place to be - we had food, shelter and cell batteries there - it felt like a daunting endeavor. Bobby doesn’t consider himself a strong swimmer, and had to figure out how to swim with his GoPro selfie stick tucked in his life vest and keep his head above water so his cell phone - smartly tucked under his hat - didn’t get wet or lost. Luckily, despite having to swim against the wind, we made it back safely about 10 or 15 minutes later. After we got to shore, Bobby confessed he felt at times like we were swimming in place and that it had taken easily 30 minutes to swim to our site. The sense of being in danger certainly slows down time.

Shaken but reassured, we dried off and sat down at camp waiting for updates from the 911 operator. Instead, we began receiving texts from our outfitter, telling us that the sheriff had visited, that rescue was not coming for us because we weren’t in imminent danger, and that we would have to locate our boat ourselves… excuse me, but WTF?! We were stunned and panicked anew by these seemingly impossible demands - remember the 1200 miles of interconnected canoe routes?! - and pushed back against what we felt would put us back in harm’s way. We were safe at camp and rescuers knew how to find us. Why would we put that in jeopardy, and how could we be expected to find our boat when it floated completely out of sight (and possibly into the next (very large) lake)? The outfitter insisted that people out here were happy to help and would assist us in finding our canoe. But that would be asking a lot of anyone. Given we had no idea which way the canoe went, it could be anywhere! How could we ask people to take an indefinite amount of time out of their vacation to help us with a possibly futile effort? What was this guy thinking? 

Now feeling at the mercy of our fellow paddlers to get out of this situation, we set about putting together a makeshift flag fashioned from one of our food bags and mounted to Bobby’s selfie stick. We also located our emergency whistles and made sure they worked. Sure enough, about an hour later, we saw a couple of canoes in the distance and began waving and whistling in hopes they would hear us and come to our aid. 

As the first boat approached, I could tell the paddlers weren’t adults, but the teens headed our way and were the first people we would recount our story to. When we got to the part where we explained we’d need someone’s help, they looked unsure and said they’d have to wait for their parents - paddling the boat behind them - to make the call. Once the parents reached us and we told our story, they looked conflicted but ultimately shared they had another 2 hours to paddle - in the opposite direction our boat floated - before they were going to get to their campsite, seeming to hope we would see it was unreasonable to ask them for help - which we did! 

Trying to see if they might have other information that could help us, we asked which way they’d paddled into this lake, and they told us they had entered the same way we had, but that they had gotten close enough to the other entry point that they could see people were wading, suggesting shallow water and therefore less of a likelihood that our boat would have been able to cross into the next lake from there. Although they couldn’t be sure, they hadn’t noticed any rogue canoes on the edge of the lake. “Rescue is coming though, right?,” they said, as they got ready to get back on their way. “I hope so!” we said. 

Our failed attempt at securing help to go look for our canoe only validated our lack of confidence in this approach and left us unsure about whether we’d get out this way. Our encounter with the other paddlers wasn’t completely useless, though. Knowing that our boat probably kept heading in the direction that it floated allowed us to narrow down our search area to a relatively contained set of coves about a mile from where we were. A later text from our outfitter suggested as much, which gave us some hope we might  - with more confidence about where our boat had gone and how much time we’d be asking someone to spend helping us - find our way out of the wilderness. The sun was setting, though, so we’d have to wait until tomorrow to see if our luck had changed.