In late November 2006 Ralph found out that Pixar was giving all employees the week between Christmas and New Year's off, with pay. So we frantically started looking for something to do. Winnie remembered seeing a segment about a dogsledding lodge on the show Adventure Lodges of North America and since she has wanted to try mushing for a long time, went looking. That lodge was the Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge. Lucky for us, they had two openings for their Wintergreen Classic 5-night Beginning Dogsled Camping Trip the week between Christmas and New Year's. The only problem was that we had to leave home at 4am Christmas morning to begin our trip to Ely, Minnesota. The return was not much better. We were home an in bed by 3:30am January 1.
The area where we were sledding and camping is in extreme north eastern Minnesota. We spent a lot of time inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (or simply BWCAW). This area is an extremely popular area for canoeing in the summer. There are several large canoe outfitters in Ely. Traveling this area in winter (with not much snow) is probably a lot like traveling in the summer by canoe--but without the mosquitos. We would travel on the lakes as much as possible and then take a winter portage from one lake to the next. The winter portages were very challenging and full of obstacles like rocks, stumps and fallen trees. More snow would have helped, but it would still be difficult.
We slept outside (no tent) all three nights. This was quite comfortable and convenient because you have lots of space for your stuff. There is no rain to make you wet and no bugs to bite you--two big advantages of winter camping. One night there was a light snowfall during the night. This was a bit annoying at first--the snow falling on your face tends to tingle and wake you up. We adjusted the bivy bags outside our sleeping bags to shelter our faces from the snow. This worked well.
One thing we noticed was that we were very busy when their was light. This made it difficult to take pictures. Our fellow travelers generously let us use some of their pictures to tell our story.
The map below shows our route. Ely is just off the map to the left (west). Jimmy made this from the GPS data he collected on the trip. Ralph added the annotations to show where we slept. He reports we travelled a total of 39 miles by dogsled.
