By Lacey Landt (Embellished by Mike Phelps)
BWCA was the trip of a lifetime. It was my first Mini-School trip. A lot of my classmates gave me some weird looks, others actually told me I had a lot of guts to go to the Boundary Waters (in the winter) for my first trip. I felt, no problem, I can handle it.
The first day I practically begged Doug to take me home. After that I got used to the cold and knew how to handle it. We built a huge quinzhee, or snow shelter. Originally three separate huts, they eventually became connected to create the Bingshick Hotel. Alan and Bill slept in the smaller portion. Squiggey and Mason in the tunnel, and Mike, Alison, and I in the big room. Doug slept up the hill in a tent. While making the quinzhee, to avoid getting our pants wet, we wore our raingear. Have you ever seen Alan fat?!? He looked like Humpty Dumpty with dreads. Mike thought he looked more like Paddington Bear.
We got passed by six hikers from Chanhassen on the way in. One of them was a Minnetonka graduate. They only stayed the weekend up on Jap Lake, and visited us on the way out as well. They gave us some extra (already cleaned) trout for our lunch. Delicious! We also had a visitor named Maury. He hiked out to Jap Lake planning to stay a week, but that next morning we saw him headed right back home again. “I’m 75 years old and I have a pace maker. I don’t have nothing to prove to anyone!” he said.
The nights got pretty cold (-30 some nights). Bill said his face felt like one big chapped lip from the cold and sunburn. Everyone agreed that it felt pretty gross.
Saturday we all went cross-country skiing. Some of us had never skied before but that didn’t stop us from going, even though a couple of us trailed behind at first.
WARNING!! Never eat frozen cheese or salami, ugh! The birds seemed to love it though. They ate right out of our hands. Lunch always consisted of bagels, cheese, salami, and mixed fruit. We learned after the first day, that frozen bagels taste better over the fire, dumb Mason seems to enjoy a little “natural” flavor with his bagels (his nose was dripping all week).
Oh yeah, the title, sorry to have kept you in suspense. At first Mason put two candy bars in his pocket and eventually pulled out six or seven. He says they mated in there. No wonder I came up short on my portions.
My impression of a Mini trip was that it was hard, but awesome, and I’d do it all over again.