REGIONAL- A 62-year-old Duluth man was found dead on Friday on Lake Agnes, the victim of an apparent drowning. Mark Ham was described by family members as a clinical psychologist and an avid outdoorsman who had gone on solo trips to the Boundary Waters twice a year for decades.
St. Louis County 911 dispatchers received a call at approximately 5 p.m. on Friday from canoeists reporting that they had located a capsized canoe and a partially submerged human body on Lake Agnes, located in the wilderness north of the Echo Trail, approximately 25 miles northwest of Ely.
Multiple units from the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office, the St. Louis County Rescue Squad and the U.S. Forest Service initially responded to the call, but the response was scaled back once it was determined that it would be a recovery operation of a solo camper. In the end, a forest service pilot, a rescue squad member, and a sheriff’s deputy flew to the site in a Beaver to recover Ham’s body. Rescuers reported that a life jacket was found on the scene but was not worn by the victim at the time.
On a memorial site for Ham, family members pushed back against the implication by the sheriff’s office that Ham was involved in some kind of canoeing accident while he was without a life jacket. Family insist that Ham always wore his life jacket while in the canoe.
“What we do know points to him having some sort of accident that led to lack of consciousness and then slipping into the water. From how he was found it was clear he was not yet in his canoe when the incident occurred.”
The incident remains under investigation by the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office and Midwest Medical Examiner Office, which will perform an autopsy to determine the cause of death.