I’ve been walking with friends in a season of gray. That period between the falling of the leaves and the coming of the snow has become longer than it used to be and we’ve been making the best of the astonishingly mild conditions to explore the variety of hiking trails in the Boundary Waters.
On the opening day of this year’s firearms deer season, I wasn’t in my deer stand. Instead, a friend and I were on the Angleworm Trail, which runs north from the Echo Trail, about 15 miles north of Ely. According to the Forest Service, it’s a 12-mile loop trail, but they don’t tell you that the loop starts nearly three miles into the hike, which makes it more like 20 miles to do the entire loop and make it back to your car. That’s a haul, especially in the short days of November. And, unlike the Powwow Trail, which we had hiked a couple weeks earlier, the Angleworm Trail is too rough for trail running in most places, which could have allowed us to cover the ground during daylight hours. Add in the delays for a wrong turn and for taking off shoes to traverse a stretch of water over a boardwalk and a 20-mile trek simply wasn’t in the cards.
Yet the Angleworm Trail rarely disappoints, at least those portions of the trail that I’ve actually walked over the years. From the parking lot, the first mile or so is a steady downhill into the Spring Creek valley, a rift that runs in a near-perfectly straight line from near Crooked Lake to the north arm of Burntside. The last time I had hiked the Angleworm, high water had washed out the crude wooden planking that served as a bridge and the high rushing water prompted an unexpected turnaround. Fortunately, the planking was back in place and we made it across the creek this time and began the slow climb out of the valley.
While the warming climate has brought changes to parts of the Boundary Waters in recent years, the Angleworm trail mostly passes through the kind of forest normally associated with the boreal woods, a forest floor deep with lush green moss, under a canopy dominated by pine and spruce, with scattered birch and aspen. The only exception were the south-facing slopes, where the landscape turned almost immediately to maple and scrub oak, evidence of the difference drier and slightly warmer conditions can make on the boreal edge.
The terrain is up and down, with ridges and some surprisingly steep valleys aligned on a roughly north-to-south trajectory. It was a reminder of my favorite description for the terrain here on the Canadian Shield— regionally flat, locally rugged.
Such conditions definitely slowed our pace. We could see pretty quickly that our progress on the map was less than anticipated so we tried trail running in a few places where the trail was less rocky. But such areas were few and short and much of the rest of the trail was too full of rocks and roots to make running safe. The last thing you need miles into a Boundary Waters trek is a turned ankle.
Like many Boundary Waters trails, you need to pay attention along the way. While the trail is mostly easy to follow, there are always disappearing trails that continue straight whenever the trail takes an unexpected turn. We found a couple of those and actually followed one along an increasingly steep slope until it finally disappeared. These false trails always fade away eventually and it’s interesting to see how long it takes to do so. It’s usually no more than a couple hundred feet although I’m always one who takes it to the bitter end before recognizing that I’ve made a wrong turn as the trail finally disappears entirely.
We were nearly three miles into the hike when we reached a junction where the two sides of the loop trail come together. A third path, what is essentially a long portage trail from Trease Lake arrives there as well, giving a hiker three options to choose from, all currently unmarked just to keep things interesting. I’d been there a couple times before so I knew which way to go. We opted to travel up the east side of the loop, which in my experience has the nicer overlooks once you reach Angleworm Lake.
About four-and-a-half miles into the hike we reached the lone campsite on the east side of Angleworm Lake. From the map, it was apparent that we were less than a quarter of the way around the loop, so we opted to make a fire and have some lunch before turning around. The trail, according to the map, continued on for many miles, past Whiskey Jack Lake and north around Home Lake before returning to the south along the west side of Angleworm. We wouldn’t have made it out until well after dark and with the trail challenging at times to follow even in daylight, we didn’t want to have to rely on moonlight to make it back. While I always carry some emergency supplies on treks into the wilderness, prudence has meant I’ve never had to use any of them. I intend to keep it that way.

A surprise find in the BWCAW
There’s something you don’t see every day in the Boundary Waters slowly rusting into the forest about 200 feet from the campsite on the east side of Angleworm Lake—two large tanks, which appear to be old underground fuel tanks, with a large, old-style fuel pump leaning against one of them. According to one 20-year-old online post I found on bwca.com, the tanks and assorted other metal junk (like lots of old barrels, bedsprings, etc.) are the remnants of an old logging camp that operated in the area back in the 1920s or so. If anyone knows where I could find more details or photos of this old logging camp, I would appreciate hearing about it for a possible history story. You can email me at marshall@timberjay.com.