Semi-Pro Guide
By John Luthens
I’ve been fascinated with the guiding lifestyle for years. When the other kids went through their phases of wanting to be an astronaut, firefighter, or the next U.S. President, I always wanted to be a professional guide.
Guiding willing outdoor enthusiasts into the wild country and getting paid for it-what better way to earn a living! I thought it would be a piece of cake to hunt and fish every day, pointing out the perfect water to fish on a humid, overcast day, or just the right stand to use in northeast wind. My clients would be overjoyed with my superior knowledge, and thrilled when their chance of a lifetime came through with me at the helm. I figured I’d have enough money to retire early from the tips alone.
Unfortunately, I never accumulated enough outdoor knowledge, or enough clients, or any clients at all for that matter, to ever realize my true potential. But last week, after suffering in mediocrity for many years, I finally got my first big chance, spearheading a group of Boy Scouts on a four-day outing to the Brule River State Forest in Douglas County.
I’d volunteered to lead the outing some nine months ago, raising my hand in a meeting when the Scoutmaster asked for canoe trip suggestions. I admonished that the Bois Brule River would be the perfect place. After all, I practically grew up on the Brule; learning to swim in the river, while also being blessed to have canoed and fished it more times than I can ever be properly thankful for.
Images danced through my head: Of standing proudly in the stern of the canoe, guiding a safe passage down a rocky stretch of rapids, giving wise advice and making thoughtful and witty comments.
Or picking the perfect campsite, like the ones the outdoor artists paint, with curling fire smoke on a starlit night by the water, while bear and deer look on in perfect contentment.
It might even be the right time of year for the Hexagenia mayfly hatch. I’d be a wealth of knowledge, showing the Scouts just the right flies to cast near the bank in the mid-June dusk, when the thumb sized bugs hatch from the silt and the really big brown trout thrash in the shallows.
Guiding the Scout group would be my first big break into the business. Granted, I wouldn’t be getting paid, but I had to start somewhere in my quest up the easy summit of guiding legend.
It turned out that raising my hand to volunteer was the only easy part of the summit there was. Guiding was more of a sheer faced rock cliff.
To start with, planning the food menu alone was a massive undertaking. We were only going to be gone four days, but eleven and twelve year old boys have endless appetites. I sweated over every grocery item.
I now have a new-found reverence towards the real guides who effortlessly see to it that their client’s are well fed. I went heavy on the fruits, healthy granola snacks and bottled water, while easing back on the cookies, potato chips and sugared juice boxes. You can guess for yourself what I ran out of, and what I carted back from the trip in bulk quantity.
Even the list of who was going, who had their permission slip and trip money in, and those who had to back out at the last minute confused me. It wasn’t big dollar commitments, like a guided bear or deer hunt, but it kept me on the phone and the email regularly. Guiding was more work than I thought.
At least the weather was bright and sunny when we left. In fact, I was worried it would be too hot. I didn’t want to disappoint my clients. At least I’d asked my mom, who lives in the town of Brule, to reserve two pine-shaded campsites closest to the river. I knew those river campsites would be perfect in a hot, dry spell.
We weren’t on the road an hour when my mom called my cell phone. She said that the park ranger mentioned if there was any more rain, the river would overflow its banks, and the two sites might flood. She asked me if I still wanted them.
“What do you mean rain?” I asked her. “It’s so dry here that the lawn grass is starting to turn brown.”
“Duluth has had almost nine inches of rain,” she said. “Roads are closed, and I heard that a polar bear and a seal escaped from the zoo. The exhibit areas flooded, and they just swam over the top.”
I thought she was kidding. It turns out she wasn’t.
Somewhere north on Hwy. 53, between the towns of Gordon and Solon Springs, dark clouds started looming over the Lake Superior horizon. It was right after we’d seen a black bear amble across the road, and the excited Scouts had me thinking my guided wilderness trip was going according to plan.
We set up camp in-between rain showers. Somehow we got the tents and dining fly up without a total drenching. My mom had taken the initiative to get us two sites on higher ground. It was a good thing too, because the river sites were occupied. At least there were two half-submerged tents there.
The ranger said he hadn’t seen the occupants since the river swelled its banks. It turned out they weren’t in mortal danger, though. They’d just abandoned ship when the flooding started.
I walked above the ranger station to take a look at the Little Joe rapids. It’s a stretch of water that can be exciting even in low water. It’s also fairly deep in spots and can be fine for trout fishing.
There used to be a stone dam below the rapids. It was used in logging days of old, as a staging ground for log drives down to Lake Superior. It was taken out about a hundred years ago, but by seeing the pounding rapids, you could have sworn it was busted out hours ago, with the whole might of the Brule was rushing through. Canoeing was out until the water level dropped.
No Hex hatch either. That kind of water on the Brule can wash out fishing for quite a while. It looked like my guiding career was washing out with it.
But then I noticed that my Boy Scout clients seemed to care less that it was raining. They ran up and down the river, and they were all for canoeing the Little Joe rapids right then and there.
There was no sign of the escaped polar bear, but the Scouts merrily chased begging chipmunks around the campsite. When the rain sizzled the coals, and the Dutch oven baked pizzas took too long to make, no one seemed to mind.
We delayed my perfectly planned canoe trip, opting instead to drive down to where the mouth of the Brule River spilled brown into cold Lake Superior. The Scouts braved the frigid water without a second thought. They wrestled a log of driftwood from the hard-packed sand and floated on it for an hour in the iron-stained lake.
The heavy rains had slid the red banks above the lake into clay. My clients dug into the clay with abandon, forming pots and mugs and vases that they brought back to camp and hardened by the camp fire. They put bread crumbs in the pottery and watched the camp chipmunks eat out of it.
Boy Scouts from Grafton Troop 840 get creative in a Lake Superior clay bank.
We journeyed into Iron River and fished on a lake impound. It was still raining, but we caught perch and bluegill, not to mention some painted turtles. Another of my guiding myths was shattered, as I spent no time fishing, instead running from pole to pole, untangling lines and fixing make-shift reels. No one cared too much about the fish anyway after we started catching turtles.
Despite intense northern rainfall, Scouts wet their lines in Iron River, WI.
On the third day of camp, we finally did get to make the canoe trip. It was necessarily shortened, and included more of the upper river, where the forested growth eases the water level. We stopped on a sandy, shallow strip that shelved into a deep pool. The trout fishing potential was there, but everyone went swimming in the pool instead.
Of course it rained again on our last night, and in the morning there was no other option but to pack up all our gear into the best soggy wet mess that we could. To my surprise, as we were driving home, everyone wanted to know if we could do it again next year.
I made it back from my guiding excursion in one piece. I strongly suspect that a good guide’s strongest asset is the ability to improvise. I needed my clients to show me that.
And now, looking out into my back yard, where I had to re-pitch seven tents and one dining fly in order to dry them out, sitting and munching one of two tons of bananas I had to haul back, I think I’ll leave the real guiding to the professionals.