‘A Minnesota thing’: Paddling quests to the wilds of Canada follow long history

MINNEAPOLIS — Two separate groups of intrepid canoe paddlers set out in the northern Minnesota wilderness this past spring toward the remote doorstep of the Arctic Circle: Canada’s Hudson Bay.

The foursomes, made up of Minnesotans and others with close ties to the state, dubbed themselves “The Solitude of 4″ and the “Hudson Bay Girls.” More than two months and 1,000-plus miles later, they completed their trips in mid-August.

The accomplishments entered them into an exclusive club, tracing waterways traveled eons before by Indigenous people and, later, fur traders and explorers.

It’s a pattern popularized in the 1930s after Eric Sevareid took the journey fresh out of high school and wrote about it in his book “Canoeing with the Cree.” It has become an epic goal for new adventurers based in the North Star state.

“It’s a Minnesota thing,” said Bob O’Hara, 84, a St. Louis Park man who paddled to Hudson Bay in the 1960s and later took trips on other major rivers of the Canadian Arctic.

The journeys are built on careful route-planning, preparation and wilderness savvy, as well as the stories of those who went before, many from a close-knit canoeing community in the state.

Olivia Bledsoe, a Hudson Bay Girl, said Natalie Warren’s book about her 2011 trip was the catalyst for thinking bigger after she spent several summers guiding in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Warren, like Bledsoe, was college-aged when she headed north with companion Ana Raiho.

“I thought, this is something I could do,” Bledsoe said. “This is something I want to do.”

Warren said the state has created an adventure culture.

“I think it really is the people who have paved the way before us all,” Warren added, rattling off names such as...