Travel: Canoeing along the St. Croix

Drifting down the St. Croix, we came upon three kayakers. Two were in an eddy, where a man gave advice to a woman whose boat teetered on a rock. Not far away, another paddled a kayak with not one but two rods -- a fly rod and a spinning rod -- sticking upright like masts, and such an array of gear lashed to his deck that his boat looked like a world-traveling sailboat.

This was his first trip down the river, he said. "We're pleasantly surprised. You're the first people we've seen."

We were pleasantly surprised as well, for the fisherman and his crew were among the few people we had seen -- even though it was a weekend in mid-July, peak of the season.

We might as well have been on a river far to the north. But we weren't. My wife, Susan, and two friends had slipped our canoes into the river at Hwy. 70 west of Grantsburg, Wis., just an hour and a half north of the Twin Cities. We had parked our friends' car at the Nevers Dam Landing on the Wisconsin shore, 26 miles downstream. We planned to float and fish a few miles, camp overnight along the river, and reach their car the next day.

The St. Croix and its Wisconsin tributary, the Namekagon, are the only components of the national wild and scenic rivers system in Minnesota or Wisconsin. Over the years, I had paddled the swift rocky reaches of the St. Croix near Gordon Dam, and the roller coaster waves of the river near the confluence with the Kettle River. I had floated on the near-continuous current of the Namekagon near Trego, Wis. But it had been 20 years since I had paddled this deeper, slower stretch of the river, and I had forgotten how pretty it was.

We bobbed down broad riffles through clots of islands. We saw hardly any cabins or homes or any other development, just a solid screen of pine and hardwoods. Occasionally we scrubbed against rocks, usually because we were fishing and not paying attention. And the fishing was better than I remembered. Susan and I laid fly-rod poppers and streamers along the bank and in the deeper runs in the riffles, where smallmouth bass hammered them and tail-walked on the water.

Through the afternoon, overcast turned to sprinkles. Then the sky opened. Lightning, thunder and strong winds drove us to an island, where we rushed to set up a tarp to shield us from the heavy rain. As the tarp strained against the wind, a stake occasionally flew from the soft sand, and I'd scramble around to find it and sink it back into the ground. A small group of the wettest kayakers I had seen paddled by and disappeared again into the gray rain. After an hour, the rain abated, the clouds broke apart, and the sun shone.

Back on the river, we floated through the afternoon. Then we found a campsite, a grassy opening beneath a spreading oak where we set our tents and roasted bratwurst over a campfire.

Paddling back in time

Beginning a lifetime ago, when I worked for the Department of Natural Resources on the state's wild and scenic rivers program, I've tried to spend as much time as possible on a river. I can't think of anything like a river for personality, with ever-changing moods and the suggestion that everything is somehow connected to everything else, that the rain in the forest links us to the sea.

And it is special to camp on a river. As bad as the mosquitoes can be -- and this evening they were bad -- sitting on the bank after dinner offers a chance to watch the river fade to night and to feel not the least bit rushed or worried.

To run a river is to feel freedom, and to paddle back in time, to imagine the St. Croix that the Ojibwe and Dakota and fur traders saw -- that is, a river not so much different from how it appears today. It was 40 years ago this year that the St. Croix upstream from St. Croix Falls and the entire Namekagon were included among the original eight national wild and scenic rivers. The designation protected the rivers from further dam building and brought considerable federal resources in managing endangered species and developing recreation. (Not that Minnesota and Wisconsin should feel too congratulatory. Oregon leads the nation with 48 streams in the federal system, and Alaska has the greatest length -- 3,210 miles.)

The designation of St. Croix does mean the river, compared with others in the nation, exists much as it did in centuries past. Even though loggers pulled tremendous volumes of white pine from the valley more than a century ago, the native vegetation has returned. The river looks wild and, well, scenic.

"There are a lot of rivers where you just don't see that anymore," said Kate Hanson, resource management chief for the National Park Service. Another sign of an intact natural ecosystem -- more than 40 species of native mussels, including the rare Higgins eye pearly mussel and winged maple leaf.

As far as aquatic life goes, paddlers are less likely to notice mussels and more likely to see the river's game fish, including walleye, northern pike, even muskies. For me, nothing rivals the smallmouth bass in this broad, rocky stream. In two days, Susan and I caught more than two dozen, though the largest ran only 15 inches.

In our final hours on the river, the sun illuminated the riverbed through the water. As we drifted, we watched minnows in the shallows. We occasionally surprised a big bass behind a boulder or a redhorse bulling up the current. Bald eagles, ever so much more plentiful now than when the river was designated, loafed in trees, looking for fish. Along shore, we spotted herons and kingfishers. On such a warm summer's day, everything seemed humid, verdant and fecund.

As we paddled past Wild River State Park on the Minnesota shore, we finally saw some people -- families along the shore and out in canoes. Below Nevers Dam, a flood-destroyed relic of the logging days, we pulled ashore. The reveries of day and night on a river vanished to the mundane chore of loading canoes and gear aboard a waiting car.

Greg Breining is a St. Paul-based freelance writer. His latest book, "A Hard-Water World: Ice Fishing and Why We Do It," will be on shelves Nov. 1.