Chasing the summer sun down river

Fifteen-year-old Joe Kluthe unfolds his Leatherman multi-tool pocket knife, then pulls out a silver-colored flint block the size of a fat credit card. With a scree-scree sound, he whittles shavings of magnesium off the edge of the block and into a nest of twine.

Just left of Joe's elbow, Matthew Crocker, 16, leans in close to the square fire pit.

"I have to say that's pretty nifty," Matthew says. "I've tried flint and steel before. But it never really worked."

With a flash, the knife blade kicks up a flint spark, igniting the magnesium shavings. That sets the twine, twigs, and, in turn, some logs ablaze.

"Nice work -- beautiful," says Greta Almquist, 27, the group's leader. "Joe, that was awesome."

Outside the fire-pit pavilion, a July sun makes a final blinding flash of its own before dropping below the filter of cottonwood leaves. An egret stabs its slender neck into the murky water and lifts its head to swallow a fish.

For the 11 metro-area teenagers and six staff members from the Wilderness Inquiry outdoor-trekking group, it was their first night of a three-day canoe trip down the Mississippi River.

Paddling three 24-foot Voyageur-style boats, they pushed off from the flats near the University of Minnesota and floated through the river gorge - stopping for a 32-foot drop behind the "Lord of the Rings" doors of Lock No. 1 near St. Paul's Ford plant.

On this night, they're camping beneath the Mendota Bridge and the roar of jet engines along a backwater stretch near the confluence of the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers at Fort Snelling State Park.

A pivotal spot in the white man's westward expansion centuries ago, the fort now marks the first night's camping point for the new canoe route that Wilderness Inquiry has dubbed the Urban Canoe Wilderness Area.

Working with the National Park Service and Aggregate Industries, which owns the island near Hastings where the group will spend night 2, the partners hope to pry 10,000 urban teens away from their video games and get them on this stretch of river in coming years.

"It's kind of liberating to leave my cell phone on my bedside table," says P.J. Wehrwein, 15, of St. Paul, who's making his fifth wilderness trek as a member of the group's Adventure Leadership Program.

He's sitting on a picnic table, swatting blood-engorged mosquitoes, as some of the others play a game of 500 with a Frisbee. One person tossed the plastic disk into the warm summer air, while a half-dozen others cluster across the grass field, positioning themselves to leap and grab the Frisbee to earn points and a chance to throw.

Pizza or calzone?

Back at the campsite, the group has placed two long picnic tables together and set up two propane stoves at the edge. For dinner, they mixed instant pizza dough in water and molded it into balls. Each member of the group then filled a small green plastic bowl with a hand-picked concoction of mozzarella cheese, pepperoni slices, canned mushrooms, diced onions, green pepper and garlic.

"Pizza or calzone?" asked Jacque Braemer and Kellen Hoxworth, two of the college-aged staffers manning the stove tops. Depending on the answer, they folded the dough after squeezing pizza sauce from a plastic bottle and mixing in the toppings.

As the Frisbee game winds down and the fire pit flames up, Hoxworth and a handful of others stay back by the stoves. They stealthily combine six bags of instant brownie mix, peanut butter, water and a couple of eggs in a large frying pan. Then they spread on chocolate frosting and punctuate the monstrosity with M&Ms and candles.

It's Claire Dzierzak's 16th birthday. After some arduous Frisbee, she's taken a solitary walk with her digital camera, hoping to surprise a heron. Now she's back, watching Joe's fire grow. Hoxworth and his team of secret-mega brownie makers sneak up with their chocolate-filled frying pan and break into a rousing, off-key rendering of "Happy Birthday to Claire."

Reflecting on the day

While the massive brownie cools, the group forms a circle and each one offers up their rose and bud for the day - one highlight and one moment they expect to blossom the next day when they paddle through downtown St. Paul on the 22-mile marathon segment toward the island near Hastings. They each offer one shout-out compliment to someone in the group.

"My rose was laughter," Almquist says. "I haven't laughed so much in one day in so long. And my bud will be seeing us challenge and push ourselves tomorrow."

Her shout-out goes to Rachel Mills, 18, of Bloomington, who taught her the call of a catbird, which she reluctantly repeats with a squawky: "WEE, WEE, WEE."

The twitter of quieter birds fills the silence as the group returns to the fire pit. Darkness is dropping and a breeze cools the night air. Dirk Gaynor, 17, picks up the Frisbee and fans the embers in the fire pit.

The flames dance back to attention, hypnotizing and reflecting off the teens' wide eyes.

Curt Brown • 612-673-4778