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Cross-posted from St. Croix 360.

It’s obvious that the folks who organize the Snake River Canoe Race have been doing it for a while. Saturday’s race, the thirty-second annual, was well-organized, yet relaxed. Things ran smoothly, and everyone seemed to have a good time.

The Snake River is one of the major tributaries of the St. Croix. It flows about 100 miles from Aitkin County to its mouth near Pine City. It’s a beautiful and mostly wild river deserving of celebration in the spring.

I paddled the race with my buddy Slim — it was our first canoe race, and our first time paddling on the Snake River. I also borrowed a GoPro camera, which is a nearly indestructible digital video camera made for capturing extreme sports … or relatively sedate river cruises. Check out the video I put together below.

There were 176 canoes entered in the race, from hardcore racers in their skinny specialized canoes to many people from the area (and beyond) paddling aluminum canoes. Racers start six at a time from the County Highway 3 bridge, at one-minute intervals. We then paddled downstream about 14 miles to the finish line at the Kanabec History Center.

The fastest time of the day was 1 hour and 57 minutes, posted by Devin Arenz and Dama Henry of the Twin Cities. Two aluminum canoes came in just twenty minutes later and only seven seconds apart: Doug Berg and Keith Canny finished in 2 hours, 17 minutes and 30 seconds, while Lynn Stegeman and Brody Halverson of Mora clocked a time of 2 hours, 17 minutes, 37 seconds.

The nature of canoe racing is you get plenty of time to talk to the people passing you (or who you are passing). We talked to people who had first run the race in the 1980s. There were also more than a few canoes featuring fathers in the stern and 11- or 12-year-old kids in the bow.

The river banks are mostly undeveloped, but we occasionally saw small groups of spectators on the banks. I overheard another paddler saying, “This is the best parade I’ve ever been in.”

The Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness is working hard to share the truth about sulfide mining with our fellow Minnesotans. We feel this is important because we have heard a lot from PolyMet, Twin Metals and other companies proposing this new form of mining in our state that they will practice “environmentally safe mining,” but they have not presented a single piece of evidence to back that claim up.

The evidence that is available proves a much different reality. For example, last month the Environmental Protection Agency released its annual survey of pollution discharges in the country. Mining operations similar to what PolyMet and Twin Metals propose was once again identified as the single biggest polluter in the country, responsible for 41 percent of all toxic releases.

If Minnesota is going to consider allowing this new type of mining here, its citizens deserve to know the truth. The Friends released five short videos this month to get the facts out about what this mining could mean for our state.

Please watch the videos and share them with your friends and family!

The sulfide mining issue is the inspiration for an epic dogsled trip starting in Grand Marais and Ely this week, and traveling all the way to the State Capitol for a rally next Thursday. Check out our friend Paul Austin of Conservation Minnesota's blog post about the trip and what it means.

Overview of mine proposals

Threats to clean water

Sulfide mining's history of pollution

Mine proposals could harm northern Minnesota's existing economy

What we can do to protect our lakes, rivers and economy

(Cross-posted from St. Croix 360 and inspired by the Heritage Initiative.)

Boston Corbett (Library of Congress photo, via Wikipedia)

“Hell hath overtaken me at last,
the world divided, tinder and ash.
Limbs lopped from the pines have made a pyre
And now the very air has come afire …
in the ascendant inferno bright
soon I will be an angel of light.”

- “Boston Corbett dies, alone and forgotten, in the Great Hinckley Fire of 1894“

The strange story of the strange man who killed John Wilkes Booth apparently came to an end along the banks of Minnesota’s Kettle River, 29 years after Thomas “Boston” Corbett shot Booth in a Virginia barn. Corbett fled to the north woods after escaping from a Kansas asylum, where he had been committed for waving a gun around in the Kansas legislature.

He is thought to have settled and spent the final part of his life in the forests of Hinckley, Minn. The popular Hinckley restaurant and doughnut shop Tobies has a bit about Corbett on their website, reporting that Corbett “settled in a small cabin just east of town, earning a living supplying venison for a logging camp near the Kettle River.”

"Burying the dead, 90 in one trench."
Minnesota Historical Society photo.

On September 1, 1894, fire consumed 200,000 acres of land around Hinckley that had been cut over by the logging companies, leaving brush littered across the landscape, a vast tinderbox. There is a “Corbett, Thos, Age 57, residence, Hinckley; burned in the woods north-east of Hinckley, near Kettle River” in the official roll of the at least 418 victims of the fire.

Corbett probably suffered from mercury poisoning. A hat-maker by trade, like Alice in Wonderland’s “Mad Hatter,” the toxic metal had attacked his mind even before the Civil War, causing delusions and dangerous behavior. In 1858, he castrated himself to save himself from the temptation of Boston’s prostitutes.

He served much of the war in the Union Army and was then in the party of soldiers that hunted the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination at Ford’s Theatre. Corbett claimed God’s hand aimed his gun when he shot Booth through the slats in the side of a barn where Booth was hiding and which the soldiers had just set on fire.

The Kettle River 118 years after the Hinckley Fire
St. Croix State Park

Although he was briefly arrested for shooting Booth, instead of bringing him in alive as the party was ordered to do, Corbett was eventually released and given reward money. He seems to have ridden the celebrity that came with his role in history for some time, but then wandered West, where he got appointed doorman of the Kansas House of Representatives. That was going well until the gun waving. He spent a year in a Topeka asylum before stealing a horse and escaping.

No further record of Corbett’s life is known, except for the stories floating around the Kettle River, and his name on that registry of fire victims.

“And though I flew so far, so north, so fast
Hell hath overtaken me at last.
And now, sap pops and great pines crack
the world caves into ashes, smoke is black.
Abba, let this cup of anguish pass from me,
if that be Your will. If not, let it be.”

IMBA Trail Solutions pro builder Stephen Mullins (center) working with COGGs members at Sprirt Mountain (Photo courtesy Hansi Johnson)

The people of Duluth must have been pretty nice this year. Word came just before Christmas that the Cyclists of Gitchee-Gumee Shores (COGGS) have received a $250,000 grant from a Legacy Amendment fund to jump start development of a new 20-mile mountain biking trail system right in the heart of the city.

The Duluth Traverse will ultimately span the port town from Spirit Mountain to Amity Creek, from the bluffs of the St. Louis River valley to the crashing waves of Lake Superior. When completed, it will be the longest urban singletrack trail system in the nation, connecting several parks to each other which feature their own trail systems.

The Legacy grant comes only after five years of effort. And there are many years ahead and much work to do; this is not a project for the impatient or the lazy. Hansi Johnson is neither of those. One just has to follow his blog to see that (he recently captured several striking photos of riding an extra-fat tired Surly Pug bicycle on the ice of a St. Louis River reservoir).

The Midwest Regional Director for the International Mountain Biking Association (IMBA) has been by all accounts essential to the project’s success so far. Though Johnson lives outside Duluth, he travels the region helping local cycling groups develop trails in their communities. The Traverse will be in his backyard when complete. Johnson shared the news by noting this is about more than just a new riding opportunity:

It is great to see that off road cycling has become a movement about creating better communities, we have stepped out from singly pushing the “trail” and are now pushing “Trails” plural and how they can create positive lifestyles and change lives.

That might seem like lofty description of some narrow paths through the woods, but the plan is ambitious. The COGGS’ website describes a trail network that will improve opportunities to get out in the woods not just for bikers, but hikers, runners, skiers, snowshoers, and even equestrians:

This trail system will feature trail hubs with more extensive trail networks in Lester Park, Hartley Park, Piedmont-Brewer Park, Spirit Mountain and Mission Creek and then have trails connecting them all together. Our goal for this system is to create the first 100+ mile system of singletrack all within an urban environment. This will connect communities together via natural surface trails and also create an environment where everyone has trail access within a short distance of their home that they can walk, run or bike on.

It’s easy to see why so many groups and individuals would come together around the vision. In any good partnership, you do more together than what you can do alone, and this one is doing a lot. In addition to Johnson and his colleagues at IMBA and COGGS and its volunteers, key supporters of the project include the city of Duluth, notably its mayor Don Ness, and other trail groups in the city, representing the hikers, skiers, birders and average citizens who want more places to get out in the woods.

COGGS members building a technical section of trail in Piedmont Park (Photo courtesy Hansi Johnson)

The coalition has racked up success before this grant. Johnson told me in an email that COGGS has put vast amounts of volunteers hours into the city’s park restoring and closing old trails, as well as investing grant dollars in infrastructure improvements. This has taken a strain off the parks budget, while still improving the parks. This fall, they strongly supported a Parks and Libraries levy that was approved by voters on Election Day.

Mayor Ness recently proclaimed that he wants Duluth to be the “premier trail city in North America.” This isn’t just because there are a lot of mountain bikers or hikers in the town, but because the trail systems are seen as essential to the quality of life the city can offer, from health benefits to recreation opportunities to tourism dollars.

COGGS chairman Adam Sundberg said in a recent article in Northern Wilds that he sees the system having potential as a riding destination up there with other regional stars, reputation as a good place to live and raise a family: “We can have riding every bit as good as Rapid City, CAMBA [the Chequamegon area], UP of Michigan, but we have a town that is much more attractive for arts, culture, kids’ activities, shopping.”

A billboard advertising the Cuyuna trail system (Photo courtesy Hansi Johnson)

Just this summer, the biggest new mountain biking trail system in the state opened up amongst abandoned mine pits on the Iron Range at the new Cuyuna Country Recreation Area near Crosby. Johnson told Duluth-Superior Magazine that the park’s grand opening weekend this summer saw all the cafes in town entirely sold out of food.

Hopes are high for the Duluth Traverse. Right now, there is a map, trails scattered around the city, a bunch of dedicated folks, and now, some money to get things started, thanks to the voters and taxpayers of Minnesota. The entire system should cost about $1 million ultimately.

With the new funds, the partners will develop an implementation plan and begin work on the trail system at Lester Park. After that they will work on connector sections which will link trail networks to each other. Johnson wrote in an email that the grant will get things “rolling.”

More: View a map of the proposed trail system (PDF).

Minnesota's executive council -- a five-member body comprised of the Governor, Lt. Governor, Attorney General, Secretary of State and State Auditor -- will hold a much-anticipated hearing at 3 p.m. this afternoon on a controversial move to lease mineral rights out from underneath private property owners.

Josephine Marcotty's story in today's paper has the details:

Residents and cabin owners in what may become a new copper mining district near Ely say they were shocked that the state's century-old minerals law seems skewed to favor mining companies over property owners. It was also their introduction to a side of the Department of Natural Resources that they had never seen -- the one with a mission to promote mining.

"In a 21st-century democracy, it seems very 19th-century," said Todd Ronning, a woodcarver who owns forested land near Two Harbors and a summer cabin on Sand Lake near Isabella. "I'm surprised to see that it's my own state that seems to be the Goliath here."

While the potential for toxic pollution from the new copper-nickel mines has largely been the focus of controversy over the proposals until now, this hearing marks a new chapter. People who have been living quietly in the forests of northeastern Minnesota are now finding out that they have little power against companies who want to come drill and possibly mine on their land.

The situation with the state's mineral lease laws is confounding. Citizens can try to negotiate the terms of exploration and mining with companies, but if they fail to reach an agreement, the prospectors can still come onto their land and drill. Try selling a car when the buyer could just come take it from you without paying a cent if they wanted to:

Mineral rights were separated from surface property rights on much of the private land in that region of the state in the 1800s. Decades ago, the state required property owners to file claims for their mineral rights every five years, and also imposed a tax on the potential value of those minerals. When the claims weren't filed or the taxes weren't paid, the mineral rights reverted to the state.

Watch online

If you can't make it to the State Capitol this afternoon to observe the hearing, the Senate Media Services will be broadcasting it live over the Internet. Visit their website at 3 p.m. to watch.