Paddling across White Iron Lake, I looked up at the sky, cloudless and blue. Then I glided around a bend and spotted them: a pair of slim maple trees, rising from the rocky shoreline, burst into a brilliant orange.
It was still early. Mid-September. In this northern edge of Minnesota, just outside Ely, most of the trees still shimmered green. But from our canoes, my paddling group witnessed hints that autumn, in all its brilliance, would soon arrive.
"It's the perfect time to be up here," one of our guides, Devan, later told us.
"Oh, you say that to all the groups," laughed Georganne, who had trekked here from Oakland, Calif., with her husband and two 20-something sons.
But the weekend would back up his claim: Comfortable temperatures. Fewer people — and perhaps more important — fewer mosquitoes. And those slim, orange maple trees, with more to come. It was as if all the forest's color had gravitated toward the water.
We had gravitated there, too. We had come to canoe, to explore just the edge of an epic wilderness of lakes, rivers and rapids. This trip, put on by Wilderness Inquiry, proved more easygoing than my past pack-and-portage excursions into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Each evening, we returned to a cozy lodge on a pine-covered peninsula on White Iron Lake.
The weekend had been billed as an "amazing trip for leaf-peepers." As the trip approached, swaths of the DNR's color-coded state map — which Minnesotans eye each fall — had begun turning yellow and orange. But the Ely area?
Stubbornly, disappointingly green.