Northwoods Memories Multimedia Productions

News Flash: We are announcing a new service on our website: Canoe Country Encyclopedia.
For about 35 years we have been taking pictures in Quetico and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and for nearly 20 years we have been video taping in Canoe Country. We are now adding a section to our website that will be in encyclopedic form that will use a large number of carefully edited video clips, audio segments, and photographs. We are also expanding this multimedia approach to current pages of our website. Extensive cross referenced links will help you move around our site to gain the maximum possible information.
The initial page of the Encyclopedia will be uploaded in a few days and will be the starting point. As soon as it is on line and tested, we will begin formatting it into pages for ease of reference in anticipation of its rapid growth into many hundreds of entries.
Have you ever wondered what the Ranger Cabin on Kahshahpiwi Lake looked like before it was burned? Would you like to show others what the “bathtub” in Lousia Falls looks like? When you talk to your friends about what a portage is like do they look back at you with a blank stare? Well now you can show them short clips of some of the portages you have carried your canoe and pack over.
If you have never been to Canoe Country but are contemplating a trip you can scan the encyclopedia to learn about the area. If you have made a trip or two, you can learn about other areas and skills, or show your friends and family what your trip was like. If you are a long term paddler in Canoe Country, we hope you will be able to scan through the entries to find clips or photos of that bring back wonderful Northwoods Memories.
Join us in trying out the new Northwoods Memories Canoe Country Encyclopedia. We will appreciate your suggestions and comments here on the blog about the new entry.

This book is unquestionably the best book I have read about Quetico Provincial Park.  Jon and his wife Marie were Quetico Rangers, first at Beaverhouse, then Cache Bay and Prairie Portage.  After his tenure there he returned to Graduate School for a Master’s program, I believe, in Archaeology, and worked as an archaeologist in Quetico for several years.  During that time he interacted with and got to know a number of the First Nation citizens of the Lac La Croix community.  As we are very much interested in the pictographs of the area, his multiple comments on this aspect of First Nation culture and religion were very interesting to us.

This book relates a broad range of topics from the early geological and natural history of the time when the glaciers of the last ice age were retreating from the area now Quetico, to contemporary issues with the park.  It is divided into sections allowing the reader to read sections of interest in any order.  To me, with my woefully inadequate knowledger of pre-history, the readings on the early post-glacial era and the Paleo-Indians were fascinating.  For the biologist or the reader interested in biology and ecology, the chapters in part three relating to ecology, tell the stories of lichens, orchids (yes, orchids in Quetico), moose, ravens and forest fire ecology along with other topics.  As a biologist and biochemist myself, I found these chapters fascinating, well written, and full of interesting information.  I learned a great deal from them. (more…)

Edwina and I just returned from Canoecopia.   I presented a short program on our three-year project to compile a complete and accurate record of all known pictograph sites in Canoe Country.  As we were driving home from Madison, we talked about how we meet the nicest people in canoes!  While that is not exactly literally what I mean, since we were not in a canoe in Madison, we do mean that canoeing and related activities have introduced us to a group of really great people.

A number of years ago we flew into Atikokan on a float plane and were met by our friends from Canoe Canada Outfitters.  They shuttled us to our hotel room.  It was July 1.  We had planned to spend the rest of the day in Atikokan walking around, visiting, shopping and generally enjoying the small town canoeing atmosphere.  We did not know that July 1 is Canadian Independence Day and businesses would be closed.  We enjoyed being around the town anyway and have gone back a number of times since.  The next day, the folks from Canoe Canada dropped us off at the French Lake entry and we began our trip back to Prairie Portage.  We  looked for the remains of old log cabins, steam boat relics on beaches, and visited the Dore Lake pictograph site.  Nearby was the sunken steam boat in shallow water.   But the best part of the trip happened in Sturgeon Narrows. (more…)

When we were in Ely, summer of 2008, I had a conversation with Steve Piragis, owner of Piragis Northwoods Company and the Boundary Waters Catalog.  I was introducing him to our fledgling series of Northwoods Pictograph bulletins.  In the course of the conversation he asked me about the Island River Pictograph site.  During this same visit he had asked me about the South Hegman Lake Pictograph site.  His account with pictures of his trip to the South Hegman Lake site was printed in Boundary Waters News, their on-line newsletter, Fall of 2008.

In June of 2009, after a trip to Ely, I wrote Steve passing on information I had gathered based on some research and our visit to the Island River site.  In it I also included information about  the South Hegman site, and that information was included in my blog post on September 28, 2009.

In July of 2009, Steve reprinted the original article from the previous Fall and my letter to him about the two sites.  Following is the approximate text of part of that publication.  I have edited it slightly from what was published to try to clarify some of the points in my original writing.

I have several unanswered questions about this site: (more…)

For all of our readers who are associated with Boy Scout units headed to the Boundary Waters or Quetico based out of Charles Sommers, the Northern Tier Canoe Base, our Northwoods Pictograph bulletins are not currently stocked in the store there or in the outfitting department.  We wanted to let you know so that if you are traveling a route with pictograph sites, and you are interested in having your Scouts learn about pictograph sites and the related Ojibwa culture, you will need to pick up bulletins before arriving at the base.

You can order from our website, or if you want to save shipping charges, there are several outfitters close to Sommers who carry a complete stock of the bulletins.  You can check our “shop” pages or the “links” page for a list of those outfitters who stock our bulletins. (more…)