Collegebound

What an experience! This trip was the best way to start off my college career. You'd think that a week of not showering, having to "wash" dishes with dirty water and our hands, sleeping cramped up in tents with eight other girls, carrying canoes over land and rapids, and eating only dried foods would make for a tough week. Wrong!

We started off the week by taking a six hour bus ride up to the Boundary Waters. We took three mini busses and a bunch of vans, trucks, and cars to transport over sixty people. The bus ride was crowded and long, but in a way fun. It enabled us to meet new people and get to know them a little bit. My bus's suspension was bad, so we swayed as we drove down the road. Despite that, we had a loud and fun bus. We played a card game called Mafia, slept, ate, and just hung out. Six hours later, with only a couple of stops on the way, we pulled in the the BWCA campgrounds and set up camp for the night. Some of us went swimming while some of us cooked dinner. After dinner, we all had our first experience with "graywatering".

Graywatering is the way you clean dishes while you're on the trail. Since the Boundary Waters has a Leave No Trace policy, we could not wash our dishes with soap, wiping away all the remains from our meal. Instead, we had to use water and scrub our dishes with our forks, spoons, or hands, and then proceed to drink that water. Definitely not a good experience! As time went on however, we got smarter about cooking and using the least amount of messy stuff we could, so by the end of the trip graywatering wasn't so bad. The worst was when we had to clean out the big pot, but luckily we got smart and added hot chocolate mix to the water and it went down much easier.

Monday morning, we packed up our tents, grabbed life jackets, paddles, and canoes, and headed into the Boundary Waters. The next three days were spent paddling around in various lakes and enjoying the beautiful weather. We got a little lost every once in awhile, but for the most part we travelled steadily each day. We made sandwiches each morning and ate them on the "road" when we got hungry. In our group there were nine women and four canoes. By the end of the trip, all of us had learned how to steer our canoes as well as be look out in the front.

On our way to our first campsite, we happened upon a forest fire. We were curious, so we stopped on the island, used the latrine, checked out the fire, and went on our way. Unfortunately for us, the Water Patrol was out, and stopped us because they thought we had started the fire. They took down the names of our facilitators and got our story, which was that we had been watching the fire for close to two hours and didn't have any way to contact anyone about it. She then radioed the helicopter up above and we got front row seats while watching the helicopter pour water on the fire.

Shortly after that we hit our first campsite. We were all exhausted and sore, so we pitched our tents and went to work on dinner so we could get eating. After we ate, we sat around the campfire talking and laughing hysterically at anything and everything. I couldn't stay awake, and I ended up falling asleep against a tree and the girls had to wake me up so I could go to the tents.

The next morning, we started all over again. We portaged a ten rod portage that day, which was quite interesting. Luckily, we realized after the first canoe that the rest could be guided through a somewhat shallow spot, therefore avoiding the task of actually carrying them over land. After we portaged, we headed for the next one, and stopped at the last campsite before hitting it for the night. That night we were less sore, so it was a bit more enjoyable, but mainly the same as the night before.

On Wednesday morning, we set off for the the 48 rod portage. This one took some work. We had to carry four canoes, ten packs, a pack of food (that was HEAVY!!!), and our gear pack over land. It was exhausting, but we felt great when we made it over. Our goal was to make it through the lake we landed in, Alpine, into the next one, which was also the last one we would be in, Seagull, that night. That meant we had one more portage to do. Our choices were a 105 rod portage which no one was looking forward to after then 48 rod, or a 20 rod that was surrounded by rapids. Needless to say, we chose the shorter one. It was really cool. We once again didn't have to portage, but instead maneuvered our canoes through a set of three rapids. We all had to get out of our canoes and guide them through, which was terrifying but also very exciting. After we made it through those, we were on our last lake. We decided to go about half way across and spend the night so we didn't have much to do on Thursday. However, most of the groups had that idea, and we ended up going all the way to one of the last sites before the exit, on Fishhook Island.

We stayed on Fishhook and relaxed for two days, which was great. One of the guy groups got a little split up, so we played host to two of the guys from that group, one facilitator and one participant, during the days, which was actually really fun. They were great guys to hang out with and they really appreciated our cooking :o)

On Friday morning, we packed up, got back in our canoes, and headed for the exit. There, we met up with all the other groups and started taking canoes up. I carried a canoe on my back over half way back to the busses. I was so proud! It was really heavy, and I had to go uphill. I couldn't manage to get it all the way there, so one of the girls in my group took over. When we got back to the busses, we packed up and headed for Grand Marais for the night.

Grand Marais was very cool. It was a little touristy town on Lake Superior, and all of the Collegebound people shopped, ate, and hung out there, looking and smelling very bad I might add, until we set up camp for the night. After we set up, we had a pizza dinner together and hung out on the beach just talking for hours. Eventually we made it back to our tents and started going to bed. In the morning, the facilitators bought us cereal and donuts for breakfast, and we ate, packed up, and headed out.

Five hours later we finally pulled back into the St. John's parking lot and started cleaning up our gear. When we finally finished with that, we all headed back to our dorms to take our first showers in a week. Man, did that feel good! Around six the girls headed back to SJU to meet up with the guys for our bbq. It was a fun couple of hours eating, laughing, and comparing stories with everyone. Eventually, we went back to CSB, and five guys came with "us". "Us" being the girls in my group, by the way. We all went into St. Cloud to pick up breakfast food for the following morning and then went back to CSB to play games in the basement lounge of one of the dorms. It was a lot of fun.

As a kind of official ending to our Collegebound trip, the eleven girls in my group gathered at one of our facilitators' house and cooked up a big breakfast. We hung out there for over an hour, most of which was spent cooking the food!

Now that we're back, we all spend a lot of time together and I can tell that this group of people is going to be a very good group of friends.