Photos From the Boundary Waters

Back in spring of 2023, I was planning my 2024 schedule and imagined that if I stuffed my summer full of photo workshops that I’d leave my fall open for adventures. I got covid in February and had issues since then, so my fall has been sort of rewritten. I don’t have the fitness that I should have because I didn’t/couldn’t train all summer. But I’m crossing my fingers that I have this figured out.

At any rate, we managed to squeeze a trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which is the most popular designated wilderness area in the country. It’s about 1.1 million acres and has over 1,000 lakes and 2,000 campsites. A typical trip for me to the Boundary Waters looks like this: we paddle into an entry point, we portage and paddle across many lakes until we get deep into the Boundary Waters, then we camp. The next morning we take down camp and paddle and portage until we find the next campsite that we like.

Sidebar note: I’m going to talk a bit about workshops at the end, and I’ll give a bit of advice about websites for anyone starting out.

This year was different. Because of my health, I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to handle paddling and portaging over and over. We decided to take an easy and basecamp for four days. From our camp, we’d explore a few nearby lakes that we hadn’t ever been to before. The plan worked out, especially after we scored one of the two best campsites on the entire lake. The other one that we wanted was taken by the time we got there. It has better sunrises, but this one worked out just fine.

It worked out fine because I’ve always wanted to hike to this overlook and I finally had a chance to do it. I visited that island and I believe we camped on it during my first Boundary Waters trip. My first Boundary Waters trip was the weekend after 9/11 happened.

We ran into a group coming out and they hadn’t heard the news. They had one more night, so we decided not to tell them. We felt that would give them one more night of not knowing how the world had changed. I do wonder what they thought about all the fighters flying the border.

After all these years, it was really cool to see this lake from an overlook!

The campsite we had was pretty amazing. It featured a huge rock slab as a front door. Here’s a photo of me doing a goofy pose during one sunrise and then another sunrise from the next day without me.

We had mainly great weather, and we caught fish. We also visited three lakes that I’ve never been on before. I also shot the following photo of my canoe and a huge rock that I tied a painter around.

Of course, maybe it only looks huge in the photos because I put a wide angle lens on my camera and shot very close to the rock. The rock was small enough to easily move around.

Photography can distort the world in ways that makes an illusion that the viewer will believe as real. But unlike AI generated imagery, photography is of this world. It happens in the world. It happens when a person interacts with the world with a camera. If you haven’t read my newsletter about The Death of the Photographic Illusion, maybe you should.

Here’s a different shot with the rock looking more like it did to my eyes — but remember the camera doesn’t see in the same way as your eyes do.

If you know me, you know that I’m a sucker for canoe photos at sunrise and sunset, and we had an amazing one. Although this campsite didn’t have a direct view of the sunset, the sky still provided enough color for a few stunning shots. All three of us watched this sunset in amazement.

After the sunset, my family went to bed and I stayed up and read in the hammock. Here’s something that I later wrote that doesn’t really capture the moment as I experienced it, but I tried to write it down.

Last night in the Boundary Waters I watched the moon rise and glow reddish in the sky while I laid in the hammock.

By headlight, I was reading about the 8th-century Chinese zen master teacher Mazu Daoyi. I read something he said in translation and began to wonder at Stephen Batchelor's commentary, and at life and at the lake, the birds, the crickets, the slight swing of the hammock.

Someone had asked him, "What is the meaning of Buddhism?" Mazu Daoyi answered, "What is the meaning of this moment?"

And for an indeterminate amount of time, I just wondered at it all asking as the Batchelor wrote, "What is this?" I didn't answer but listened and looked in child-like amazement as the feeling of humor, detachment, and joy accompanied the "What is this?"

I didn't know and in that moment it didn't matter.

And then there was the moon. It was the funniest thing that I had ever seen.

For a few moments, I captured a bit of what looks like joy and wonder that you see in Buddhist monks. I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that way before, but it was wild. I experienced it again the next day for a brief period of time.

The Boundary Waters is like that. It’s such a special place that it changes you. Even if you’ve been there a hundred times, it’ll just sneak up behind you and change your life again.

And then there was this tree.

I mean, THAT tree. It doesn’t get better than that.

Until next time

Before I sign off, I do want to give a word of advice. I’ve been running my own photography website for over 20 years, and it was starting to get slow, and I got sick of managing all the shopping carts, credit card connections, and everything else that comes with running an online store.

Twenty years seems like enough time for me to do all that work, so I’ve decided to offload my ticketing to workshops to a third party. If you sign up for one of my 2025 photo workshops, you’ll be one of the first people to use the new system. It comes highly recommended and should make my life so much easier when it comes to managing the backend of running photography workshops. I still have some tweaks to make. I had to learn their API and am writing a plug-in so I can display remaining spaces on my website. That’s been like pulling teeth, but it should be done next week. If you have time, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the new system. I’d especially love this if you have registered before.

Next up is moving all my eBooks, etc. to another third party website. I’m looking at one that handles the sales and sales tax for me.

This last week has been nothing but sitting in front of my monitors, looking through databases to clean them, sorting through issues, moving products, and doing general cleanup. But it really needed to get done, and I’m hoping it makes my life easier.

Here’s my advice. Every time that I’ve given up control on the backend and started using a service, I’ve been happy. When I switched to SmugMug (I get a commission if you shop from my SmugMug link) for my print sales, it increased sales and reduced my workload to almost nothing. When I switched my newsletter off my website to Substack, it made writing easier, and I don’t have to manage subscriptions because they handle it. Before you try to tackle everything yourself, consider using a service instead of running your own website, newsletter, print shop or whatever else it is. When someone else is running all the updates, database stuff, sales, sales taxes, and on and on, it makes running the business easier and frees you up for what you like to do.

For me, that taking photos and writing and making cool stuff.

That’s it for me. Thanks again for coming along for the ride (or paddling in this case). I’ll see you again in two weeks.

p.s. I’m thinking about turning on subscriptions here soon. I’m not sure if that will mean bonus letters for subscribers or if it will just be a way that you can support my writing. After I get my website stuff sorted, I’ll make that decision.

Also, it’s late on Saturday night and I’m heading to bed. This newsletter is bound to have more grammar and spelling mistakes than usual.