I’ve been wanting to paddle the Cloquet River in northeast Minnesota for a few years now. I read “Wild Country…Still” in the Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine, which originally piqued my interest, and the more I researched the river, the better it sounded!

Looking at a map, the Cloquet River looks like a squiggle running roughly parallel to the north shore of Lake Superior, through a remote and undeveloped stretch of Minnesota’s Arrowhead Region. It offers stretches of whitewater paddling and primitive riverside campsites. I never really hear anyone in the Twin Cities talk about the Cloquet. The Boundary Waters and various wild rivers far north of the Canadian border are a common topic of conversation, but the Cloquet seemed like it was relatively unexplored territory, which struck me as odd, considering its closeness. That also made me want to check it out even more.

In his Guide to Minnesota Outdoors, Jim Umhoefer describes the Cloquet as “...one of the state’s most primitive canoe routes. Most of the river flows through the wild lands of the Cloquet Valley State Forest, inspiring a sense of isolation that explorers may have felt.”

As luck would have it, I came across a notice that the University of Minnesota at Duluth’s outdoors club (UMD RSOP) was running an overnight trip on the Cloquet. The trip was open to non-students, and I’d heard that the school had a great environmental education degree and outdoor recreation program, so I figured this would be a quick and easy way to test the waters of the Cloquet. I called my buddy, Jeff, to see what he was up to, and after a few minutes on the phone, he signed on—let the adventure begin!

Getting on the River—Almost