Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA): North America’s Canoe Country

Northwest of the Great Lakes, between Lake Superior and Lake of the Woods, lies a vast network of smaller lakes and streams – a region once famous as the water highway of the Voyageurs, whose birch bark canoes carried explorer, trader and trapper ever northward to such distant points as Athabasca, Great Slave Lake and the Arctic Ocean. In the heart of this wilderness lies the United States’ Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park. They join together at the international border to form an area of more than two million acres known as the Boundary Waters canoe country. This area has been designated as “primitive wilderness” and has been set aside to be preserved in all its primeval beauty.

The wilderness of the BWCA canoe country is the same today as it was in the days of the Voyageur, and when the Ojibway Indians hunted the Caribou here. It has not changed since the glaciers of the Ice Age carved the pattern of these rockbound lakes. The pictographs of the Ojibway can still be found.

Your Boundary Waters Canoe Trip Vacation In Ely Minnesota

Let Canadian Waters Inc. be your Boundary Waters Canoe Outfitter and your adventure will be unique! Its moods can change from day to day, moment to moment, and place to place: from the wild booming of Chatterton Falls to the cathedral calm of lakes such as Cairn and Keats, from laughing springs and streams to the thundering roar of Split Rock Falls, from the sanctuary of a quiet bay to the wind-whipped waves of a momentary squall – these are the moods of North America’s largest wilderness canoe country. If you seek seclusion you will find it here; away from the more traveled routes you seldom see mankind.