- [Narrator] Production funding for "Making It Up North" is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

(soft music) - I graduated from The University of Wisconsin at Madison with a mechanical engineering degree.

And right out of college, I went to work for a company and I was an engineer for them.

(soft music) They sent me to Birmingham, Alabama where I spent a few years.

And then I transferred to the Panhandle of Florida where I spent a few more years.

I wouldn't trade that experience for the whole world but it wasn't home to me.

I went from living in, in a little apartment right on the beach on the Gulf of Mexico, to now being on the other side of the country, at the Canadian border, at the end of this 60 mile dead end road, and then further from that, two miles down a river.

(laughs) We all want toast?

- [Daniel] Yes please.

- I had decided to quit my job in Florida.

And, initially I thought I would, I would come up and get an engineering job in Duluth right away.

And my dad said, well, "Why, you know "It's been a really long time "Since you've spent a bunch of time with me," and he pulled the card of, "If I could have spent this time with my dad, "I would have jumped at it."

And so, he had me.

(upbeat music) - [Daniel] We are at Birchwood Wilderness Camp.

- [Ashley] Birchwood Wilderness Camp is a summer camp for boys ages seven to 17 at the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota.

- [Daniel] You know, this place was in, it's been in the family since '68.

But the girls camp, my parents purchased in '58.

So, and camping goes way back.

It's in our blood.

When my parents passed away, my brother became the owner of both properties, the girls camp and the boys camp.

And it was difficult for him to continue to operate this camp.

And so, he was looking to figure out a different route.

- [Ashley] And then my uncle called saying, he was looking for buyers.

And, not to cue us or anything, just to let us know that the place we were living was potentially gonna be sold.

My dad was the one who said, "Hey, what if we bought the boys camp?"

And, I thought, "Well, that's an interesting idea "But I'm planning to go back to "An engineering career in Duluth in the spring."

And we'd only planned to be here for one winter.

- [Daniel] We had this huge house in Grand Rapids and, it wasn't really home anymore because everybody was gone that we built it for.

So we had just enough funds to help purchase this camp.

And that was when we finally said, "Well, I think this is a good thing for us to do."

- Yeah.

It was his harebrained idea to, (laughs) to buy the camp, and I went along with it, so here we are.

Best decision ever though.

- We both decided together that it's time to do something different.

And this has been in the family all of these years.

And we believe in, her grandfather, my father's dream and my mother.

This is what they wanna do is work with kids in the woods.

So, the timing just happened to be just right and everything fell into place.

- Can you sit?

Can you sit?

I am Ashley Bredemus, and I am owner slash director here at Birchwood Wilderness Camp.

And I also am a writer, photographer, blogger at thecabinseason.com.

(chuckles) So our property line is shared with the Boundary Waters.

So there's nobody that way, and nobody that way, just a neighbor that way.

And then, yeah, the rest of our camp is this way.

It's 66 acres.

So this is our sauna.

A lot of time spent in there.

(chuckles) Last summer we had a staff member who, always, was lighting the sauna.

Like, if you didn't know where he was, he was in the sauna.

And that sauna is called Dante's Inferno and so his camp nickname is Dante.

Everybody gets a camp nickname, mine is Penny, his is Stride and his is Uncle Dan.

- My name's Daniel Charles Bredemus.

And we're up on the Sea Gull River which is at the end of the Gunflint Trail which is a 60 mile dead end road out of Grand Marais.

And we're two miles from where we can park our car in the summer, and we have to come by boat.

Canada's about four miles away.

(soft music) - So we're gonna go to the right of that little cabin over there.

And then we'll go through the woods and up onto that big hill.

Which is our campfire rock where we have campfires every Saturday night.

In the summer.

(laughs) - [Daniel] Well the campfire rock that we use on the north end of the property was the place that my father first discovered, before he purchased this place.

He was bringing kids, before he owned a camp, up from Wausau, Wisconsin that were troubled kids.

His first stop, they'd leave from the landing and they'd have a lunch spot.

And he found that big rock and thought, "This is a great place for lunch "It overlooks the river."

So he kind of fell in love with that little spot.

And then, as I say, in '68 he purchased that piece of property and he started the first camp.

- First time I was at the campfire with campers was probably in 2010, when I helped my dad build the water slide.

That was the first time that I was actually part of the campfires here at boys camp.

- So we have counselors and campers come up and we all circle around the fire here in the middle of this rock.

And we share stories from trail and we sing songs, and we yell, and we scream and we play games.

- The rest of time kind of melts away and that you're just there with a campfire and friends.

And it's truly, like, the best thing.

It's my favorite part of camp and the program that we run here.

- So my first experience, I was never a camper here.

I came as a counselor back in 2016.

One of my good friends from college, he was the program director at the time, and he invited me up being like, "Hey, come up.

"We are looking for guides and for counselors "And I think you'd be a great fit."

So I came up, and learned a lot about myself, and about this great place.

And I kinda have been hooked ever since.

- [Ashley] So Victor, Victor is my fiance.

Actually, our one-year anniversary of engagement is coming up on February 1st.

He proposed to me on Romance Lake in the Boundary Waters.

- I was so nervous.

I barely could say anything.

I was, "Will you marry me?"

And then yeah, it was, I was nervous.

I knew she was gonna say yes, but I was still nervous - I was very surprised.

So he did such a good job and it was everything a girl could ever dream of or, well I could ever dream of anyways.

But, yeah.

Yeah, probably take some photos here.

Hey, Arlo, Arlo, come on.

(Ashley whistles) When I moved here just to spend the winter here with my dad, I had family that was, I hate to say worried about my survival, but they had a lot of questions.

And so I thought, "You know what, I'll start a blog.

"And I'll just, you know, write about "What it's like to live here."

And then it just gained a lot of interest.

Sharing that much of my life online, it may seem that I share a lot but I have very strong boundaries around that.

So just like with anybody's social media, they're showing you what they want you to see.

So, I feel like I'm not sharing much of my life because Arlo, my dog, is kind of the, I'm just her hair and makeup team really.

She's the star, so I'm pretty comfortable taking the backseat to her.

(laughs) (Ashley and Arlo howl) (laughs) Good job, good girl.

Micro-influencer.

I kinda like that title.

People really are bothered by the word influencer but I think that's a really, it's a lot of responsibility.

And I value that platform that I have.

Now, I'm working with brands like Coleman in a way that I feel aligned with.

They're really trying to make the outdoors more inclusive and bring more awareness to environmental issues.

And it really, at the core, the companies that I work with, care about connecting people with the outdoors, in hopes to better both of them.

(gentle music) My blog has gone through several changes in direction.

And what I really wanna write about and what my motto is, is rediscovering what it means to be an outdoors woman.

My answer to redefining what it means to be an outdoors woman is, or outdoors man, is your connection with the outdoors.

That's really what I think it means to be a person of the outdoors is the quality of your connection with nature.

And you can do that by sitting on a dock dangling your toes in the water, you can do that by scaling a mountain, you can do that by car camping.

you can do that by coming to summer camp or yoga retreat or gardening.

There's so many different ways and it's really personal.

And I would just want to invite more people, women in particular, to discover that for themselves.

I think it can be confusing to people when they see I run a boys camp but yet I have a blog about women in the outdoors, and those are really two groups, kids and women, that I really have a special spot in my heart for and helping get them in the outdoors.

So, I mean, those are two sides of the same coin to me, but the cabin season, I'm hoping, what I'd like it to turn into is, is my year-round platform for connecting with women.

And then in the summer, it is a vehicle to get women here for wellness retreats, or just getting more women here.

Now watch your step, it's slippery.

But this is a yoga deck slash arts and crafts space, slash our outdoor dining space.

We built this, this summer.

It's this big platform in this boreal forest overlooking the Boundary Waters.

So, it's a really special and fun place for all in camp to use.

- [Daniel] The yoga deck, basically is Ashley's idea.

And it came from her work with yoga and her training in yoga in Florida, where she lived.

So, we decided to build that deck and with the idea that, that can be multipurpose for a lot of things.

But, and we did have one group here at the end of last summer.

And they, women, and they just had a fantastic time.

They thought this was the coolest place in the world.

- This is all still from our yoga retreat we had last year.

Some of drawings and messages.

I mentioned a lot of projects that we work on in the winter.

This is one of them, obviously, this deck is torn apart.

We're rebuilding it.

But this is the stage, in the summer, where everybody performs their skits and we have a lot of fun.

My dad and Victor are, oftentimes, outside working on maintenance projects or improvement projects.

- Victor and I are adding a deck on the front of one of the older cabins, and we have to build a little landing.

No, we can't let winter stop us from some things.

And unlike most places where you have to dig footings, well, we don't have to dig footings because you can't dig footings.

So we scrape the snow away.

And then a person, when everything does melt, you have to relevel things.

So as long as it's not 20 below, we just keep marching forward.

(Daniel scrapes snow) - He loves to build those things.

He loves to dream and see those things.

And he also loves to test those things.

He's the big dreamer of our group and he likes to push the limits of what we can do here.

- Wooh,hoo!

- Watch out.

(soft music) - So my dad is totally Peter Pan and this is Neverland.

And my mom, (Ashley sighs) so my mom passed away in 2013 from breast and lung cancer.

And she, she'd been fighting cancer since I was like five years old.

So most of my conscious life, anyways, my recollection she was always this fighter, that was, oh gosh, like, what do I, what did I always say?

She's like snow white with an attitude, kind of.

She's this fiery snow white who loves animals.

And that's where I get my love for animals is from her.

But she, you know the cabin that we're in right now she lived in, when she was my age with my dad.

And there's actually a great picture of her sitting on the front steps of this cabin, that I recreated and then put side-by-side, which is kind of fun.

So it's really special to be living in this cabin where she spent so much time.

(keypad clicking) This is from my blog post that I wrote when the pandemic was really kicking up.

And it's titled, "Seven Uncommon Cures for Cabin Fever."

The Escape Friend is one person you've designated to be your safe zone when cabin fever is getting the best of you.

Mine is my neighbor Cassidy at Voyageur Canoe Outfitters.

- It's really important for me personally to have a female up here cause you know this area is predominantly male.

So that's important for me for sure.

Okay, include email address to have in file - (Matt) okay.

- I'm Cassidy, I'm the general manager, so I run day-to-day operations, answer a lot of phone calls like all day, every day.

When Matt and I first moved up here, I think for the first three winters we were on our own.

It was like very different for us, it was kind of like culture shock.

- It is a remote lifestyle.

It is unique.

It is different.

I think an example I use often is, when you go to the hardware store, instead of getting one box of screws, you get three, you know.

So there's little things that you don't think about.

- We got really into, you know like snowshoeing, ice fishing, walking around is like one of our fun things to do.

Then once they moved up it was just like, "Oh my gosh, we have people, "Like we can walk across and have dinner."

Which is, seems simple, but it's a big deal, you know?

To sit and have a conversation over dinner and just cook with your friends and, yeah, so it's really important for us, now that we have it, I definitely don't ever want to live without it.

- You know, when you say out loud that you're 55 miles or 60 miles from town, I think that scares a lot of people.

Cause you can't run to the grocery store, you can't run to the gas station.

But using each other and the neighbors and the community is kind of how we stay afloat.

- People often ask "What's the hardest thing "About living up here?"

And, so many people think that my answer would be, Not having the social life of a normal 28 year old living in a city.

I'm really well equipped to have this lifestyle.

I'm super introverted.

And I, I like this lifestyle but it is so nice to have some friends right across the river that, that wanna go winter camping, that wanna go hiking, that wanna have a campfire when it's like five degrees outside.

It's nice to have those built-in friends here.

(gentle music) - I feel like at a young age the woods kind of changes people.

Like I see people come back with more life and they kind of experience what the wilderness has to offer them.

And a wilderness means a lot of things for tour, a lot of different people.

But the overall experience to me is, you work hard and you get to see marvelous things that you'd never see back in your home.

I think those two things really, kinda shine bright in people's lives.

- One of my dad's mottos I guess, was lifelong skills.

A kid can learn to play basketball and can play basketball maybe in high school, maybe make the team, but then, they're not too many 50, 60 year old men out there shooting hoops, might be, but you teach a kid how to canoe and backpack, and it's a lifelong skill that we can share with our children and our grandchildren.

- You guys, this is a 10.

I don't know, this is a nice fire.

The reason you come to camp, and my dad talked a lot about life skills, and the reason why I think those life skills are so important is because of the things you learn about yourself, through attaining those life skills.

So at the girls camp, sailing was my thing, right?

And yeah, I learned how to tie a bowline that I use on a daily basis here.

But I also learned, a lot of confidence in myself and there's a lot of soft skills that you learn in the wilderness experience.

So I think that's why you come to camp is to learn so much about yourself and then connect with other people.

You have lifelong friends, when you go to camp.

(Ashley mumbles) ♪ There's a wind and the rain ♪ ♪ And the fathers ♪ Well, that's it.

Thank you.

- I'd like to see us grow, as far as numbers of people that come in and out of the camp, but I wanna see us grow and see much more diversity coming in at the camp, which is a big thing for us.

- That's one of my biggest goals within the next five years here is to develop a nonprofit so that we can provide scholarships to Bayport kids in particular.

- I wanna see kids from all sorts of backgrounds, come visit us and visit the woods.

I think that's a really important thing to do.

- There's nobody in the camping business that I'm aware of, that's made millions of dollars.

It's a matter of, this is something I love and it's something I believe in and it's worth preserving.

And so that's why we do it.

- I didn't expect to be here as long as I have, but this is definitely a place where I see myself being forever.

- It's just one of those things that it seems like life pushes you into and it was meant to be.

(upbeat music) - It can be so quiet in the winter here sometimes.

One second.

Oh, that's my dad.

Can you hear that drill?

- [Man] Your dad is burning something.

As we're talking about the quiet and you can hear my dad drilling.

(chuckles) (upbeat music)