citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

[music playing] PAUL LAJEUNESSE: The trail systems of northern Minnesota are a source of identity and pride for many people in the arrowhead region.

This diverse and impressive network of trails is alive and teeming with activity year round and is a destination for local, national, and international outdoor enthusiasts.

The recreational trails that we have today can be traced back to economies that shape the north lands from native trade routes to the French fur trappers, the timber industry, and the iron mines.

These industries laid the foundation for and has quickly become one of the nation's premier recreational trails systems.

Hi, I'm Paul Lajeunesse.

I'm an Assistant Professor of Art at the College of Saint Scholastica here in Duluth, Minnesota.

My life as a professional artist and academic has taken me from St. Louis, Missouri to Ohio, Oregon, Georgia, Tennessee.

I've lived in France and in Iceland, and I'm now able to call Minnesota my home.

Join me as I go on an adventure and explore the Mesabi and Gun Flint trails.

My name's George.

I'm going to be your conductor on today's trolley.

And up front is our motor man, Jim.

So say hi to Jim.

He's going to take us down the tracks today.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: Hi, Jim.

ARDY NURVAWILBERG: The Mesabi trail's and incredible asset.

It's an incredible resource for this area.

If you know any of the history of the Iron Range, we have a history of boom and bust.

Tourism is one of the constants that we can depend on here on the Iron Range.

The arrowhead of Minnesota and the Gun Flint trail's pretty special, pretty unique area.

There's nothing like it.

MAN: People are a little nuts, you know.

When I got retired and said I was moving to northern Minnesota, they said, no, you're going-- you should go to Arizona.

WOMAN: We're just average working class, and it's never been-- WOMAN: Glad you pointed that out.

They wouldn't have know that.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: How many miles can you get on one tank?

MAN: Some of those machines are pushing 200.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: Good Lord.

WOMAN: I am not a handy man, but I had to be.

And mother was the brains, and I was brawn.

And that was such as it was, so there wasn't a lot of brawn.

LEE JOHNSON: My title's a forest archeologist, which is one of those rare occurrences where an an anthropology major actually has gainful employment.

PETE PELLINEN: Gang, this was the first mine in the state.

And as I mentioned to you all before, over 80% of all domestic iron ore production comes from Minnesota.

It's our culture.

It's our economy.

It's what we do.

You're welcome.

We have a very tight schedule that we need to maintain based on the movements of that hoist.

So when it's leaving so are we.

When we are done in here, we're going out to that head frame.

We're going to get into a cage, not an elevator, a cage, and be lowered just over 2,300 feet.

That's almost 1/2 mile.

The ride down is noisy.

It's bumpy.

It's shaky.

It's authentic.

It's very safe.

Backs to the back wall, gang.

Face the front.

Everybody doing OK?

Yeah.

PETE PELLINEN: I'm good enough.

Thank you, sir.

Gang, that's a little bit below, so step up and come on out.

Follow me.

How many in your group, sir?

With drills and explosives, we worked our way out to this point.

We came up this 25, 26 feet, and we slice in all directions until we run into something that is not iron ore.

The ore that we are after, gang, is this sparkly gun metal blue stuff above me.

A lot of people think iron ore is red, and some of it is.

And the red that you see right there is the result of the drilling and blasting process, and maybe I'm already going too far for some of you.

If you ever owned a mid 70s Ford vehicle, you already know all about that.

Yep.

The white too is corrosion leftover from the blasting.

If not you, who?

Who were the men who mined this ore?

That made the steel, that makes the steel, that makes everything else you've got.

They were immigrants.

In 1905, 80% of our workforce was foreign born, immigrants.

Where would we be, gang?

What if we were treating them the way we do today?

I can tell you that my father and most of these fathers did not want their kids working in the mines.

My dad would be very disappointed to find me still working in a mine.

When I was leaving the taconite industry, I had to write it to him, because his hearing stayed in the bottom of the spruce mine under Eveleth Minnesota.

And all he had to say was, well, it's about time.

It's education.

That's what they are pushing for us.

OK, we're ready.

Watch your step coming up, gang.

Once you're clear, take those hands off, crank them all the way wide open for us please.

Leave them upside down on the long counter in the hat room.

And if you would, point those hats west.

The only solution is to figure out how to do it without those negative environmental impacts, because we're not going to stop mining.

That's proven.

It almost seems like it's ratcheting up with the way the technologies are changing and-- The demand.

--the ubiquetiousness picture of it.

Every other month you're going to hear some government, whether it's regional, local, or beyond say, well, we need to crease the amount of renewable energy that we can provide by x percentage points.

That requires all of these metals that they're talking about right now.

And we have to be cognizant of the fact that within 20 miles of where we're shooting this right now, we contribute to three of the major watersheds for this continent.

Our water's going to Hudson's Bay.

Right over there it's down the Great Lakes.

And right over there, right on the far side of those gray hills, which are all taconite dumps, it's going down the Mississippi.

Right.

Of course.

We don't want to send something to somebody else that they wouldn't want to get.

Hello, how are you doing?

Hi, good.

Good.

Well, welcome to the Minnesota Discovery Center's trolley.

You have the honor of riding the last one o'clock trolley for the season.

The Discovery Center exists to interpret Minnesota's Iron Range in an economic way, political way, social, historical.

GEORGE SLETTA: Now we're going down into the Pillsbury Mine.

The Pillsbury Mine was established and started chipping iron ore in 1898, and it was owned by John Pillsbury.

Now John Pillsbury was the same Pillsbury from Pillsbury Baking and the governor of Minnesota for three terms, as I understand.

We had a very unique situation up here on the Iron Range, and that was that we had iron ore that was plentiful and relatively easy to mine on the Mesabi Range that was discovered in the late 1800s.

And the mines were actually discovered and operating before Minnesota had built any roads up here.

There was two trails up here, one from Duluth called Vermilion Trail that went up to Lake Vermilion and one that went east and west called the Mesabi Trail.

And these were pretty nasty mud trails.

The equipment that you see surrounding that water tower is 1950s era natural iron ore mining equipment, which is much smaller than the taconite mining equipment we use today.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: When you get into these spaces, you really think about the conditions.

And inside of this small chamber, it's completely filled with a motor.

And you just have to imagine what it would be like to operate this thing all day and how these people must not be able to hear after a couple of years.

You really start to sympathize with the people of these working conditions in order to just even get this raw material out of here.

It's also not much space.

The housing inside of these machines, I'm sure inside of the mines, there's a-- I just get a real sense of claustrophobia about being in any of this stuff or I would-- I think I would, kind of, lose my mind.

People are tough, though.

They stick it out.

You're an immigrant from another country, and you need to feed your family so you just-- you just suck it up and do it.

You move across the world to this.

You just have to make it work.

GEORGE SLETTA: Well, of course, and they were promised a lot of things when they were moved over here that didn't take place.

The streets were paved with gold and, whoops, it wasn't quite that way at all.

Because they figured they'd come over here and make fortune and then go back to the old country, you know.

But it didn't work out that way.

Get over here and shove you down in a hole.

Go down there.

Yeah, really, and you had to buy all your own equipment to even ride down to the dynamite.

Where am I going to go?

What would-- I would start right around the corner here.

And so there were strikes in 1907 and 1916.

GARY KAUNONEN: It was to some extent segregated, and that's the way the mining companies liked it.

Because then you could put people from different races or ethnicities on the same crew, and they couldn't talk to one another.

So they couldn't do things like union organizing.

Now as a labor historian, I've studied a lot of the immigration patterns but also the way that immigrants were treated, especially in the workplace.

And it was a difficult, difficult life on the Iron Range.

There were a lot of deaths.

In 1906 alone, there were over 100 people that died in area mines.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: Wow.

Wow.

A lot of kids, a lot of 18 to 23-year-olds.

PAMELA BRUNFEL: The immigrants here were not expensive.

They were interchangeable parts in an industrial machine.

And until World War I, they could just be replaced by the next ones who came in off the boat.

After World War I, that all changed.

Especially during the war, that immigration pipeline was shut off.

And so suddenly they were more valuable.

The first strike on the Mesabi took place in 1987, and they lost that one but they put up the fight.

1916 was a different story.

They worked together across ethnic lines.

It was the beginning of the notion that the people up here were fighting the same battles.

GARY KAUNONEN: The '16 strike was really unique, because it pitted organized labor through the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World, against the largest corporation in the United States of America at that time.

And it was the first billion dollar, 1901, billion corporation, United States Steel.

And so you had this group of immigrants organized by the IWW taking on the largest corporation.

And for a time in 1916, they were winning.

And it was a fiercely pitched battle.

And because I'm a historian and maybe a little bit of romantic in some senses, one of my favorite parts of the Mesabi Trail is when I bike around the St. James Mine Pit in Aurora, because that is where the 1916 strike started.

And so you can bike around that pit today and know that there was a gentleman by the name of Joe Greeny who walked out of that mine, laid down his tools, and started the 1916 strike.

I mean, that's the type of history that exists on the Mesabi Trail.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: Agitator.

The immigrant population that came here and worked in these, kind of-- these extraordinarily difficult conditions, I keep thinking about what winter was like, limited light, a lot of snow, a lot of ice.

And the native population had been here for many, many years prior to that.

And so you really makes me think about getting out of that European eurocentric mindset of what life was like here.

People were navigating the difficult weather and living conditions for centuries prior to that.

The history as far as a written record goes up here is fairly short, right.

I mean, you have some of the first accounts of this area coming out in written history from French explorers like La V rendrye in the 1730s, 1740s, right.

But if you look at history from a different angle, whether it be from Ojibwe oral history or from archeology, the history is deep here, right.

And it does go back to we have evidence of folks utilizing Northeastern Minnesota 10,000, 10,500 years ago, right.

So right on the heels of the retreat of the last glacial advance, we have people using resources and living on the landscape up here.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: Would this be referencing wild rice.

You have the land, the water.

We have the ducks.

Net Lake, like I said, is our wild rice lake.

I'm Zoongwee Lesik, Martha Anderson.

I'm the visitor services manager here.

We usually start off with talking about our Ojibwe migration.

It picks a sacred journey that drew the original Ojibwe people from their home on the Atlantic seaboard through the Great Lakes to the forest in the Northeastern Minnesota.

The story in the east coast is that an individual, an elder, a spiritual advisor received a vision where he was told to gather everyone who would come and move westward looking for the food that grows on water or manomin, wild rice.

MARTHA ANDERSON: With this red line, It's kind of showing the roads that they traveled, and this journey it took over like 500 years.

These are stopping places along the way, all these little turtle-shaped island, Niagara Falls, Detroit River, Manitoulin Island.

So we had seven stopping places along way here.

Our Bois Forte history and our culture needs to be passed on down to our younger generations.

And the reason why we do that is so that they can carry that on down.

This part of our museum as we're getting into the dark era, this is where families start getting torn apart.

Young children are being forcibly taken from their families, their mothers or fathers.

The whole goal of it is to colonize.

They want us to be like them.

A lot did happen in the boarding schools.

A lot of our people suffered hard.

There's just been different ways of discipline, abuse with a lot of stuff that's happened to them, which actually kind of even runs down into the generations now.

How does that term goal?

It takes a village to raise a child.

Yeah.

So that's the way we are.

We have our young ones always growing up with the grandparents.

The grandparents are teaching that culture and that history and our traditional ways.

Everybody in the community, kind of, helped each other raise children and take care of each other.

I always, kind of, like to think that they were tight knit communities.

PAUL LAJEUNESSE: Right.

Do you feel like this museum helped get you connected in your community a little bit more deeply?

I do.

It's for everybody.

It's for everybody.

I mean, it's been wonderful to be a guest here and get this private tour of this space is outstanding.

ARDY NURVAWILBERG: On the Iron Range, we sometimes have a little bit of a provincial attitude, because we've got all these little towns.

The one thing that's special and unique about the Mesabi trail is it's strings everybody together.

So when we're-- right now we have about 135 miles complete.

When totally done, it'll be 155 miles.

And at that point, we will string together 28 little communities from Grand Rapids to Eely from the Mississippi to the Boundary Waters.

And to be able to travel that whole trail, you actually pass through a lot of these little communities.

So it brings resources, tourism dollars to those little communities.

But it also makes people aware of the Iron Range and all of our wonderful little communities.

The actual trail that exists today that we know as the Mesabi trail really began in 1986.

Any public lands that fall under mining activities and includes fall out from their smokestacks, dust fall out falls within a certain radius of public use.

At the time, it looked like a big venture, 132 miles in length.

A major long segment of the Mesabi trail in place, which would then be the attraction, the gravitational pull for getting people coming in from, lord knows where they may come from.

James Oberstar was probably a key link in that, because he liked to bike.

Jim was a avid, I would almost say a rabid cyclist.

Oh, my god, he loved to bike.

And anybody who knew him knew how much he liked to bike.

And even in his elder years, I know a lot of people who couldn't even keep up with him once he got out there on his bike.

MAN: He was long and respected in the US Congress.

And so he could get things done, both on a national level and locally.

And his love for biking really gave the movement to establish a trail some steam.

WOMAN: It was kind of the brainchild of another gal.

Her name was Liz Prebich.

Liz was a county commissioner.

She passed away, unfortunately, at a very young age.

But she and Jim, this was kind of their passion, their idea.

You know, so it's really fun for those of us who have involved with the trail for a while to think back to those folks, who are part of our legacy, for those folks who helped build this crazy thing.

NARRATOR: In the 1980s, there was a movement to put old railroads and railroad grades back to use, converting them into trails for the public.

MAN: They were trying to find a way to make them viable again.

They knew the trains weren't coming back, so we have to do something with them.

There's this infrastructure there, and we're not using it, how do we take it and make it a new economic driver?

MAN: It was up to us to kind of figure out well, how do we get community A and B connected, again going back to the old rail corridors that existed at one time.

A real hodgepodge, these corridors that we kind of gathered together.

And we could get close to a community sometime, but like not through it.

That's where the Mesabi Trail's a little bit different.

We wanted to bring it into the communities, the points of interest, lakes, streams, ponds, creeks, and so forth.

So it worked well, where we can be on a railroad grade for a while, and then we'd get off of it for a while, and then back on one, then off of one.

So it's about a 50/50 mix.

WOMAN: Mesabi Trail is not flat and straight.

I like to tell some of our visitors, it has a lot of topography.

MAN: Mesabi Trail infuses history by signage.

In many places, there's some interpretive signage that goes along the trail.

There's also the opportunity to stop and talk to people.

And that's probably one of the best resources for the Mesabi Trail.

You don't have to be blazing through it.

It's nice to stop and smell the proverbial roses.

But more likely, maybe some pasties or something like that.

So we're at Carlson's Pasties in Biwabik, Minnesota, where I'm going to have a traditional pastie that has, potatoes, carrots, onions, beef, pork, and salt, and rutabaga.

Now the history of this food, it's Welsh and English-- Welsh, I believe, in its origin.

And it's miners' food.

And they would carry it in their pocket along down into the mine.

And would use the crust as kind of a handle.

This one's a little bit lighter weight.

Well, this is definitely a very hearty meal and easy to eat.

It's delicious, so it'll keep you going all day long.

MAN: It's really a sensory experience in many ways that is unlike anywhere else in Minnesota.

It's nice that the trail is going to hopefully keep you thriving, right?

MICHAEL PRIEST: Well, I like to keep people outside instead of playing computer games.

NARRATOR: Let's look at some stuff.

I need-- I know what I want.

MICHAEL PRIEST: I mean, we're kind of lucky, compared to living in Chicago.

You got to drive two hours to get out of town.

I had the experience.

I lived in Atlanta, Georgia.

And my favorite things to do were two hours away.

MAN: It gets people walking.

It gives people biking.

It's an economic driver for many of the communities.

[music playing] NARRATOR: So in exploring the Mesabi Trail and understanding the importance of bicycling on that trail, and coming to the Mesabi area during the winter, and you find these fat tire bikes, these insanely big tires, that are designed to drive over ice and snow.

And they are highly effective tools for this job.

And that's one of these inventions that kind of fits the landscape.

Really fascinating, so we're going to give it a try.

[music playing] Whoo.

It's currently minus 5.

It is not going to get warmer.

So you really have to bundle up.

And I'm not the only one out there.

This is what these people do up here all winter long.

And so you really understand the kind of relationship with the land.

And cold doesn't stop here.

So they find a lot of fun things to do all year long.

And on the Mesabi Trails, it's bicycling year round.

[music playing] MAN: As an avid rider of the Mesabi Trail, I reap the benefit of all the people who have come before.

And the people that built the railroad grades, but also the people that maintain them now.

WOMAN: The passion that people have for the trail, for showing people a good time, making sure they come up here, and they're having fun, and they're safe.

They're out there on their bikes with their families.

I don't know, it's a community.

You know, we've created a community around this trail.

MAN: Trails are emblematic in that some of them started off as footpaths.

Some of them then became inter-urban, and street car, and then railcar that were hauling thousands of metric tons of iron ore. And now there are bikers and people who are walking on the trail again.

It's really kind of come full circle.

And it's done that in 200 to 300 years.

MAN: Trails, generally people refer to terrestrial trails, places where you're walking across the landscape.

And you know, long before Europeans arrived here, trails criss-crossed this land.

MARTHA MARNOCHA: This is the museum for the Cook County Historical Society.

And this used to be the light keeper's house.

So everything came here by boat-- pianos, livestock, visitors, mail.

It was super busy.

We even had some shipwrecks in the harbor here.

So it's a really rich Maritime history here.

WOMAN: The first people that started arriving in the Grand Marais area was probably around the 18-- late 1800s.

There were mining interests.

There was the lumber.

Because you had cities being built.

And who was going to supply them with all their lumber?

Well, this was one of the areas, with all the white pine forests.

So you had people coming here to economically benefit from the land.

And then you had people looking to settle, which here, were primarily Scandinavians.

MAN: I think you still get this sense of the wildness of it.

I think you still get some of the sense of it as a frontier, almost, right?

And certainly, that's how the Gunflint Trail really originated in the 19th century, you know, it was a frontier.

It was a place where people in Duluth were hearing about the silver mines opening north of there in Canada, along White Fish Lake, and the big haul of silver coming off Silver Islet by Thunder Bay.

And people were coming up there thinking that this was going to be the payout.

There was a lot of exploration.

This whole area has been, every inch of it, you think it's pristine wilderness, well, every inch of it has been traversed by somebody looking for minerals.

MAN: The early Gunflint Trail was called Mayhew's Road or the Rove Lake Road.

Mayhew, who had a post, a fur trade post, trading post that he was operating on Rove Lake by the early 1870s, mid-1870s.

And he improved that, you know, that road.

And again, by road, you're probably just talking about a place where you could maybe, you know, probably not even get a wagon up.

It was a pack road, a tote road.

I think the name Gunflint Trail stimulates some thought of this must be something special.

It has an appeal of pioneers.

I think that's got to be a reason for people wanting to come up here and find out what this is all about.

MAN: When I was a kid, I remember doing a road trip up there with my parents.

And the concept of getting to the end of a road was not something that was in my mind, right?

Like that you can drive and the road stops.

I remember being like 10 years old and asking my dad, I was like, well, why doesn't the road keep going?

And he's like, hey, this is the end of the road.

FRED SMITH: It's kind of interesting that people will drive 57 miles to get up here to find this place, you know.

It's become a destination, more than just a place to go fishing.

And we're right in this little bay here of Saganaga Lake.

And Grand Portage is-- Way-- Oh, way over east.

Over in this-- Yeah, I mean, because they tried to do the iron ore, and unfortunately that did not work.

They didn't have good test quality or the knowledge.

I would say fortunately it didn't work out.

Right, exactly.

Because right now, you have something very unique, just even the drive up in here.

Like this doesn't look like any place I've ever been.

FRED SMITH: Our entire purpose was to tell the cultural and natural history of the Gunflint Trail.

The largest mammal that you're going to find in this building.

And you have to pretty much be standing underneath it in order to find it.

The first resort was log and it was built out by the main gate.

And that would've been in 1931.

And then after a couple of years, then they decided, no, maybe we should move the lodge closer to the water.

The owners were unpacking the dishes and getting ready for the guests to come.

The dog came in, knocked over the oil lamp and burnt it down to the ground.

So then, they decided, OK, we need to be resourceful.

And that was Art and Ed Numstead, the father and son.

During the depression time, they thought, how can we rebuild?

So then they collected all the stone for this building from this area, got some local out of work stonemasons to come up Grand Marais and build the structure that we have today.

NARRATOR: I mean, just don't really know about and hear much about trapping as a viable means of income, past the Industrial Revolution.

And it's interesting, so resorts, trapping.

WOMAN: The owners, actually the resorts in the wintertime, that's how they were to sustain once-- you know, if the resort was closed, they needed a way to have their money.

And so a lot of them would go out and trap.

Some of the commercials were shot here on property.

So this is right out front here.

That's Sasha the Bear.

And that is Earl Hammond.

And in order for the canoe to stay flat like this, there was reports that he put cement sacks underneath Earl's seat to keep the canoe level.

Because otherwise, Sasha, I guess, was like a 200 or 300 pound grizzly bear.

And in 2007, there was nine members of the Gunflint Trail Historic Society that were looking for property, said hey maybe we could do a museum.

And they found this old building just sitting here, empty, not being used at all.

And it was in dire, dire straits.

I mean, it was not in good shape at all.

Inhabited by a lot of wildlife.

Yeah, and the doors were left open.

FRED SMITH: At that time, the forest service wasn't sure what they were going to do with the facility.

There was even talk that they might tear the facility down.

And that even enhanced the local interest in preserving the facility.

MAN: It was really a partnership of local folks up the Gunflint Trail that developed a 501(c)(3) that saw in that structure, A, you know, a manifestation of the early resort history and the Gunflint Trail, and B, a place to interpret that to the public.

And so I think that's where the forest service, you know, a case study of where they succeed in that public interpretation piece, is partnering with other organizations.

So Chick Walk Lodge, yeah, it's a great example of that.

[music playing] Today, we drove up the Gunflint Trail and to the Chick Walk Center.

And we're now at the Gunflint Lodge, which is located on Gunflint Lake.

The Chick Walk Center is a really well-designed and well-maintained interpretive center, museum, that gives a great history of the founding and development of the Gunflint Trail and the Gunflint location in terms of a tourist destination.

And it was fascinating to find out that it was developed in the 1930s as a hunting, fishing, resort, and getaway.

So for me to find out when it was developed was really quite a surprise, just thinking that that type of private construction and development for recreation was still happening at a time when I would have expected people just simply wouldn't have disposable income, nor would they have the means to build and develop without large bank loans to make that kind of a large scale resort.

But they also, you could tell, did a lot of work on their own.

So it seems as though they obtained the property.

And it was just a really hearty group of people that knew how to do everything.

There's a level of humility and respect.

So the things that they made were well made, but naturally fit into the landscape.

And you can see the original buildings that are still here really are suited for the landscape.

You don't find that kind of architectural hubris that you sometimes see, where a building looks completely out of place.

Here, everything feels quite natural, and subtle, and part of the landscape.

[music playing] WOMAN: You had the wood on site to build, so it wasn't a huge investment.

And you could create this rustic villa.

And people from all over would come by boat or by new road.

BRUCE KERFUD: There were very, very few tourists at that point.

And what tourists that first came were totally fishermen, hard core fishermen.

It was outdoor biffies, a wood stove, and a lumberjack meal, and fish to beat hell.

And it was all lake trout, because the only two native species we had up here were lake trout and Northern pike.

In the '20s, this was.

MAN: So you got Gunflint Lake, got the lodge, narrows into Magnetic Lake.

And you've got Gallagher's Island over Magnetic Lake, which is kind of a pretty little island.

How did your family and up coming up here?

What was the-- why did they choose to come up here?

Well, my grandparents and my mother lived outside of Chicago.

And they vacationed in Wisconsin, which was as far up as recreation had kind of gotten with the development of the trains and some of the lakes that were the recreational destinations of the time.

And I think they stayed at Lighthouse Lodge, didn't they?

They had some cabins they rented at Lake Zurich.

Yeah, Lake Zurich.

Lake Zurich, which is not Lighthouse Lodge.

It's nowhere near.

They owned and rented out?

Yes, yes.

And then they became friends with the Blankenberg family.

Next door neighbors.

Yep.

At Lake Zurich.

And those people from Chicago had kind of a game they played each year about who had gotten the furthest north and had an adventure that their compatriots had not.

So they had talking material all winter to be one up on that aspect of social conversation.

They got up there one summer, and all of a sudden the Blankenbergs started talking about having coming north to Minnesota, that there was a new area just opening up.

And that he was exploring the Gunflint Trail and Northeastern Minnesota and the wilderness.

NARRATOR: In her book, "Woman of the Boundary Waters," Bruce's mother, Justine Kerfud, writes, "I don't know when I first knew I was in love with this sometimes harsh and demanding land.

Did I fall in love in winter, when the snow was cold and crunchy as one pads along on snowshoes?"

"When, in the early morning, the rising sun reflects on the hoarfrost, and each separate branch and tree in the woods stands as if covered with jewels?

As I snowshoe across the lake, the wind stings my cheeks, leaving them tinted, glowing red.

The snowshoes swish steadily over the crust in perfect rhythm with my swinging arms."

"As I rest a moment and look down the lake, the Sawtooth Mountains present a jagged outline.

Their slopes covered with timber and their cliff like faces heavy with frost and snow.

I don't know when, but the fact remains that I did fall in love, an infinitesimal speck in the cosmos.

I stood on the shore of Gunflint Lake, beneath a great white pine, matriarch of a fast vanishing tribe.

And I knew I was home.

I was 21.

The year was 1927."

WOMAN: She talks about the natives that lived across Gunflint Lake.

And how she learned to survive up here was those natives.

And they had taught her how to trap and how to handle the winters up here.

They, so to speak, introduced mom to the wilderness and helped keep her out of trouble.

And they helped her create her first team of dogs, which they didn't have a clue about, or mother didn't have a clue about.

But she got some dogs from the Indians, and some from other places, and created a dog team to get around in the winter time.

[music playing] [dogs barking] NARRATOR: This is the coolest thing I've seen.

This is great.

MAN: It's going to get even cooler.

NARRATOR: Yeah, I can't wait to see them take off.

[dogs barking] WOMAN: --victory in itself.

The mail used be carried this way.

Far, far distances .

MAN: That's how they get the name-- WOMAN: The race is called the mail run, so it's a historic route.

We spend a lot of time taking care of the dogs.

That's pretty much our second job.

OK. [music playing] [dogs barking] The musher will be doing anything from waiting on the sled to go, to usually they get here early enough, so they can have somebody else stand on the sled, and then walk the line and make sure everybody's in their right spot.

Kind of get them excited, make sure they've got a good attitude and mind.

WOMAN: It started back in the '70s.

And actually, one of the guys that actually started it, back in the '70s, is our race Marshal.

When I was one of the two guys who went to the Gunflint Lodge.

And said, what do you think about starting a race at your lodge?

Well then, he says, that's a hell of a good idea.

Yeah.

How many participants are there now?

ARLEIGH JORENSEN: There's 31 teams here today.

NARRATOR: Holy smokes.

ARLEIGH JORENSEN: There's-- NARRATOR: This is massive.

ARLEIGH JORENSEN: The first class is a 12-dog class, and they're here.

OK. ARLEIGH JORENSEN: And they're going to run about 50 miles.

NARRATOR: Amazing.

ARLEIGH JORENSEN: And then they'll rest for five hours and do it again.

SARAH HAMLIS: I followed my sister up here actually.

She came up in '80-something, '84 or something.

Came up.

My father brought her up on a trip in the winter.

And she fell in love with it.

And moved here the next spring.

Really?

Just picked up and moved up here.

And back in '84, there wasn't a lot of people that lived up here.

There was very little, if any, full time work.

NARRATOR: Right.

SARAH HAMLIS: And there were hardly any neighbors.

So it was really, really isolated at that time.

ANNIE HAMILTON: At the age I moved up here, I just turned 25.

It was, I'm going to have to go to school.

I'm going to have to make a professional decision here.

And then I came up here, and I thought I don't have to.

Because I know how to work.

Right.

And that's all that mattered here.

And I have worked ever since.

And I work really hard.

And I've worked two and three jobs.

And had a couple businesses overtime.

And none of it mattered, because it was all worth it.

It's all worth it.

I don't know.

I just graduated college from college.

I'm not quite sure what I'm going to do yet.

And I'm figuring it out.

But I feel like there's so much time you have to fit this stuff in, and why not throw yourself out there and just try something new.

MAN: I like the challenge of it too.

You know, every day, there's something new that you're coming across.

And to be able to look back at all the challenges that you've overcome, it's really rewarding.

To know that you've come this far.

And it makes other things look like small, small hiccups in the road later on.

SARAH HAMLIS: We didn't have any money.

We were waitresses here.

OK.

It was just a point where there wasn't enough full-time work, I couldn't stay here any longer.

I was trying to figure out what to do and I didn't want to leave the area.

So we contacted a seasonal homeowner up here, who had talked about wanting to own a resort up here.

So we actually faxed and said, hey, do you want to be partners?

We don't have any money.

ANNIE HAMILTON: Want to be a silent partner.

SARAH HAMLIS: And you need to be silent, but do you want to be partners?

And he said yes.

No kidding.

And that's how we bought the house.

And we couldn't believe it.

Really, yeah.

ANNIE HAMILTON: With no money invested, it was just labor.

Sarah worked 24 hours a day.

I like having the work to live.

I enjoy having this all to myself.

And fortunately, not in like the conventional sense.

But I live in a giant cabin and have to haul water and build a fire to stay warm.

It's a challenge.

SARAH HAMLIS: Most of my employees are college educated.

They just want to live here, you know.

So they wait tables so they can live on the Gunflint Trail.

[music playing] The things we've really become interested in are the history of what brought people here, and then the things that have allowed people to stay.

And so your lumber mill is a wonderful example.

And so if you could just kind of talk us through maybe the brief history.

It was established by my grandfather, in 1914.

So we're starting our 105th year in business here.

NARRATOR: Wow.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: And all the products are used, like I say, all the chips go to a paper mill.

So what bark and sawdust we don't burn here goes to other markets.

So that's a pack of lumber ready for going to the dry kill.

NARRATOR: Yeah.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: And back in earlier days, it was a seasonal operation, where the mill ran in the summer.

They moved the crew out to the woods and log in the winter.

And then come back and-- NARRATOR: So they do it all.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: Yeah.

So now we're going to go into the mill.

It'll be a little noisy.

NARRATOR: OK. HOWARD HEDSTRUM: The wood's coming in from outside.

NARRATOR: So as the log's going through, it's rotating it as it's milling it?

No, the grater arms go around the log.

It goes around the log.

It's stationary, yeah.

Almost like an apple peeler or something.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: It goes through the de-barker.

And then we have a two-sided mill.

So we take the bigger wood and go through a conventional carriage and head rig.

We load the carriage and the carriage holds the log.

And it goes in front of the saw and takes off a board at a time.

NARRATOR: Right in there, in the machine, doing the work.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: Yeah, it's real work, yeah.

It takes a skill set.

I mean, I tell people when they come to work here, I mean, it's old fashioned work.

I mean, it isn't-- you know, you don't sit and-- on a computer and play video games.

It's real work.

Here's the profile head.

Oh, wow.

We can make log siding.

Oh, that's right, sure.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: The whole lumber industry moved from the east coast, Maine, you know.

They jumped over to Michigan and then into Wisconsin and Minnesota, because wood was the product they had back then.

A lot of land was logged and cut over because people wanted to farm.

So they had to eat.

And they had to build houses.

And all the big cities were growing at the time.

The Great Chicago fire wiped out most of the city and they had to rebuild it.

That was during the heyday of the lumbering here.

So a lot of that wood got run into Chicago.

Not only do you have to have the saws sharp, but you have to have them properly tensioned, or otherwise they won't hang on the wheel.

It takes constant attention just to make sure there's no lumps in it, and the tension's correct.

It takes some active management, especially if you're going to live around forest areas, or breathe air.

It makes a lot of smoke and lots of bad things when you burn that much wood.

The width and the thickness and the grade and determine where it ends up in the sorter.

It takes a lot of money to manage a forest.

So if you manage the forest by taking product off the forest, that covers the cost of doing that work, and actually, returns money to the land owner.

That's it.

They'll put a-- NARRATOR: This is sizable operation.

It's been going for a long time.

And these are the kinds of things that, you know, you come into Grand Marais, and you come driving up the North Shore, and you think, like, oh, that's kind of a nice way of life.

And then you find like this really thriving industry here, that it supports people to be able to live here.

And I think that's great.

Yeah, we hire about 35 or so, plus the support community of loggers, and truckers, which probably equals that or more.

NARRATOR: Yeah, and it expands out from there.

HOWARD HEDSTRUM: Yeah.

NARRATOR: You know, most of our trail system here were originally logging roads.

At one time, the Gunflint Trail used to end here.

Because this used to be called Gateway Hungry Jack Lodge.

So it was gateway to the wilderness.

Born and raised at the lodge here.

The lodge has been in my family since right around 1970.

Well, my dad, a Duluth native, grew up coming up to the Gunflint Trail area as a kid.

And as he grew up, for hunting and fishing, it was kind of his-- it was his draw to the area.

And opportunity presented itself with getting involved in this place.

And here we are, coming up on 50 years later.

We're also located on the Gunflint Trail's snowmobile system, managed by the local Cook County Snowmobile Club.

They manage about 150 miles of local trails here, that access from the Canadian border all the way down to the North Shore, and beyond, down to Duluth, and up to the Iron Range as well.

NARRATOR: So this trail system will actually connect all the way to Duluth?

MAN: Correct.

NARRATOR: Holy smokes, I didn't realize that.

MAN: There is some great history here in Minnesota, due to Edgar Hetteen, who was kind of the founder of Polaris and Arctic Cat.

NARRATOR: I didn't know those were Minnesota companies.

MAN: Yeah, Thief River Falls in Roseville, Minnesota.

NARRATOR: No kidding.

MAN: I'll send you guys out and check out this trail right here.

Now, you're going to get a variety of hills and rolling hills.

And I mean, you're going to change in elevation.

And you're just going to be going basically through the edge of the wilderness.

[music playing] A lot of my customers don't stay here.

They ride in from Grand Portage, Grand Marais, Lutsen, Tofte, Deluth, Cloquet, Ely, the whole, right on down the line.

So they want somewhere to go, they need a reason.

So the reason is to come and get gas and have a bite to eat.

And go on to the next.

[music playing] You know, off this trail system didn't exist, I mean, I would-- I don't know if I would be open in the wintertime, you know.

Back before snowmobiling, what it was, back in the '70s, I think the winners were a little more bleak.

NARRATOR: Pretty lean, right?

MAN: Yeah, yeah.

I've mentored a lot of people, you know.

But, I mean, to me, it's not a job.

It is a lifestyle.

Not only our guests, not only ourselves, but the people, the residents in the area, share so many of the things that we feel.

That's why they're long-term residents of the area.

And the trail is a community.

Back when you were growing up, the Indians were across the lake, but even now the people who are year-round residents here, and the seasonal people, it's a very close community.

MAN: It's fun how they all develop basically the same approach to the setting, because everything is not totally scripted or ruled by rules up here.

So take this lake, no horsepower limits.

And no restrictions on what you can do.

So theoretically, jet skis are allowed.

And they are, they're permitted, and sailing, and speed boats, and water skiing and all that.

But you know, over the years, we've had an occasional guest bring their little Sea Doo or something.

And they jump on it.

And first off, I tell them they can't be around the dock.

So that means they got to go over there somewhere else where it's not much fun.

Because there's nobody to show off to.

But very quickly, they get the message, without our saying that they can't do anything.

All of a sudden, we realize that they do not bring it back.

Because they realize that's not the appropriate way.

And our neighbors are the same way.

Motors up to 25 horse are pretty good for fishing.

Anything beyond that is show and tell.

Well, they don't come up here for show and tell, so nobody has big motor crafts.

Nobody's racing around water skiing.

Because it's not in sync.

And we just don't have to tell each other that.

That's the value of our community.

And we all kind of see it the same way.

ANNIE HAMILTON: The people that come into your life, specifically at points, it becomes a mentorship.

And that is where-- An awful lot of them.

--our biggest work has been done in the past 25 years.

In all of our businesses, that has been the most rewarding.

FRED SMITH: You know, I think the future the trail, and for people that live around here all the time, is preservation of the historical character of the Gunflint Trail.

Well, it's pretty incredible that we have this right here in Minnesota.

Yeah.

And a diverse range of activities too.

It's just crazy.

MAN: Yeah, it kind of surprises people when they walk up this way.

It's not what you think of when you think of Minnesota.

[music playing] MAN: When you talk about the evolution of trails, like that sometimes is how it works.

You have a footpath, that moves to a tote road, that moves to a wagon road, that moves to a railroad, to a gravel road, to a modern asphalt highway.

And I think when you look at the Gunflint Trail, that depicts that evolution really well.

Throughout Minnesota, that's the way transportation systems evolved in some cases.

But up here, you have this little microcosm where you can still kind of see it.

[music playing] FRED SMITH: Come out and see this adventure.

This is the way life used to be.

You know, even though we have terrific development around our great nation, it all had to start somewhere.

And it started like it is right here.

[music playing] NARRATOR: The opportunity to just explore the trail system, a very specific thing, and a very specific part of Minnesota, has been extremely rewarding.

Because the things that you find when you quiet down, and slow down, and really look, and that's what this place offers.

That's what this film can offer, is just a glimpse of what's there.

And then hopefully, will entice you to do the exact same thing, and just really stop, and slow down, and appreciate what you have, not just because of the history of it, because of what is here, and what the future will provide.

This is an extremely rewarding place.

It offers a peace of mind that you simply can't get by going through your day to day operations.

Come out here and be part of your land, be part of your home.

[music playing] God bless the sun, shining like heaven, the stars above.

The sun is so beautiful.

God bless the sun.

The sun is for everyone.

We are so beautiful, bless everyone.

Shining like heaven, the stars above.

We are so beautiful, just like the sun.

We are for everyone.

We are for everyone.

NARRATOR: Funding for historic trails in northern Minnesota is provided by the citizens of Minnesota through the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.