I have always been a paddler. I have been on at least seven different Boundary Waters trips. My first one was when I was seven or so. My dad got super into canoeing around 3 years ago, and I became his partner. I didn't paddle as much as he did but I still went with him from time to time. Two years ago is when I started going a lot more often and we did all sorts of trips. My favorite trips were day trips where we go down rivers - fishing for roughfish and sturgeon.

My dad heard about the challenge and did it in 2024. He trained a ton and I would come with him occasionally. I met the Water Tribe, the group he was doing it with, for the first time at the Ely lodge. We woke up early the next day to drop him off. All I could think of was, “That's going to be me next year.”

This summer I trained with my dad. We paddled around twenty times and went like 150 miles or so. On the day before the Challenge started I met all the people in the group. I even gained a third grandma, Lori . My mom and dad were both with me the night before and we slept in a tent at Echo Lake. I slept well. In the morning we packed away the tent, ate donuts, and got in the car to go to the landing. We got to Crane Lake and packed our bags nice and tidy for the last time. We said our goodbyes to my mom and left.

Day 1 Grandma Lori gave us a tracker so she could time us and see where we were and if we needed help. The instructions on how to use it were super simple, but my dad wasn’t paying attention when the instructions were given, so we struggled to get it working and to know if it even was on. We eventually figured it out on day two. We put in on Crane Lake and paddled toward the King Williams Narrows. At the same time we put in, Toolman and Towhee, who were other challengers, put in at a different spot on the same lake and just missed us. Since we put in at a different spot than them all we had to do was glance to our left and we should have seen them, but we did not. We went into the only narrow part of the lake just ahead of them and then four motorboats all needed to get through at the same time. We paddled through the Loon River, which I thought was boring for some reason. Then we arrive at the first portage and are surprised that Russ, another challenger, hadn’t caught us yet.

On Loon Lake, which I really liked, we decided I would be the navigator with the map for the rest of the trip. We could see people ahead of us and all I remember is how excited we were to see if they were other challengers. We paddled hard to catch up with them.

We took a short break for some snacks at the Beatty Portage and those people did turn out to be challengers. The people we caught up to were a group named Clewless, Mr. C, Prospector, and CanoeWNC. We paddled with them across a large basin on Lac la Croix straight into the wind. There was a point where lost sight of one of the canoes and thought they could have dumped. We waited for a while, and were relieved when we saw them emerge from behind an island. We paddled behind some Islands to escape the wind and took a short portage to cut off some miles. We ended up taking a very long break there to eat some very good bacon wraps and make some tail wind, a drink that powered us for the whole trip. After that, it rained hard on us once and then there were on and off sprinkles. We were paddling with them when it started downpouring, and we had to pull off and empty our canoe of the water. We stopped on a rocky beach and I skipped some rocks while we waited for the rain to settle down a little more. We were still paddling with the group we caught up with and they gave us a good tip on a short cut we took. It saved us a good twenty minutes of paddling.

We paddled to the end of the lake leapfrogging with them. They stopped at a campsite and we continued for another hour. We looked at the pictographs and pulled into camp on an island at 8:00pm. We didn't eat much for dinner and went to bed straight away. I would give our campsite 3.5 stars. We went 44.5 miles that day.