A Minnesota canoe enthusiast retraces the routes of the voyageurs.

The wilderness of the Boundary Waters is as rich in history as it is in natural beauty. Almost three hundred years ago, French Canadian voyageurs traveled through this area, which straddles the border of the United States and Canada, paddling birch-bark canoes along the St. Lawrence-Superior route to northwestern Canada. In this work of travel and adventure, Bolz recounts a journey he took in 1958, retracing the voyageurs’ route from Grand Portage on Lake Superior through the Quetico-Superior country to Rainy Lake. His canoe and paddle served as a time machine as he re-created a trip first taken centuries ago.

Beautifully illustrated by Francis Lee Jaques, Portage into the Past draws from the journals and maps of the early explorers of the region. Today’s adventurers of the north country will treasure this classic, an ideal guidebook to the region’s remarkable past. “At times, the transition is so smooth that it is with a start that we realize we have suddenly been carried two hundred years into the past.” Canoeing ISBN 0-8166-0919-5 Paper £00.00 $14.95192 Pages 6 x 8 1/4 AprilFesler-Lampert Minnesota Heritage Book SeriesTranslation inquiries: University of Minnesota Press

J. Arnold Bolz (1918-1991) was an avid outdoorsman and accomplished nature photographer whose work was published in Wilderness Days by Sigurd F. Olson and The Boundary Waters Wilderness Ecosystem by Miron Heinselman.