Another bastion of wildness in Northern Minnesota is Voyageurs National Park, established, as its name suggests, to commemorate the route of the voyageurs who established the fur trade through these lands and waters by canoe and portage routes in the late 1600s and into the next century. Of Voyageurs' 220,000 acres, one third is water, much of it in several large island-dotted lakes that form the boundary between the U.S. and Canada.

Unlike the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, which Voyageurs abuts on the northwest, Voyageurs is a highly motorized place. Fishing boats, houseboats and floatplanes are common in summer and in winter, snowmobiles use its frozen lake surfaces. Here too, though from a much higher threshhold, motorized users agitate continually for expanded use and resist any effort to manage motorized activity.

The major challenge for conservationists is to achieve sensible management of motorized recreation in Voyageurs-a place that, despite motors, remains a splendid place for paddling-the "Aegean of the North," one kayaking magazine termed it. And though none has yet been designated as wilderness, the National Park Service has found roughly two-thirds of the park suitable for wilderness and manages it as such.

Visit Voyageurs National Park web site.