Last Entry Point: Stories of Danger and Death in the Boundary Waters

Introduction

The death notices are always short. They come in the form of a press release: usually nothing more than a couple of paragraphs, often with a quote from the local sheriff. Other than that, details are scant after someone dies in the Boundary Waters.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA) encompasses more than a million acres of pristine and remote boreal forest in the far reaches of northeastern Minnesota. The US Forest Service manages the landscape. Across the BWCA and adjacent Quetico Provincial Park in Canada, motors of any kind, for the most part, are not allowed. It is largely a quiet space, inhabited by moose, wolves, bears, and other species that tend to captivate the human spirit. These wild creatures roam through a collection of dense forests, deep lakes, and thousands of flowing waterways. It is a setting of natural balance, often romanticized by visions of white pines, singing loons, and breathtaking sunsets. It is also a harsh landscape. Winter temperatures often dip to thirty below zero or colder. With such brutal cold, it’s not uncommon for the thousand-plus lakes inside the wilderness area to be covered in ice for more than half the year. When the waters do open, relentless summer winds, massive wildfires, and all manner of insects and wild creatures can make life challenging for human visitors.

As a journalist who lives near the Boundary Waters, I find out when people die in this remote pocket of the globe. The information typically arrives from law enforcement located near Duluth, Ely, or Grand Marais. News reporters have to pry if they want more information.

On May 20, 2020, the Cook County Sheriff’s Department in Grand Marais, Minnesota, sent a press release to media outlets across the state. It read, in part: The Cook County Sheriff’s Office 911 Dispatch was notified of an overturned canoe on Tuscarora Lake at approximately 1:51 p.m., today. It was learned that three people were in a canoe which had capsized on Tuscarora Lake. Two of the people swam to an island and one, a 29-year-old male, was reported missing. Identity is being withheld pending notification of family. No further information at this time.

Just the facts. Bare bones, at that. It turns out the twenty-nine-year-old male was Billy Cameron from Indiana. His death is the genesis of this book.

I’ve been a news reporter on the edge of the Boundary Waters since 2014. In the decade following the start of my tenure here, more than a dozen people have died in this, the most-visited wilderness area in the nation. During a summer thunderstorm in 2016, a tree fell on Minnesota governor Tim Walz’s brother on Duncan Lake, killing him. There have been numerous drownings. Wayne Morrow, Michael Hickey, Lester Hochstetler, and Joseph Fedick—they all died in the water here. Search and rescue found a Texas man, Mike Brown, floating dead on Seagull Lake in 2023. He was wearing a life jacket. Each death meant another press release. The notifications continually told little of what happened. Anecdotes were completely absent.

It was Cameron’s story that broke me. After reading his death notice on air at WTIP, the community radio station in Grand Marais, our news department posted a short, two-hundred-word story online. This was during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, May 2020. A young man died on a lake in the Boundary Waters. The story could have ended there. Instead, I found Cameron’s profile on Facebook. His girlfriend, Nataly Yokhanis, posted something on his wall about the situation. I contacted Yokhanis and asked if she wanted to talk about Cameron and what had happened to him. She did.

Prior to recording an interview, we laid down some ground rules. The idea in talking about Cameron’s death was to educate people, not scare them. Yokhanis, who is featured in this book, wanted to immediately use Cameron’s death as a cautionary tale. That water is cold, she wanted people to know. Others who planned to paddle in this wilderness, not just in May 2020 but every spring and early summer from that moment on, needed to know how serious it is to fall from a canoe into a Boundary Waters lake. Cameron’s accidental death might save the lives of other canoeists, Yokhanis told me. The interview hit the airwaves. Of those listeners who shared their reactions with me, most felt sorrow and sympathy for Yokhanis. Others were horrified. But some were angry. It was not fair to request an interview from someone in a moment of immense pain and suffering, they said. They wanted the story, and the people involved, to be left alone. Talking about death, it turns out, is terrifying for some people.

In this book, you’re going to read about people who lost their lives in the Boundary Waters. Yes, people die here. Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion, as Edward Abbey said. The acclaimed environmental writer also said, You can’t study the darkness by flooding it with light. Some of the stories shared in this book are disturbing and packed with emotion, as situations involving unexpected death typically are. Just like with the Yokhanis interview, the purpose of sharing these stories is to educate, not to scare. Better planning. Utilizing situational awareness. Waiting. These simple steps could have prevented many of the deaths you will read about.

At the same time, accidents happen. Nobody expects a towering white pine to fall on their tent while they’re sleeping. It happens here. So does lightning. Tornadoes. Hypothermia. The other side of the coin is unnecessary risk, like the behavior of twenty-nine-year-old Chase Winkey when he chose to go cliff jumping into the water of Makwa Lake in 2013. Winkey jumped from a sixty-foot cliff and never surfaced. Authorities found him dead in twenty feet of water the next morning. Outfitters, whether located near Highway 61, at the end of the Gunflint Trail, or in downtown Ely, told me time and again how important it is for people to understand these woods and water aren’t here to provide them with entertainment. The Boundary Waters is not an amusement park. In fact, it’s not a park at all. It’s a federally designated wilderness.

The intention of sharing these sometimes-troubling experiences is to prevent similar accidents, including deaths, from happening here. Stories of people dying can have value, in the way a tree, once cut down, can be made into a table or a bench. It is no longer alive, but it continues to have a purpose. And perhaps above everything else, these stories are here to help us remember what the Boundary Waters is capable of.

PART I

Water and Lightning

Billy Cameron drowned in Tuscarora Lake.

I

On paper, Billy Cameron did everything right. And he still died in the Boundary Waters.

Cameron and two friends, Curtis Weeks and Taylor Johnson, capsized their canoe on Tuscarora Lake in the BWCA on May 20, 2020. After tumbling from the canoe, Cameron drowned in the frigid waters of Tuscarora Lake, about fifty miles up the Gunflint Trail. The lake is found several portages and lakes in from a popular entry point on Round Lake. Cameron was wearing his life jacket at the time of his death. After entering the water, Cameron and the others tried to get to shore without panicking. Weeks and Johnson made it. Cameron did not. A coroner’s report said he died from hypothermia and drowning. He was twenty-nine.

May 2020 was a strange time to be alive. It was the first peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. The world was full of uncertainty. Fear gripped the nation. Five days after Cameron died in the Boundary Waters, George Floyd was murdered on the streets of Minneapolis by a police officer. It was a period of great unrest everywhere you looked.

Few people felt the collective chaos more intensely than Nataly Yokhanis.

This has broken me at my deepest. I am shattered, Yokhanis, Cameron’s girlfriend for many years, told me just days after his death. I don’t think I’ll ever be whole again.

Years removed from the onset of a global pandemic, most of society has learned to live with the realities of COVID-19. Similar to the pandemic, Floyd’s murder on Chicago Avenue and the subsequent conviction of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin deeply impacted societies across the globe. As Yokhanis engages with the world and watches the collective human race move forward from these situations, she told me in July 2022 that it’s Cameron’s drowning that continues to make her feel incomplete. I have accepted what happened, but nothing will ever be the same, she said.

Yokhanis, a health care professional in Dayton, Ohio, started dating Cameron in July 2011. She was not the spirited outdoors-person he was, though Cameron’s passion for the wilderness was contagious. He lived for these types of adventures, she said. Going to the Boundary Waters was something he would talk about all year, staring at maps and calling his friends to talk about the routes. He loved that stuff. He could talk to me about it for hours, and I loved to listen because he was just so excited about going there time and time again.

Cameron, of Noblesville, Indiana, was an avid outdoorsman. He enjoyed visiting Minnesota’s north woods and border lakes, and he did so as often as he could. He knew what he was doing up there, Yokhanis said.

Built like a collegiate athlete, Cameron kept his hair short and his muscles toned. His mother was from Japan. His father was a hardworking white man from the Midwest. The combination of his parents’ backgrounds gave Cameron the look of a model, Yokhanis said. He was beautiful, she told me.

As he moved deeper into his twenties, Cameron made planning a canoe trip to the Boundary Waters a summer tradition. During the 2020 trip, he traveled with Weeks and Johnson to spend time on Tuscarora Lake. With more than thirteen miles of shoreline and ten campsites spread across eight hundred acres, Tuscarora is a popular destination throughout the year. It holds lake trout that grow large in its deep waters, which bottom out at 130 feet.

Tuscarora was familiar territory for the trio from Indiana, and the trip was Cameron’s third to the BWCA in recent years. An island campsite in the middle of the lake was Cameron’s favorite. It’s where the group set up their base of operations this time too, said Yokhanis, who recounted details of the trip from conversations with Weeks and Johnson. Cameron’s paddling partners are still largely unable to speak with anyone publicly about the experience and the day their friend Billy died. They have refused all requests from media in Minnesota and beyond to discuss what happened. As painful as the memory is, the authorities, canoe outfitters, and others familiar with the situation all agree the accident that claimed Cameron’s life was nobody’s fault. This is a terrible situation, but these things can, and do happen, said Andy McDonnell, co-owner of Tuscarora Lodge and Canoe Outfitters on the Gunflint Trail. May can be a dangerous time up here. Cold-water drownings are almost like a thing waiting to happen on certain years.

The day Cameron died was unpleasantly windy. It was cold the previous night, with temps dipping to the mid-thirties. This scenario is not unusual in the Boundary Waters, and most who travel in canoe country in late spring do so because many of the pesky insects known to haunt this vast wilderness are not yet in full force. Bugs or no bugs, the temperature slowly warmed up throughout the day in coordination with strong gusts of wind from the south and east. Though it was the third week of the month, the ice had only recently come off some of the larger lakes in the BWCA and along the Gunflint Trail. It’s typical for a lake the size of Tuscarora to maintain a surface temperature of about forty-seven degrees in mid-May.

In the early-evening hours, Cameron, who had just celebrated his twenty-ninth birthday the day before, was fishing from shore when his line tangled in the rocky depths. The group had rented a three-person Kevlar canoe known as a Minnesota 3 from nearby Tuscarora Lodge and Canoe Outfitters. Cameron didn’t want to snap his line to free the snag, so he and his friends put on their life jackets and hopped in the canoe. After untangling the line, they decided to continue fishing from the canoe near the island. Moments later, they were hit by an easterly gust, and the canoe capsized. The three young men spent nearly fifteen minutes trying to right the watercraft, to no avail. Cameron, the leader and most experienced of the group, decided they should swim toward land.

The men were in peril. Weeks and Johnson were able to reach solid ground safely, though not easily in their heavy boots and clothing. Weeks made it back to the island, haggard and freezing after barreling through waves across a distance greater than the length of a football field. Meanwhile, Johnson ended up on the north shore of the lake after he realized he couldn’t move through the waves, but only with them. After reaching land, both Johnson and Weeks started to holler. They could barely hear each other through the wind. At the very least they knew each survived the ordeal. Meanwhile, Cameron was neither heard nor seen. That scene is an image that haunts Yokhanis to this day: Cameron drifting alone in the cold water, fighting for air. His lungs likely filled with water at some point, the result of his desperate gasps for oxygen. The cold water gave him little hope as the situation deteriorated from scary to desperate within minutes, perhaps seconds. Cameron’s death was quick. It was not messy.

Ben Aldritt of Minneapolis expected to travel many miles each day during his group’s canoe trip that May. He planned to visit nearly a dozen lakes, starting and ending at Round Lake and Tuscarora Lodge and Canoe Outfitters.

I love the pre-trip planning and thinking about what campsite we’ll get, said Aldritt.

No amount of planning could prepare Aldritt and his companions, Tony Porter and Dan Fuller, for what they would find in the BWCA on the first morning of their trip. After starting early from Round Lake, the crew completed the one-and-a-third-mile portage from Missing Link Lake into Tuscarora with relative ease. The winds from the day before still blew, and the sun was out. About ten minutes after reaching the lake, as they paddled its south shore, they heard shouts in their direction. It was Weeks. As they neared the island campsite, Aldritt could tell the person in distress was waving an object. It was a large stick with a white T-shirt tied to the end. This was an emergency.

After assisting Weeks on the island and confirming he was not injured, the group paddled to the distant shoreline and retrieved Johnson, then brought him back to the island. Cameron still was missing.

They kept telling us that if anyone could survive this it was Billy, said Aldritt. They were convinced he was hiking out to get help or that he was just out there in the woods somewhere.

Hours later, after Aldritt and his friends were able to use the satellite phone of another canoe-camper on nearby Missing Link Lake, a search and rescue team was alerted. A floatplane arrived just after 1 PM in search of Cameron. The group’s canoe was lost too. The pilot spotted Cameron and the canoe floating in a remote bay in the northwest corner of the lake. Cameron was dead when the pilot pulled him into the plane.

Kylan Hill, a conservation officer for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources based near Grand Marais, does routine patrols in the BWCA throughout the year. He sounded a note of caution for visitors. Hill said while the air temperature may be comfortable and relatively warm in spring, the water temperature hasn’t had time to acclimate.

It’s possible that the water temperature is ten, twenty, or even thirty degrees colder than the air temperature, Hill said.

Aldritt additionally points out that people who come to the BWCA in the early or late seasons need to be prepared for a different type of canoe trip. Absent are afternoon swim sessions or the luxury of wearing sandals across dry portages. Mud, cold, and wind are often reliable realities for BWCA adventures, particularly in May.

It can get busy around Memorial Day weekend, Aldritt said, so a lot of us try to get in there before that start of the peak season.

Aldritt, who wears glasses and is a self-described fishing junkie, will forever recognize the similarities between his group and that of Cameron and his friends. All were experienced canoeists, relatively young, and full of passion for the wilderness. He referenced a Neil Young lyric to sum up their shared spirit for outdoor recreation: The same thing that makes you live can kill you in the end.

It’s believed Cameron