A truly wild summer adventure

Hi, my name is Olivia Bledsoe, and this summer I came 1,300 miles from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay, which is in northern Canada. We paddled this expedition as part of the Hudson Bay Girls Expedition Team. The reason we chose this route was so we could be the first all-female crew to ever complete it and to inspire more women and girls in paddle sports and to advocate to permanently protect the Boundary Waters from mining. My other team members were Emma Brackett, Halina Karlstrom, and Abby Chalky, all of which attended other universities. We partnered with Save the Boundary Waters during our expedition to advocate for their causes. We started our expedition at Lake Superior. Our day one was the eight and a half mile long Grand Portage Trail which is when we had to carry our 65 pound canoes and 115 pound packs across land for 12 hours that day. We chose to do this portage to stay true to the historic fur trading routes that occurred all throughout this region. The first two weeks of our expedition we were canoeing 250 miles through the boundary waters on the Minnesota and Canadian border. We got to experience some of America's most pristine wilderness, and it was truly quite a beautiful, beautiful landscape. On this expedition, we canoed all types of water, flat water, large water, and white water. While we were on white water, we really had to be careful with our communication and carefully pick out our lines so we could have the best chance at making it through the rapid unscathed. In time, we just straight up had to walk our views because we couldn't travel through an area. We just had to pick out campsites really wherever we could, on the edge of a burnt area, on a sandy beach, even on like a tiny rock slab next to the lake. We could not really be too picky with where we chose to camp. My inflatable sleeping pad broke around day 50 of the trip, so for the last third, I was pretty much just sleeping on rocks the entire time. And while it's not always the most comfortable and we did have a bear come into our camp we had wolves around our tent one night and in the last bit we always had to watch out for polar bears it's always pretty rewarding and a great experience to sleep outside we fished a few times on this trip and we mostly just caught some northern pike that we would fry up and eat and they're pretty delicious so we freeze-dried all of our meals and we had a variety of desserts and then dinners and we did make pizza quite a times and when we were allowed to have a fire we did cook some s'mores and we also would pick wild berries when we ran into them. The first part of our expedition was incredibly dry and there are so many wildfires but then the last week it was really really cold and rainy. When we got to the tundra there are no trees to set up a tarp so we had to set up our tarp with our paddle. The white water was pretty hard to run as it was such low water levels that we were having to walk with canoes through so many different sections the entire middle section of our trip we spent on Lake Winnipeg which is the 11th largest lake in the world it took us 17 days to canoe down its eastern shore and we experienced up to seven foot swells on this lake every day it was like the ocean and we had to be incredibly careful with when we paddled and when we did our six to seven mile long open water crossings when we left Lake Winnipeg we entered the Hayes River, a 400 mile long heritage river in Manitoba. We ran anywhere from class 1 to 3 whitewater and then after 26 days on that river we got to our destination York Factory. At York Factory we celebrated the end of our 1,300 mile long and 80 day journey and then had four days of travel back which started on a motorboat out in the ocean. We hope that our journey as the first all-female team to ever do this route inspires more people to get outside and enjoy the outdoors.