The last glacial period carved this landscape into existence, scouring bedrock into basins that filled with meltwater to create the bewildering maze of lakes and streams that defines the region today. Long before European contact, the waterways served as highways for Native American peoples including the Huron, Sioux, Chippewa, Cree, Dakota, and Ojibwe. Pictographs painted on cliff faces throughout the BWCAW still survive, silent records of cultures that thrived here for millennia. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, French-Canadian fur traders -- the voyageurs and coureurs de bois -- adopted these same routes, paddling birchbark canoes loaded with beaver pelts between trading posts. The late 1800s brought logging crews who cut deep into the old-growth forest. It took decades of legislative effort to reverse the damage: President Theodore Roosevelt designated roughly one million acres as Superior National Forest in 1909, the 1964 Wilderness Act folded the area into the National Wilderness Preservation System, and the 1978 Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act established the strict protections that endure today.

The BWCAW holds the largest boreal forest east of the Rocky Mountains, a vast expanse where roughly 85 percent of the canopy is coniferous -- white and red pine, spruce, jack pine, cedar, and hemlock towering above a floor dotted with wildflowers and fungi. The remaining 15 percent is deciduous: paper birch, yellow birch, poplar, and tamarack, which drops its needles every autumn despite technically being a conifer. Dramatic cliffs and rock outcroppings punctuate the forest, and countless vistas open up where lakes stretch toward horizons of unbroken green. No motorized vehicles or boats are permitted within the wilderness boundary. The silence that results is not merely an absence of noise but a presence -- the sound of water against a canoe hull, wind through pine needles, the sudden crack of a beaver tail on still water at dusk.

The climate here ranks among the harshest in the contiguous United States. Winter temperatures regularly plunge below zero Fahrenheit, with the region averaging around 90 subzero days per year. Minnesota's all-time record low of minus 60 degrees Fahrenheit was recorded in Tower, just south of the BWCAW. Lake ice grows four to seven feet thick. Snowfall on the Superior Highlands ridges can reach 150 inches annually, while the interior averages 75 to 90 inches. Snow has been recorded in every month of the year, with the heaviest accumulations surprisingly falling in March and April. Summers are brief and cool, running from mid-June to mid-August, with Lake Superior's offshore breezes dropping temperatures by as much as 25 degrees near the coast. The average annual temperature ranges from just 29 to 36 degrees Fahrenheit. This punishing cold is a product of geography: the nearest ocean inlet is Hudson Bay, which is frozen 70 percent of the year.

On July 4, 1999, severe thunderstorms carrying intense straight-line winds -- a weather event known as the Boundary Waters-Canadian Derecho -- tore through nearly 400,000 acres of forest in and around the BWCAW. The blowdown flattened entire stands of timber, leaving behind a tangle of fallen trunks that fundamentally altered the fire risk across the region. The U.S. Forest Service has managed the aftermath through prescribed burns, but the scars remain visible from the air more than two decades later. The event was a reminder that this wilderness, for all its apparent timelessness, is a dynamic system shaped by sudden violence as much as by slow glacial grinding.

The main attraction in the BWCAW is the wilderness itself. Canoeists typically spend four to five days paddling and portaging between lakes, making camp on unreserved shoreline sites marked on area maps. Even during peak summer season, encountering more than a handful of fellow travelers is unusual. The fishing varies by lake but is generally good -- walleye, northern pike, and lake trout are common catches. The geographic isolation makes the BWCAW one of the finest stargazing locations in the eastern half of the continent, and on clear nights the aurora borealis occasionally ripples across the northern sky. Entry requires a permit, available through the two gateway towns of Ely to the west and Grand Marais on the North Shore. Outfitters in both towns provide canoes, route planning, and shuttle services. Once past the trailhead, there are no stores, no roads, no cell towers. Just water, forest, and the lonely call of loons.