Paleo-Indian peoples inhabited this north country as early as 8000 BC, leaving behind limited but tantalizing artifacts. Among these are rock art pictographs, including a canoe image painted on a cliff face at Agnes Lake -- a scene that could have been sketched yesterday, so little has the essential activity of this place changed. Pottery and clay pipes from the Later Woodland period have been found throughout the park. When French-Canadian voyageurs arrived in the eighteenth century, they adopted the same water routes the Indigenous peoples had used for millennia, paddling birchbark canoes loaded with furs between trading posts scattered across the continental interior. In 1909, an Order in Council by the Ontario government established the Quetico Forest Reserve. That same year, across the border, the United States established the Superior National Forest, beginning a parallel conservation effort that would eventually link both sides of the boundary into a single protected landscape. Road access to Quetico was not constructed until 1954.

The creation of the park came at a cost that took most of a century to acknowledge. The Lac La Croix First Nation had a reserve within the park boundaries. In 1915, the province cancelled the band's right to Reserve 24C, relocated its people, and effectively nullified their treaty rights. The grievance went unaddressed for 76 years. In 1991, Ontario's Minister of Natural Resources, Bud Wildman, delivered a formal apology in the provincial legislature -- a landmark moment in Canadian-Indigenous relations at the time. Wildman also committed to immediate and long-term economic and social assistance for the band. One tangible result: members of the Lac La Croix Guides Association were allowed to operate small motorboats on select lakes for guiding purposes, a carefully negotiated exception to the park's otherwise strict motorized-travel ban. The Agreement of Coexistence, developed through public review, aimed to phase out motorized guiding through attrition.

Quetico contains more than 2,000 wilderness campsites spread across its 600-plus lakes, none of them reservable in advance and all of them unimproved. Canoeists enter through one of six ranger stations serving 21 specific entry points. Three stations -- Dawson Trail, Atikokan, and Lac La Croix -- are accessible by road. Beaverhouse requires paddling and portaging to reach. Cache Bay and Prairie Portage can be reached by paddle or outfitter tow. Drive-in camping exists only at Dawson Trail; log cabins are available to rent there as well. The park has been completely protected from logging since 1971. Group size is capped at nine. Cans and bottles containing food or beverages are prohibited -- only containers for fuel, medicine, and personal items may enter. Even barbed fishhooks, while permitted in a tackle box, must be pinched flat before being attached to a line.

The waters of Quetico support four prized sport fish: smallmouth bass, northern pike, walleye, and lake trout. Above the lakes, common loons deliver their haunting calls, bald eagles patrol from white pine perches, and herring gulls, Canada geese, and red-tailed hawks round out the avian population. The forest itself is a mix of white and red pine, cedar, birch, and trembling aspen. In the park's many wetlands, Labrador Tea grows in leathery green shrubs -- a plant that Native Americans and voyageurs once brewed for both tea and tobacco. Bunchberry carpets the forest floor, displaying white flowers in spring that give way to red berries by summer. The Boy Scouts of America have long recognized the park's value, incorporating Quetico into the Northern Tier High Adventure program, which sends young paddlers on multi-day canoe expeditions through some of the most remote terrain accessible without a passport -- or, in this case, with one.