Missing Hatchet from Nate Ptacek on Vimeo.
Freelance photographer and cinematographer Nate Ptacek has put together a video (set nicely to music by the Fleet Foxes) of a September canoe trip through Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. It’s a pleasant wintertime reminder of what’s so great about the woods…and there’s a special frisson when you read Ptacek’s commentary. He notes that the day his crew first dipped their paddles, the Pagami Creek fire blew up, its size growing ten times over 24 hours. The fire was 40 miles away then, but it still affected the weather. They eventually ran into closed portages “and soon realized we had been largely alone in the wilderness for some three days” as other campers fled and the fire grew around them.
