Anderson: Minnesota’s million anglers should be convinced that Boundary Waters is worth protecting

Whether he’s having lake trout or walleye for shore lunch, Lukas Leaf employs the same recipe.

“We fry up a pound of bacon, eat the bacon, and fry the fish in the bacon grease,” Leaf said. “With fresh fish, there’s nothing better.”

Similar culinary rituals will play out on lakeshores from Winona to Warroad and Winton to Worthington beginning at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, when Minnesota’s 2025 inland fishing season begins.

Mille Lacs, as usual, will produce lots of walleyes, as will Leech, Winnie and Upper Red, along with dozens of other opening day playgrounds.

To each, some anglers will carry war chests — otherwise known as tackle boxes — full of crankbaits, spoons, bucktails and other baubles, all dressed up in kaleidoscopic colors.

But 90% of what they’ll deploy on the season’s first days will be 1/8- and 1/4-ounce jigs painted chartreuse, white or black and baited with fathead or spot-tailed shiners.

As insurance against being skunked, some anglers also will pack a slip bobber or two, and maybe a Lindy Rig, all of which can fit in a jacket pocket — no tackle box needed.

Leaf advocates an even simpler approach.

Rather than piloting a boat onto one of Minnesota’s big walleye lakes this spring, he’ll paddle a canoe into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. And instead of a strongbox full of lures, he’ll pack a small assortment of terminal tackle, spoons and crankbaits.

He says that that’s more than enough gear to produce a limit of fish and, as importantly, to provide a respite from his everyday life in the state’s only federally designated wilderness.

“I was a very young boy when my dad first took me to the Boundary Waters,” said Leaf, 42, who was born in Aitken, Minn., and now lives in Hastings. “We’d go up the Thursday before the opener, paddle into Tuscarora Lake and fish trout.”

So enamored was Leaf of his early trips to the BWCAW, and of his many subsequent paddles onto its waters, that he now heads up Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters.

The group’s mission is to gather support among hunters and anglers to protect the BWCAW from copper-nickel mining and other threats.

Together with Backcountry Hunters & Anglers, as well as Trout Unlimited and a host of other organizations, Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters is holding a rally for the BWCA and other public lands on Thursday, May 8, from 3-5 p.m. at the Capitol in St. Paul

From my perspective, Minnesota’s 1-million-plus anglers should be an easy bunch to convince that the BWCAW is worth protecting. Long before the wilderness became known as a sort of spa for the soul, albeit one that at times can be physically challenging, the Boundary Waters was the nation’s top resort and fishing destination.

As early as 1921, Basswood Lodge and Wilderness Outfitters opened a fishing camp on Basswood Lake, serving anglers who could reach the big border lake by a combination of boat and motorized portage, and later by floatplane.

By the 1940s, more than 20 resorts, each armed with a flotilla of motorboats, ringed Basswood, while other resorts popped up elsewhere in the Boundary Waters, including on walleye-rich Crooked Lake, overlooking Curtain Falls.

So it went until the late 1940s and 1950s, when, at the urging of conservationists, Congress appropriated money to buy out the region’s private properties. Airplanes also were banned, ensuring that access to the area’s 1 million acres would be mostly by canoe.

All of this occurred long before Matthew Schultz accompanied his dad to the BWCAW for the first time as a sixth-grader.

A Rochester native, U.S. Navy veteran and graduate of the University of Eastern Washington, Schultz, 28, now lives in Ely, at the BWCAW’s doorstep, where he is program manager for Sportsmen for the Boundary Waters.

Like many other Minnesota hunters and anglers, Schultz will be at Thursday’s rally.

“My dad’s driving force in visiting the Boundary Waters was to get away from everything,” Schultz said. “Fishing was a part of our BWCA trips, but also he just wanted to soak in a wild place.”

A proponent of wilderness guru Sigurd Olson’s belief that what is left behind on a canoe trip is more important than what is taken, Schultz totes only a handful of Shad Raps into the BWCAW to catch walleyes or lake trout — purple ones for tannin-tinted water and blue for clear.

“I’ll also carry some jigs and some minnow-like baits, and a few topwater baits for later in the season," he said. “But not much more than that.”

Not only is a suitcase-sized tackle box unnecessary to put a few fish on a stringer, Schultz believes, but — with apologies to his colleague Lukas Leaf — bacon grease isn’t the only option for preparing shore lunch.

“My girlfriend, Claire Sebald, and I like to mix freshly grated ginger, coconut milk and finely chopped lemongrass with Asian fish sauce,” he said. “We poach our fish in that mixture, then pour it and the fish over a bed of jasmine rice.

“With a lime wedge, it’s great.”