Anderson: The Chainsaw Sisters Saloon is gone, but the Echo Trail is still a pathway to possibilities

ON THE ECHO TRAIL — When Michele and Marlene Carlson graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, they took about two minutes to decide they didn’t want to be teachers. This was long before they became known as the Chain Saw Sisters and opened a saloon on this bendy road about midway between the Minnesota towns of Buyck and Ely.

Oftentimes, it’s said the Echo Trail connects Ely with Crane Lake, or even more mistakenly, with the town of Orr. Charles Buyck, for whom the village of Buyck is named, and who was lured to northern Minnesota by the Homestead Act of 1863, would disagree.

I was thinking about this the other day as I moseyed onto the gravelly Echo Trail in Buyck, angling toward Ely. A few years had passed since I had motored this northern Minnesota roadway end to end, and the stretch near the intersection with Buyck had been widened and the trees and brush that bracketed it had been cleared. The whiskey smugglers who canoed into this country from Canada during the Prohibition, packing 100-proof elixir, wouldn’t have recognized it. Nor would the loggers, whose steel axeheads and size 10 horseshoes can still be found on the shorelines of Fourtown Lake and other waterways along the border.

Despite the trail’s changes, I recognized it not only as a road but as a pathway to possibilities. I’ve hunted grouse alongside it, chased walleyes, too. And years ago, when I lived in Ely, I opened the duck season a couple of times on a wild rice-filled lake that adjoined the trail. The lake not only gave up a few mallards but, just as importantly, offered a place to light a campfire as refuge from an October storm.

Where the Chain Saw Sisters Saloon fits in the Echo Trail’s long and storied history is for others to decide. What is known is that Michele and Marlene’s establishment was located at the Mudro Lake entry point to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.

Known as well is that the joint served a working man’s beer. Absent the benefit of electricity, the saloon’s propane-powered refrigerator harbored a brew whose chilled cans featured paintings of feisty northern pike and florid rooster pheasants — telltale signs of St. Paul’s finest, Schmidt.

While driving the trail, I stopped to explore a grouse and woodcock habitat project the U.S. Forest Service had undertaken, and at a bend in the road, I pulled over to watch a pair of beautifully plumed mallards cavort near a duo of similarly majestic Canada geese. Also in my rearview was Jeanette Lake, where I spent a good while watching two kayakers dip and pull their paddles through the tannic-colored water. Nearer to shore, a pair of loons disappeared beneath the lake’s surface, fishing.

Soon enough, the Mudro Lake entry point came into view, and memories of the Chainsaw Sisters Saloon flooded back.

While working behind their bar, Michele and Marlene, who grew up in Richfield, looked very much like the twins they are, and identical ones at that, with nearly the same interests. Which explains why they attended the same college, studied the same subjects, and in 1978 came north together, to Ely, to take jobs with the U.S. Forest Service.

“Timber-stand improvement was our job,” Marlene said the other day. “We did cuttings and also planted red pines. That was real work, planting the pines, because there are too many rocks up here to work around. We had trouble just finding enough dirt for planting.”

When their Forest Service jobs ended in 1986, Marlene and Michele looked for something to do. Hearing that Potlatch was selling some of its timberland, including 40 acres near the Mudro Lake entry point, the sisters figured it would be a good place to open a bar that in summer catered to canoeists and in winter served snowmobilers.

Already, the sisters had been living along the trail, near Everett Lake, in a rented cabin that had electricity but no running water. So building a bar and a place to live that was 18 miles from Ely and had only a generator for power seemed a reasonable idea.

Besides, as anyone residing north of Cloquet, Minn., knows, scraping a paycheck together is as much a part of living in the North Woods as portaging a canoe or filleting a walleye.

“Neither of us were married at the time, and we liked being in the woods,” Michele said. “So we thought we would build the bar and see what happened.”

The Chainsaw Sisters Saloon had a nearly 20 -year run. But Marlene was part of it for only 18 months. When she married in September 1988 — and Michele, fittingly, followed in matrimony six months later — Marlene moved off the Echo Trail with her husband, Sam Zorman, leaving the saloon to Michele and her husband, Mark Richards.

When the latter pair retired in 2006, the Trust for Public Land bought the saloon property and transferred it, ultimately, to the Forest Service.

Today, Marlene and Michele, age 69, live with their respective husbands a half block apart in Winton, Minn., population 165, a few miles from Ely.

The Echo Trail, meanwhile, though still a footpath to possibilities, is different from when I first traveled it years ago, different still from when the earliest loggers arrived to clear its towering pines, and even more different from when the Chippewa lived among wigwams and game trails.

Paradoxically, perhaps, the smoothest stretch of what historically has been a very bumpy road might be its least interesting.

Sixteen miles from Ely, where blacktop replaces the Echo Trail’s gravel covering, I started speeding up, in more of a hurry, it seemed, though for no good reason.