About 170 campers at the YMCA Camp du Nord near Ely are stranded with their vehicles behind a washed-out road following heavy rains in the area, and officials are working on getting them out of there.
Families at YMCA camp near Ely stuck on wrong side of washed-out road
An official at YMCA of the North said about 170 campers are safe but unable to leave in vehicles after heavy rains flooded the road to the camp.
The Minnesota Star Tribune
June 21, 2024 at 12:18AM
“Everyone’s doing really well,” said Michel Tigan, vice president of adventure and camp operations for YMCA of the North, which operates the camp. “Everyone’s physically safe … the rain has stopped for the short term.”
Rains washed out a road on camp property Tuesday night, Tigan said, cutting off access for a portion of the camper population. Camp du Nord describes itself as “a family destination located deep in Minnesota’s north sides,” on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness.
Campers could hike out or leave on boats if necessary, but they would need to leave their cars at the camp in order to do so. The current group of campers is supposed to leave at 11 a.m. Saturday, with a new group to come in Sunday afternoon, but it’s not currently clear how that can happen, Tigan said.
“So, you can see this is pretty problematic,” she said. Tigan said the camp’s facilities team is working on solutions that could involve widening of certain paths to accommodate vehicles.
“So, we’re looking at those trail systems that we’ve driven cars on before and seeing how we can bolster them,” Tigan said. “So we can get more vehicles that are currently stranded out through our property.”
Tigan said people are in good spirits despite the struggle. “Communities are an incredible thing in hardship,” she said. “And so our families are picking up shovels and helping to solve these problems.”
A different YMCA camp in Babbitt, Minn., suffered the loss of a building that housed its kitchen earlier this week in a fire. Camp du Nord was supplying meals to the camp until the road was washed out. Undeterred, the cooks there continued on, using a boat to ferry the food across Burntside Lake so it could be picked up for Camp Northern Lights.
Star Tribune staff writer Patrick Condon contributed to this report.
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