Andy and Doug and I had packed the Beaver full to the headliner with film gear and whatever we'd need to survive 4 days at the somewhat remote fishcamp on an airplane-only-access lake in Ontario, Canada. We met at Cook airport, about a 20 minute flight from the US-Canada border, took on some fuel, and pushed on to make our scheduled customs window. Despite the promising forecast, the horizon currently presented a few rogue showers and what seemed like fairly benign schmutz—a Yiddish-sounding moniker for precip and obscuration that Andy was committed to popularizing.
One thing that has always fascinated me about Minnesota is that so many of the local pilots, when given a choice of where we'd voyage the airplanes, will just bolt and go north to Canada. In the US they call Minnesota the "Land of 10,000 Lakes," but our Canadian neighbors look at us like a parent looks at a young child's burgeoning pride, as if to say isn't that cute?
Ontario, Canada is estimated to have more than 250,000 lakes. I just call it the Land of 10 Million Lakes, and while it's a massive province, much of that water is densely clustered due north of us. It's a region so bountiful with amazing playgrounds for floatplane adventures that...I dunno. It just really gets me excited. I now understand why everyone around here lives to fly north.
We arrived Fort Frances, the Canadian sister town across the river from International Falls, Minnesota. After a brief phone chat with a customs officer 700 miles away in Toronto, we were cleared to hijack the airport loaner car and hit Safeway for sundries and cabin mouse offerings, as well as Rainy Lake Sports for bait. This was a fishing trip.
Years ago, my friends Andy Brown and Gary Gades answered the call to go filming during one of my vacations to Minnesota, both piloting Huskys on amphibs. We called that movie 7 Days On The Range. It was my introduction to northern Minnesota float flying, and Andy and Gary, freshly introduced, became fast friends and have been making trips together ever since.
Andy in his Husky A-1A, back in 2016.Fast forward to 2025, and we've all linked up again. Andy flies a pristine DHC-2 Beaver, and Gary has added an equally pristine Cessna 185 to his stable. Just a month prior we caravanned these two birds to Oshkosh, but for this trip we'd rallied a slightly enhanced team for the mission north, which included: our friend Doug Beck, MSP-based airline pilot & Aeronca Sedan owner, Jeremy Dresel, the mayor of Chisago City, who is flying the hell out of his new Aviat Husky A-1C, and finally Rod Skoog in his beautiful American Champion Scout. Oh, and me, Zane—auteur and planeless poser. Master of the ride-along video capture and documentarian.
While we cleared customs at the Fort Frances airport on amphibs, straight floaters can also park at this dock on the river in town and clear.We packed groceries and minnows into the remaining empty spaces in the Beaver, some into the big Aerocets on Gary's wagon, and departed Fort Frances. It doesn't take long before you notice that the roads have been left behind. I saw a few logging roads here and there but they soon faded out as we pushed further north.
I'd been primed for this arrival at the camp and was looking forward to it. Nestled into the narrow of an island, the camp perfectly aligned with the mouth of a river that spills into bay, surrounded by tall pines and glacier-hewn granite slabs. The winds were just right to make a straight-in, but you have to be on your game, especially in heavily loaded larger singles like ours.
At this point my face was pressed against the window like a homesick dog. We taxied in and Andy cut the mixture to the Beaver's chortling radial. It was home, too. Nothing to hear now but the tinkling of cooling exhaust metal and calm lake water parting as we slowly approached the dock.
Time to unload, open up the cabin and outbuildings, and dig out the beer and cheese. Except that I cut beer out of my diet over a year ago, and I forgot cheese at Safeway. Peanut butter & jelly time, then.
There's really one main reason people make the effort to cross the border and get this far north—the fishing is insane. I could see Andy and Gary scratching their necks like crack fiends, hungering to get on the water and feed innocent live sucker minnows with their tough little lips to monster walleye. Doug was less possessed, maybe more like me and just in awe of this slice of summer heaven. We had generator power, running water and hot showers, and satellite internet.
Fishcamp from on high.Andy, Gary, Doug, and I launched the 16 foot boats to go catch dinner.
In all of sportsman history, billions of dollars have been spent just getting to this moment. We had arrived here in a few hours, the sounds of society noticeably absent save for the rumbling of a distant Beaver servicing one of a handful of other outposts on this lake.
I love fishing but being from the Pacific Northwest, I've always tended toward small stream angling with dry flies or Steelhead in our rivers. Chasing walleye on live bait is a new thing but holy hell it was awesome.
As evening rolled around, we indulged in the irreverent luxuries of a well-managed camp like showers, internet, and full-size propane refrigerator. It was nice to be able to wind down, look at camera footage/ back it up (you never know when your iPhone will go submersible), and process the current reality. It was so awesome. But even with all those amenities, caveman TV was streaming live by the north dock.
We have Andy to thank for this. In the midst of the pandemic, he purchased this camp from the former owners who had reached their end-of-line for the outfitting business. As a dual citizenship Canadian/American, it was a rare opportunity to buy into a dream cabin and run it as a remote outfitter—mainly for friends and family. And a friendly population of local Canadian mice. Time for bed. Morning was a question mark: go flying or fishing?
Some fog and short-lived ceilings made the decision for us. Andy recommended we head for a deeper area of the lake, more than 150 feet, and target some Lake Trout who tend to hang out lower.
It's almost too easy with live bait. I actually found a big rubber jig with a rusty hook and started using that to see if I could fool them, and even found my way into a hog of a bass.
The final 2 companions in our group—Jeremy and Rod—were on a slight trailing schedule and had departed the Twin Cities later in the day, overnighting at Rod's cabin on Kabetogama Lake, adjacent to Voyageurs National Park which is essentially the Canadian border. After waiting out some low ceilings, they finally arrived, and were no less giddy about being here.
Fishcamp class of 2025 L to R: Rod, Andy, Jeremy 
That afternoon I got the guys to go out for a filming session—all 4 airplanes. If there was another soul to be found on this lake, they got a nice little airshow.
Doug and I commandeered the nicer of the two boats and attempted to shoot off the tripod with mixed success. We'll see how it all turns out in the edit.
I waded ashore to set up the tripod on some rocks for a stabilization...
Which yielded some shots like this:
And strapped the GoPro to the strut of Jeremy's A-1C Husky.
One more day in the can, tomorrow we'd set out to check on another friend's camp northeast of ours. But not before getting Rod and Jeremy out for some walleye fishing.
This being my first time in the area, I found the distinctions in geology and vertical features interesting from one lake to the next. Of course there are no mountains in the traditional sense, so one who's accustomed to "real" terrain eventually develops a greater sensitivity to the understated topography of the region. This other lake had even more pronounced granite walls and probably deeper holes.
We landed and snaked back into a secluded bay that felt like we could have been in British Columbia. Friend was nowhere to be found and no airplane docked, obviously, so we cut out again for our camp.
Jeremy and Rod departed first and were at altitude by the time Andy opened the throttle on the big radial, which worked out great as Jeremy caught our takeoff from an altitude that captures the expansive beauty of the surrounding area.
The 20 minute flight back to our camp on our lake was a moment for me. I sat relaxed in the second row, finally enjoying the glassy air and focusing on the ground below through the observer side windows. Some relief had set in that I'd captured enough footage to recreate this experience. It also had galvanized that this life choice to move closer to this region was the right one—float life or die. Andy and Doug were clearly feeling the moment as well, visibly comfortable together in the cockpit.
The next morning, a final walleye run in the boats, a walleye & eggs brunch, and then it was time to pack up and head back to the US.
What an adventure! Maybe that's a little generous—I usually think of adventure as providing a higher measure of adversity, and this was just an easy trip. Chalk that up to preparation by our host. Great wx, bugs weren't bad, airplanes ran like tops, the US Customs & Border Patrol let us back in.
Thank you to our Canadian contingent for sharing this slice of heaven. Next time I would love to meet up with other Ontario locals. I know at least Steelroamer is very close to where we were.
If you've read this far, thank you. A trip report like this isn't to brag or boast. In fact, one thing that sucked is that I didn't do any flying myself. But one can't ask for anything more in life than a weekend in the backcountry with a few solid guys and fighting some big ass fish. These days it's important for me to pen these stories and commit them to history as it aids recollection when I edit my movies. By that time though, it's all a fish tale and nothing should be trusted to have much accuracy.
