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They're Back! Visitation Grad, Best Friend Complete Historic Canoe Trip

Ann Raiho and her friend Natalie Warren became the first women to canoe from Minneapolis to Hudson Bay.

On Aug. 3, recent St. Olaf College grads Ann Raiho and Natalie Warren were a little more than two months into their quest to become the first women to canoe from Fort Snelling to Hudson Bay in Canada. They were cold, tired and on their 15th day paddling Lake Winnipeg in Manitoba, the 11th-largest lake in the world.

They knew they had to be getting close.

“We got to six of those points (where we thought we had reached the end) when we saw we had to keep going,” Raiho, a graduate, said in a phone interview.

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“When we did see (the end) …that was a big moment. We both started crying.”

But it wasn’t the end of their trip. The pair still had more than 360 miles of their journey to go.

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But finally, on Aug. 25, they reached York Factory, Manitoba on the southwestern edge of Hudson Bay. In all, the trip covered 2,250 miles, lasted 85 days, entered three states and one Canadian province–and garnered them one dog.

That’s right, in Norway House, Manitoba, Raiho and Warren adopted a stray German Shepherd mix they named Myhan, a word similar to “wolf” in the language of the Cree First Nations tribe.

The pair wasn’t thinking about adopting a dog when they set out on June 2. They were more concerned with the high water levels on the Minnesota River.

“We had a hard time (at first),” Raiho said. “The Minnesota River was at flood stage.”

Most of the way, they were paddling upstream, instead of down.

Still, they found time to enjoy their surroundings.

“We thought it was just going to be a river of mud,” Warren said at a Sept. 22 presentation at REI in Bloomington. “We found it unbelievably beautiful.” 

After they finished the Minnesota River stretch (335 miles), they started on the Red River on June 25, where Raiho said the paddling was “easy but pretty boring.” They finished the Red River leg on July 16, and began on the massive Lake Winnipeg July 19.

Both Raiho and Warren raved about the kindness of the people they met along the way. From meals to lodging, generous support was everywhere–like in Montevideo, MN, where a farmer offered them his retrofitted silo–complete with satellite TV–for the night.

“We had to switch the mentality of our trip,” Warren said. “‘Maybe we should eat this home-cooked meal.’”

The trip allowed Raiho and Warren to display generosity of their own, fundraising for YMCA Camp Menogyn, where the pair met and became friends.

As of Sept. 12, when the most recent numbers were available, they had raised $1,600, Raiho said. And at the Sept. 22 presentation at REI, they auctioned off a new Langford Prospector canoe, just like the one they used on the trip, which retails for $3,570 at shopcanoeing.com.

Jack Stone, owner of Stone Harbor Wilderness Supply in Grand Marais, MN, gave Raiho and Warren the canoe for their trip after they won him over.  

“The first thing that (appealed to me) was that they were taking the route Eric Sevareid took in ‘Canoeing with the Cree,’” Stone said. “As a young man I read the book and it really spoke to me.

“After sitting down with them and listening … I was so impressed. It was a no-brainer. They didn’t let me down.”

Indeed they didn’t. After the exhausting trip on Lake Winnipeg—on one day, Warren said it was so foggy that it was the first time she had paddled without being able to see land—and the stop in Norway House, they finished by paddling the Hayes River from Aug.7-25.

Raiho and Warren say they are happy to be home and at the same time proud of what they accomplished.

As a bonus, the trip taught them some things, too.

“I think the biggest thing we took from it … (was that) if nature was telling us to stay back, stay back,” Raiho said. “I learned that you shouldn’t push yourself on wilderness trips.”

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