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Depending on where you get your information, the Kekekabic Trail is 36, 41, or 46 miles long. But according to Martin Kubik, who has hiked the trail 25 to 30 times (maybe more than anyone else) the winding, hilly, minimally maintained rugged path between Ely and the end of the Gunflint Trail stretches 42 miles.
“I always ended up at one location 15 minutes later than I should have, and when we finally GPS’ed the trail, we found out the spot was half a mile further than the map indicated,” said Martin.
Why does it matter how long the trail is? Well, because of its’ difficulty, it’s either 42 miles of pleasure or pain, or both, depending on your frame of mind and conditioning. Martin says it takes three days, maybe four days, to hike it comfortably. He did note, “There have been some crazy people who have run it in one day, but I wouldn’t advise trying that.”
As it is affectionately called, the Kek is part of the 400-mile North Country Trail that runs from Snowbank Lake Road to Jay Cooke State Park. But for a time, if not for efforts by Kubik and a group of friends, the thin BWCAW trail might have disappeared, lost in a tangle of brush and trees, overgrown and forgotten.
“The Forest Service did not want to maintain it,” said Martin. “So, my friends and I maintained it.”
That didn’t always sit well with the bosses at the Forest Service, though, he said. You see, Martin didn’t get permits to clear the path. He said the regular Forest Service employees who were out working in the field seemed to think it was a good idea to maintain the trail, just not the guys and gals that worked in the offices.
“I wasn’t getting anywhere arguing with them, so a couple of lawyers volunteered to help me, and from then on, we made good forward progress. It was the iron fist in a velvet glove approach,” he grinned.
As for the Forest Service, their argument could have been that the Kekekabic Trail was created in the 1930s for fire suppression crews and wasn’t intended to be a hiking trail for the public. Still, once formed, the trail became part of the fabric and lore of the north country, a goal for some to be faced and conquered.
Martin first hiked the Kek in 1974 as part of his training to work at the Adventurous Christian camp, located mid-Gunflint trail.
“First, we did a canoe trip,” he said.
The canoe trip was quite rigorous, but the Kek proved even more daunting.
“That was my baptism to the Kek. It was rainy and wet, a cool spring. We ran out of food and had to eat young shoots of cattails. We were very hungry, and the shoots tasted delicious.
The name for the trail comes from the Ojibwe language. Kekekabic in Ojibwe is pronounced “Kekequabic” (hawk-cliff or hawk-iron lake).
Despite the first trip being somewhat arduous, Kubic was hooked.
Following his graduation from the University of Minnesota, Martin went to work at 3M, first employed as an electrical engineer and then later as an advanced engineer specialist, retiring after 37 years.
“I was hired by 3M in 1979. Me and a work buddy of mine hiked the Kek pretty much every year.”
But, said Martin, the trail was getting severely overgrown, and deadfalls cluttered what path they could find. “At times, we would use game trails for hiking because they were better than the Kek.”
And while he and friends worked to clear the trail, it wasn’t done annually, and it was apparent that more needed to be done consistently, or the trail would vanish into the forest.
In 1990 Martin formed the Kekekabic Trail Club, which was dedicated to annually maintaining the trail. That first year he organized a tree clearing group of volunteers, and over 3,000 trees were removed from the path. Until then, the Kek had been cleared every three to five years, and with that low maintenance, the trail was filled with obstacles for hikers.
Clearing the trail is hard work. Only hand tools are allowed, and crews often canoe and portage into hard-to-reach sections.
In the mid 1990s, Martin took a cassette recorder with him and made notes as he hiked. Using that recording and notes, he and Angel Anderson, a Forest Service employee, created a trail guide published by Makenzie Map company and later was part of the Fisher map series. Today that map has been republished by the Kekekabic Trail Club of the North Country Trail Association.
In 2002, Martin formed the Boundary Waters Advisory Committee, a 501(c)3 non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to serving the trails in the BWCAW. The committee’s mission is to organize trail clearing trips, provide education through increased awareness through presentations at local events, and advocate, lobbying the Forest Service and Congress to keep trails maintained.
Besides the Kek, the advisory committee works to see the Pow Wow Trail, Eagle Mountain Trail, Kelso Mountain Trail, and Snowbank Lake Trails are cleared for hikers.
In the field guide for hiking the Kek, Martin and Angela Anderson included a quote from Whitney Evans, a Boy Scout who walked the path in 1949.
“The trail struggles its way through swamps, around cliffs, up the sides of bluffs, and across rocky ridges. It is choked with nightmarish patches of clinging brush. It is blocked with tangles of windfalls and standing timber. It is pressed in places on all sides of an outcropping of rock.
“Sometimes it snakes its way over old riverbeds, slippery, rocky and treacherous. In other areas, it is a peaceful path loping through open stands of timber with a soft, moist, mossy carpet underfoot.”
From May through September, the Forest Service offers BWCAW day or full through hiking passes.
Today the trail is maintained by the Kekekabic Trail Club of the North Country Trail Association. It’s not for the faint of heart, but hike it once, and you might be like Martin Kubik, hooked for life on the wild beauty and daunting challenges the Kekekabic presents.
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