Author: outfitter

Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Trip Planning Guide Excellent trip planning guide for the BWCAW: Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Trip Planning Guide created and shared by the USDA Forest Service. Excerpt from the guide: GREAT GLACIERS carved the physical features of what is today known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW) by scraping…

Original 1932 log lodge, large meeting room, check-in, check-out, hi-speed WiFi (over 100 mbps) picnic shelter with gas grill Rockwood Lodge:Rockwood Lodge was founded in the mid-1920’s by Paul and Jennie Stolz and Wally and Helen Anderson. The lodge and cabins were built of local timber by the two men (with help from their wives…

One of our customers posted a very well written trip report to www.bwca.com – http://bwca.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=trip.report_view&sel_trp_id=4934 A Childhood Dream Come True by mashpotatomezzo Trip Type: Paddling Canoe Entry Date: 07/20/2017 Entry & Exit Point: Lizz and Swamp Lakes (EP 47) Number of Days: 5 Group Size: 2 Trip Introduction: After growing up listening to my father tell stories of his adventures…

Photo Shawn James CANOE TRIPPER SHAWN JAMES ON THE UNIQUE APPEAL OF SOLO CANOE ADVENTURES WRITTEN BY SHAWN JAMES It is four a.m. and I lie awake, mesmerized by a spectacular display of the aurora borealis dancing just above the horizon to the north of my fly-less tent. A billion twinkling stars slowly fade as…

The leaves are beginning to change. I drove to McFarland Lake on the Arrowhead Trail on Tuesday (Sept 12), and I noticed many individual trees already with color. The road that I took, Shoe Lake Road, is a narrow forest road that goes north of Greenwood lake but just South of the BWCA. It’s barely…

We’ve had a lot of moose sightings and walleyes caught already in 2017, with about 10 weeks of the season left to go. The moose have been seen on the Gunflint Trail, near the bunkhouse at Rockwood Lodge, and in the Boundary Waters around Horseshoe Lake. Walleye have been caught in Poplar Lake, with a…

— The dogs woke up at first light on day one of our trip.  After spending hours last night gazing upon the heavens that seemed to reach from straight above all the way down to my feet due to the mirror like surface of the lake, I was not too happy that my dogs wanted…

Spring is here and Rockwood is ready for it…yet we are excited to have a bunch of projects coming to completion and will be welcoming guests as early as next week!  We’ve remodeled the gift shop in the lodge and are putting the finishing touches on a ‘new to us’ cabin, Cabin 12… The former…

It’s really feeling like spring. The lake is still 20″ thick with ice, but there is water forming on the top. It won’t be long now and we’ll be talking about ice-out. The projects on the resort are coming along nicely, we want to have Cabin 12 ready for large groups this summer. It’s a…

Planning your trip for next year? January 31st (at 9am) is the go-live date for reserving the perfect entry point for the perfect day! – Reservations for all entry points may be made on a first-come, first-served basis beginning January 31, 2018, 9 a.m. Central Time. Reservations are for dates from May 1 to September…

It’s late September and we are beginning to wrap things up for the season. We’ll close for a month on September 30th, and open again in late October with our first winter cabin! We are excited to have a winter cabin, it’s a large house right on the lake that used to be the owner’s…

One of our guests took this amazing shot of a rainbow over Rockwood Lodge – Thank you Kevin!

https://youtu.be/TIiPAtDxxOs Nice video of a family of 4 paddling across Ram Lake in the BWCAW, on the Eastern side of the wilderness near Grand Marais, MN.

The roof on the outfitters is DONE! (view large image here) We have a hundred excuses why it took us 34 days to complete it…from completely removing the old porch, removing both layers of shingles, replacing rotting sheathing, custom building new corbels, mortise and tenon joints for the porch lintel, to a new custom sign…

Today marks 90 years of operation for Rockwood Lodge and Outfitters! Originally Camp Rockwood, the land was purchased on July 16, 1926.

Link to big version of photo. Several big events just happened at Rockwood, one week before our 90th anniversary. First, we completed half of the outfitter’s new roof! Yes, it’s still got a monster bow in it from 80 years of use, but it’s on good and tight. Second, we made our first of 79…

Nearly Summer! We’ve had a busy few months here at Rockwood. Our first outfitting trips seem like yesterday even though they were over 7 weeks ago! The bunkhouse and cabins have been full several times, and the bookings are looking very strong. In addition we have every one of our Tandem canoes rented out the last…

A nice video of a Moose and her calf on the gunflint Trail – https://youtu.be/UROcBpATobg

We’ve had several sightings of moose twins at Rockwood, and now we have photographic evidence – thanks to our Guests! 

Shirley Wilson was in Cabin 2 and took some amazing video of a fox and her kits! update: This video clip made it to Almanac, a Minnesota PBS television show, look for it at 21:34 on the June 10th (2016) show- http://www.tpt.org/almanac/

Today was filled with a lot of activities at Rockwood. We had two awesome guests in Cabin 2 all week, celebrating their honeymoon at Rockwood Lodge! They reported seeing a cub bear, moose, and many different animals on their hiking trips. They especially liked getting up and personal with a Loon on Poplar Lake while…

We are getting the new graphics printed and painted and on t-shirts. Check out some pictures! [vc_media_grid element_width=”4″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1462781210946-749057091587fd667d46aaea1afd0ba6-5″ include=”1989,1993,1994,1992″]  

Lots of movement on the ice today, Poplar Lake. It opened a large area next to the island in our bay and the stream between the shore and the island is completely open. There’s still a large sheet in the middle of the bay. Small stacks of snow where I piled it with the snow…

Please take time to read this excellent story by our friend James Michael from his upcoming book “From a Rustic Cabin”. Into_The_BWCA_3-6-2016_james_michael Posted with limited permission by the author; use is limited to this website and not passed onto any other publisher without written permission.

Today was an exciting day, we helped a bunch of our customers book their Entry Permits into the BWCAW. It’s great thinking about the summer when it’s 20 degrees outside. I just checked and all three of our Entry Points on Poplar Lake (Lizz/Swamp 47, Meeds 48, Skipper 49) are wide open, with just a…

The Rockwood Webcam is up and running! Bookmark this page: www.rockwoodbwca.com/webcam and visit it often as the image is updated every 15 minutes.

Merry Christmas! Download the letter here…

As Mike and Lin start the next chapter of their lives I want to take this time to say thank you to both of them for taking such good care of us during this transition. It would be hard to find two nicer people and if you had a chance to meet them you know…

Jack enjoying Rockwood.

— Previous owner Lin Sherfy and new owner Carl Madsen standing next to Poplar lake We were going through some old stuff in storage and stopped to take a photo. The trees are heavy with snow, and everything looks like a Christmas Card.