A Wild Couple

Barbara and Ted Young run Boundary Country Trekking with adventure, fun and responsibility

Chris Godsey

We who aren’t yet 65 or 70 should strive to be like Ted and Barbara Young, who are those ages. It’s not that we all need to become graduate students and community organizers in Chicago, like they were, then move to a remote location up the Gunflint Trail and open a business, like they did. But if by the time we reach that age we can say we’ve been as mindful, active, and joyful as they seem to be, we’d have lives of which to be proud and unregretful.

Their original Gunflint operation, a guiding and trail-maintenance-service operation called Mid Trail Services, opened in the early 1970s. It quickly expanded in multiple directions, including a B&B, and is now called called Boundary Country Trekking (BCT).

“I still like getting up every day and making breakfast,” Barbara said, incredulous and beaming at her good fortune. “I mean...can you imagine having a job like that? I love talking to people, setting up programs, and doing every part of what we do. I’ll just go on and on doing this. I mean, I hope I’ll know when to stop, and I’m sure I’ve already slowed down some, but who knows what the future holds?”

Ted was born in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area; Barbara, in Ottawa, Ontario. They both took degrees from the University of Minnesota, then moved to Chicago, where Ted got an urban studies degree at Roosevelt University then started organizing. It was the early 1970s, and Barbara hung out with a group of women in the labor-organization movement who were setting up some of the first college-level women’s studies courses. “I also worked at the Field Museum [of Natural History],” she says. “It was a lot of fun.”

Barbara was born into social consciousness, Ted found it on his own.

“I got it from my parents,” Barbara says. “Especially my dad. He was in a labor union. My parents acted as an adoptive family through the Ukranian Catholic church, helping immigrant families adapt to life in the U.S. I remember so many families coming to our house, and all the conversation and concern.

“When we were at the U of M, it was when the Civil Rights Movement was taking place. We marched in Minneapolis. My sister and I took buses to marches in other cities. My parents didn’t think that was unusual at all.”

After a pause, Ted admits, “My parents were Republicans.”

Barbara lets out a huge laugh that takes a while to settle down.

“I acquired my consciousness over the years,” he notes.

They brought their shared sense of it to Minnesota in 1974, when they headed for a Poplar Lake-island cabin Ted’s family had bought in the 1950s.

“We left Chicago with no plan but to stay at the cabin for the summer,” Ted explains. “That was 34 years ago.”

For a few years, they ran their growing group of businesses—trail maintenance, canoe guiding (which Ted had been doing since his teens), dog sledding, hiking, cross-country skiing—out of the tiny family cabin.

“It’s kind of amazing to me how we did that,” Barbara says. “That cabin was very small. We started the B&B by realizing that people sometimes had trouble finding places to stay the nights before and after trips, so we had them staying on the couch, the floor, wherever we could put ‘em. Sometimes I think, ‘We must have been nuts.’ But we weren’t nuts. We loved what we were doing.”

From the late 1980s and into this decade, BCT grew consistently, adding land, yurts and cabins, office space, and vacation packages based around birding, mountain biking, snowmobiling, and wilderness volunteering; Ted and Barbara became exclusive coordinators of the Gunflint Trail’s lodge-to-lodge skiing program and Banadad Ski Trail maintenance; they established inn-to-inn hiking and bicycling excursions in the Gunflint area and along the Mesabi Trail.

Throughout these expansions, they’ve done their best to observe what’s important to them. BCT’s Web site (www.boundarycountrytrekking.com) includes a brief “Statement of Sustainability” and a more-detailed ”Sustainable Business Practices Implementation Plan.”

The sustainability statement begins by saying that sustainable development practices are “the right thing to do,” and also “good for our ‘bottom line.’”

BCT’s sustainable practices plan includes commitments to wise energy, land, employee, water, and other resource management.

“We try to think in little, effective ways,” Ted explains. “We’re trying to transition to all non-harmful cleaning products. We wanted to be using all fluorescent light bulbs by the end of 2007, but some of our incandescents still haven’t burned out, so we didn’t meet that goal. All our ski-trail maintenance is done with snowmobiles, and we try to keep accurate track of the carbon burned in that process, and when people drive in to do volunteer maintenance, then plant trees as an offset.

He says they’ve planted more than 6,000 trees on various properties in the last few years. “We’re seeing significant growth in in trees we planted a few years ago,” he says. “What a thrill.”

The last decade has been challenging for many Gunflint businesses: blowdowns, low-snow winters, rising gas prices, the Big Fire. But Ted and Barbara don’t get discouraged.

“Just living in a place like this seems like it would motivate anybody,” Ted says.

Barbara adds, “Sometimes when I’m driving home from town, I’ll look at a stand of trees or the way light is hitting snow or long grass, and my eyes will well up.... That is loving a place.”