All-women crew paddles 1,380 miles to Hudson Bay to promote conservation, inclusion

NINA MOINI: Four women have just returned to the US after an amazing journey, canoeing more than 1,300 miles over 80 days from Lake Superior to Hudson Bay, Canada. The young women call themselves the Hudson Bay Girls, and they believe they're the first publicly documented all women's crew to do this route.

But that wasn't their only mission. It was also to raise awareness about environmental stewardship and encourage women to reclaim space in paddle sports. Joining me now are two members of the crew, Abby Cichocki and Helena Karlstrom. Thank you both so much for visiting Minnesota Now.

ABBY CICHOCKI: Well, thank you, Nina.

HELENA KARLSTROM: Thank you for having us.

NINA MOINI: Quite a journey. 80 days. I hope everyone's still friends.

[LAUGHTER]

ABBY CICHOCKI: Yes, yes.

NINA MOINI: I'm just kidding. No, but Abby, tell us a little bit about this idea. Where did the idea come from to do the trip?

ABBY CICHOCKI: So me and Olivia worked at the Northern Lakes Canoe Base up in Ely, Minnesota. It's a Girl Scout program. And we had read Hudson Bay Bound by Natalie Warren, and they started in Minneapolis and paddled to Hudson Bay. We were like, man, I think we can do this. I think we can do this long trip. But we really want to start in the Boundary Waters. We really want to bring awareness to the place where we all got our beginnings, and so that's kind of where it all hatched.

NINA MOINI: OK. So Helena, tell us a little bit about this route that you took. It's the voyageur fur trading route. How did you decide?

HELENA KARLSTROM: Yeah. So this is actually a historic route to the Hudson Bay. It was based on how voyageurs would get from the stockade at Lake Superior to Hudson Bay at the main fur trading factory, York Factory. So we also have a historical aspect to this trip where we wanted to follow the traditional ways that people would travel here. So it's from the voyageurs' perspective and then also from the Indigenous perspective as well. We wanted to follow these traditional waterways.

NINA MOINI: So cool. Abby, tell me a little bit about just what goes into planning a trip like this. It must take a lot of planning and supplies. What was that like?

ABBY CICHOCKI: Oh my goodness. I could not even count the number of spreadsheets I have.

[LAUGHTER]

But lots of planning, lots of reaching out to people who've done different parts of the route, seeing what it's going to be like. Where can we ship our food to? Where can we buy our food? It's a lot of work. So we would meet together once a week to go over it all and make sure we had all of our eggs in a line.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And Abby, how do you transport all that stuff?

ABBY CICHOCKI: Oh, OK. So all of our food resupplies we actually shipped with the post, but everything else we carried in our canoes. So all of our tents and food and any gear we needed on the water, we carried on our backs and in our canoes.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. And so tell me a little bit more about the shipping, because I understand you would send stuff ahead of time to different points along the way.

ABBY CICHOCKI: Yeah. So it's a very remote route. There's not very many towns. There's less grocery stores.

NINA MOINI: Sure.

ABBY CICHOCKI: So what we would do is we'd find people on Facebook, or I would call a B and B, and I'd be like, hey. I'm doing this route. Can I ship you food? And then when we'd get there, we'd paddle up, and they'd have our food there waiting for us.

NINA MOINI: Cool. So a bit of community help and pitching in. I really like that. So part of your mission, Helena, was, like you all said, to get women in paddle sports and owning that space. Tell me a little bit about that, because I don't a lot about it. Has that changed since you were a kid? Was there not a lot of room for women.

HELENA KARLSTROM: Yeah. I think something that was really apparent to us when we were doing this trip is that we wanted it to be an all women's crew because all of us, as people in the outdoors, we found that we couldn't find a lot of mentors out there that were women. So we kind of wanted to be that person that shows people that, yes, we can, and that this is what we can do.

We got a lot of support from the Girl Scout space. And it was really amazing seeing the strong women that taught us to be leaders in the outdoors and then becoming those leaders ourselves. So it has really been kind of like forging our way as women in the outdoors, but we all really came into ourselves as leaders through the Boundary Waters and on this trip.

NINA MOINI: Cool. And you mentioned you have to have a bit, I would imagine, of an adventurous spirit. Obviously, you all are educated and well versed in being in the outdoors. But I'm kind of wondering, Abby, were you ever scared? Was there anything--

ABBY CICHOCKI: Oh my goodness. Yes.

NINA MOINI: Any animals or anything kind of unforeseen? Give me a story, and then I'll ask Helena, too.

ABBY CICHOCKI: Yeah. So much wildlife. There was one night I remember where we were all in the tent, and we were listening to the distant wolves howl on Lake Winnipeg. And we woke up to it, and we were listening for a couple of minutes. And all of a sudden, just outside of our tent on the other side, we hear a smaller howling. We're like, oh my god. Our tent's surrounded by these wolves.

NINA MOINI: Oh, no.

ABBY CICHOCKI: What do we even do?

NINA MOINI: What did you do?

ABBY CICHOCKI: I mean, we yelled at them, and they all ran away. But they knew where the food was for sure.

NINA MOINI: Sure. Helena, how about you?

ABBY CICHOCKI: Yeah. I mean, adventurous spirit. That's in all of us. We all had a real hankering to do this trip. I'd say lots of encounters with wildlife. We saw so many animals. We saw plenty of bears on this trip, black bears. We saw moose, moose with their calves and everything coming towards us, which was really crazy. But I'd say one of the biggest challenges for me was learning how to do all of the whitewater that we had to get through.

So that was the time that I felt like the most rugged paddler out there where, hundreds of miles into the back country, running class one to three rapids, which can be pretty dangerous. And we paddled around a lot of waterfalls, so we had a really good time navigating that and learning how to communicate with each other through these stressful situations where you can't always use your words.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. I love that. And I made the joke about 80 days, and is everybody still friends? But I bet you really got to each other and yourselves on maybe just another level. Abby, is there anything you learned about the other women on the trip or about yourself that you would want to share?

ABBY CICHOCKI: Absolutely. We know each other so intimately now. But I think the biggest thing is we learned where our true boundaries-- how far we could push ourselves and push each other, how many hours we could paddle a day. How many miles could we fit in? And how many days in a row can we feasibly be at the brink of exhaustion? So we really learned how to push ourselves in a new way.

NINA MOINI: Helena, how about you?

HELENA KARLSTROM: Yeah. I think on this trip, every day was a gamble of what challenges that we were going to face. I mean, we started our trip with an eight and a half mile portage, so that means carrying all of our gear across land from one lake to another. And that put us to the test because we went into this trip not knowing each other very well. We had only met twice before, actually.

So that was kind of where we learned how to work with each other through tough things, because that portage took us 12 hours-- 12 hours of brutally walking, carrying 115 pound packs. So we learned that this is the time where we need to pick each other up. So when someone was down, exhausted, crying on the ground, we knew that it took one of us to get a second wind and pick them up and keep going.

NINA MOINI: I love that. It's really a team effort and pushing each other and learning about each other. Abby, we have just about a minute left, but obviously, being like in the Boundary Waters-- and you have to have a lot of skill already. But for folks who may be listening and they're like, I would really love to explore nature in that way or get into paddle sports, but I haven't been doing it all my life-- do you have any advice for folks?

ABBY CICHOCKI: Yeah. I would say-- we're not these crazy people. We were just normal people just a few years ago. I actually got my start in paddle sports a senior in high school. So truly, you just have to get out there. Whether you go for a night, for a day paddle, whether you go through an outfitter, or whether you just go in your backyard. You just try to connect with the woods in any way you can.

NINA MOINI: Yeah. Helena, how about you?

HELENA KARLSTROM: Yeah. A big part of this trip was making this accessible for other people, so we just want people to that, yes, they can. Everybody deserves a place in the outdoors. We did a lot of documenting of our trip online so that we could show people that can do it, too.

NINA MOINI: Great. Thank you both so much. Congratulations. I'm really happy for you both for completing this milestone. That's huge. Thank you.

ABBY CICHOCKI: Thank you, Nina.

HELENA KARLSTROM: Thank you so much.

ABBY CICHOCKI: Great being here.

HELENA KARLSTROM: It's been awesome.

NINA MOINI: Thank you. That was Abby Cichocki and Helena Karlstrom, two members of the Hudson Bay Girls portage or portage crew.