The Happy Camper: Canada Ends Quetico’s Remote Area Border Crossing Permit
Some interesting news has hit the Quetico Provincial Park backcountry. The Canadian government has terminated the traditional Remote Area Border Crossing Permit (RABC). Starting September 14, 2026, travellers entering Canada through remote areas, including portage routes from the US Boundary Waters Canoe Area into Quetico, now have to go through a designated Port of Entry rather than apply online to cross the border in the interior (there are future plans to have a designated telephone reporting site).
Why the change? The reasoning is kind of vague. The government has a short reply on their website: “To further enhance border integrity.” The scoop, however, between tourism companies, lodges, outfitters and cabin owners is it was a symbol to the American government that Canada is “trying” to stop the drug trade between the Canada and US border.
Yep, it seems portage packs are full of Fentanyl, a very potent opioid pain reliever that the President of the United States claimed a year back is coming in from Canada by an incredible scale.
To be quite honest, it doesn’t mean too much to Canadian paddlers—or drug traders. Over 93 percent of Quetico use is from American paddlers, with the majority of them entering through the Ely Boundary Waters remote access point. That’s huge! And how does that actually stop a possible drug trade from Canada to US? It just doesn’t make much sense.
I crossed into the Canada from the US once a couple of decades ago. It was for an article I was writing on renowned American conservationist Aldo Leopold’s canoe trip into Canada’s Quetico Park.
I’ll admit that it may have seemed a little odd: a Canadian canoeist wanting to enter the United States so that they can re-enter Canada’s Quetico Park from the US side and thereby retrace an historic route taken by the American conservationist. The US border guard found the whole idea a bit too quirky, especially when I launched into a spiel about how important the trip was to me. My speech was short. I only got to the part about my long-time desire to visit the same lakes and rivers that Aldo Leopold, a wilderness visionary and author of the quintessential environmental book Sand County Almanac had when the guard simply waved me through. I’m not sure if he suddenly agreed with the reasoning behind my trip or just couldn’t bear to listen to my detailed explanation, but he let me pass.
In a couple of hours, I had arrived at Ely, Minnesota, to begin my pilgrimage. I accessed Quetico Provincial Park just as Leopold did in 1924, by way of the remote ranger station situated on Basswood Lake’s Prairie Portage. Once I arrived, and portaged across to Canada, I still had to wait in line for over an hour before being able to register. It was a busy place. I counted 112 American canoeists and kayakers waiting to be get into the promised land—Quetico Provincial Park.
US paddlers adore Quetico, and they actually helped protect and promote it. Sigurd Olson, another renowned writer and conservationist, befriended the celebrated Canadian writer and conservationists, Eric Morse, while portaging through his beloved Quetico-Superior canoe country. In the 1950s, they joined forces and went on to form a group of Canadian and American writers and bureaucrats—dubbing themselves the “Voyageurs.” They went on to produce some of the most important behind-the-scenes conservation work in Canada and the US.
I wonder what Olson and Morse would think about the elimination of the Remote Border Crossing Permit system. I’m guessing they’re rolling in their graves right now. So is Leopold.
Thinking back to me retracing my Leopold trip through Boundary Waters and Quetico, there was one very memorable moment. I had just paddled full tilt down the middle of Basswood Lake, with the United States to the left and Canada to the right. To mark the occasion, I fastened an American flag to one gunwale and a Canadian flag to the other. Then, making camp my first night I pitched my tent on the same site that Leopold used, and even used the same border marker for a tent peg that he did.
I lit up the tent with one of those old-fashioned candle lanterns to read Leopold’s classic Sand County Almanac. It was the content of this book that later caused environmentalists to call Leopold the “father of the new conservation movement.” Sadly, Leopold died the same year his book went to print (1949), and he would never know how inspirational his writing would become to so many people. According to historian Donald Fleming, Leopold was “the Moses of the New Conservation impulse of the 1960s and 1970s, who handed down the Tablets of the Law but did not enter the promised land.”
Of all the short essays in Sand County Almanac, my favourite has to be “Thinking Like a Mountain,” in which Leopold tells the tale of shooting a mother wolf:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.
Reading the wolf story that evening along the border of Canada’s Quetico Park and the US Boundary Waters got me thinking. Leopold used the wolf as a way to measure the health of a wild place. The spirit of the wolf, of wilderness, was seen dying in its eyes that day on the mountain. The question is, has the “fierce green fire” now faded in Leopold’s beloved north country, or even that of Sigurd Olson and Eric Morse, or more importantly, the thousands of American paddlers who choose their beloved chunk of Canadian wilds to paddle and portage?
Here’s hoping the howl of the wolf still echoes through the night along the remote border, and there’s paddlers on both sides still roaming about to listen to it.
