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Rainy Lake Houseboats announces exclusive new summer recreation opportunities for this summer’s guests!
Chris Hemstad of Boreal Explorations announces great opportunity for Rainy Lake Houseboats.
I was 15 years old when Rainy Lake Houseboats hired me as a dock boy. It was my first job and, already deeply in love with Rainy Lake, I knew it was the only job that I wanted to do. I was able to spend my days on the lake, as I had been doing all the years of my childhood. For two years, under the wonderful tutelage of Rainy Lake Houseboats and the Dougherty’s, I worked the docks, learning more than I ever imagined about boats, ropes, engines, navigation, and communicating with wide varieties of people. At the end of two years, having acquired a decent working knowledge of the intricacies of Rainy Lake, I asked Billy Dougherty if I might try my hand at guiding. To this day I am still honored and grateful that he trusted me enough to let me try. My memories of the next three years are ripe with adventure, fishing, exploration, and deep sense of the landscape of Voyageurs National Park, and all of its wonders. To this day I am still amazed that I was given the opportunity to live and learn, within such a beautiful and awe inspiring setting. The experience was formative and always with me. Throughout the next fifteen years, as a student, a geologist, and a natural scientist, I often fell back on what I had been taught working for RLHB.
 After graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College, I was accepted in a M.S. program at Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington. I became interested in ore deposits and after receiving my Masters worked as an exploration geologist in many amazingly wild places throughout North and Central America. My love for exploration and geology eventually led me back to a PhD program at the University of Minnesota where I was given the, to me, unbelievable opportunity to conduct the field work and make the Bedrock Geologic Map of Voyageurs National Park and Vicinity. After three years of field work, again upon the waters and rocks of my home, three published maps, and a wonderful son, I found that I could not, again, leave this place. Therefore, I changed course, received a teaching degree of the University of St. Thomas and came home.
 I now spend my winters teaching high school science and math and own and operate Boreal Explorations EcoAdventures (BEEA). BEEA specializes in providing opportunities for visitors to experience and learn the natural history of the border waters and Voyageurs National Park through the eyes and experiences of a naturalist and geologist. In partnership with Rainy Lake Houseboats BEEA is excited and, again honored, to be given the opportunity to guide visitors upon educational, life enhancing, tours that allow one to experience the depth of a wild landscape ripe with all the ingredients of a classic northwoods adventure. BEEA specializes in quiet kayak tours, hiking adventures, and houseboat-based eco-tours.
If you are interested in a quiet break from the fishing or have simply come to learn about this phenomenal, natural ecosystem BEEA is always ready and willing to show you this seldom visited, pristine wilderness we call the Border Waters and Voyageurs National Park. Boreal Explorations EcoAdventures web address is www.borealexplorations.com
If you are interested in one of Chris’s BEEA trips during your houseboat vacation this summer you can contact him by phone at 1-218-286-1342 or email chris@borealexplorations.com
Rainy Lake Houseboats cannot take reservations for Boreal Explorations EcoAdventures.
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