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It started out as a normal fishing trip for Tom and John Connelly. The brothers put in on Saturday for what was supposed to be 10 days of paddling, camping and quiet in Quetico Provincial Park, just across the Canadian border from the Boundary Waters.

Then they saw smoke. Then came the fire, and the start of a sometimes heart-pounding struggle to get out alive.

Coming out of the wilderness Thursday off Moose Lake, just outside the Boundary Waters, they told a story of a long, harrowing journey they said could have ended in death. At times they found themselves nearly surrounded by walls of fire as the shoreline burned.

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At one point, “we were skirting the shores because we couldn't see, and so we decided, OK, we can't skirt the shores that close because, you know, there's trees that are falling into the water from the edge of these islands,” John recalled.

“But you could just hear a noise and you could tell when it was about to happen. These trees were just going up. It was nuts. They're just fireballs on the tops, tops of trees.”

Tom, 40, and John, 47, are both experienced paddlers. Tom teaches an outdoor education class and they both were well-prepared and equipped with a satellite link that could bring help in an emergency.

When they set out, they knew there was a fire burning farther north in Canada, but it was a long way away. A ranger they spoke with on the way into the park even told them they could light campfires. 

"Everything started to get kind of crazy,” Tom Connelly said. “We saw smoke, and we're like, ‘That looks a lot closer than we think it should be.’”

When they looked to the south the next night, the horizon was aflame in orange. 

By Tuesday night, they were camped below a string of waterfalls known as the Falls Chain. Tom was cleaning some fish they had caught when he looked up.  

"I'm like, oh my God! Look! There's a flame right there. It was like probably a mile, mile and a half to the north of us. Huge flame, huge crown fire. Huge, huge crown fire."

They wanted to pack up and leave, but it was dark and so smoky they couldn't see to navigate. So they sat, and watched the fire. 

"We're talking, you know, 40-foot flames. I mean, it was just all over the place," Tom said.

At one point there was about 200 feet of water between their campsite and the fire. They initiated an SOS on their satellite search and rescue device. But they knew no one could fly in to rescue them. It was too smoky.

So they crawled into their tent around 11 p.m., hoping the fire would stay away until daybreak so they could paddle away. 

Tom said he woke up about 2:15 a.m. and felt uneasy.  “I woke up John immediately, and I said, 'Let's go, pack up the gear, get everything. We need to get everything and get in the canoe right away.'"

“Something didn't seem right,” said John. “Looked out again, and I could see the flame again. It had come back.”

But it was still dark. They saw flames converging around them. By 4:30 a.m., they couldn't see anything except the fire. 

"I said, we gotta stay put until it's too late to go,” said Tom. “If we leave in the middle of the night, we're gonna get lost, and then we're out of luck."

They wrapped bandanas around their mouths to try to keep the smoke out, and hoped they could make it until dawn.  

When daybreak came, the fire had reached the edge of their camp. They left just before it went up in flames. But with so much smoke there was barely enough light to navigate to the end of a lake to what's called Dead Man's Portage. 

There the smoke cleared. They were out of the fire. They thought they were in the clear. 

The paddled and portaged through a string of lakes until they came to the portage between Jasper and Ottertrack lakes in the Boundary Waters. But it was gone. 

"War zone,” said John. “The whole thing, all the trees are downed, everything's still totally smoking. There's still little ground fires going. Our hands were completely black, soot."

They slowly picked their way through the devastation. On Ottertrack Lake, fires smoldered on both sides as they paddled through. 

On the next portage, they got the canoe across and John walked back to get some more packs. Minutes after he got back with the packs, he looked behind him “and saw probably a, I don't know, 50-foot coniferous just drop — and I mean it was at least 30 inches in diameter — just dropped right across that trail."

Had he been on the trail, he probably wouldn’t have survived. He took it as a sign. “So we thought, OK, we got to keep moving.”

They made it to Knife Lake, a long well-known lake that straddles the border, and again paddled as flames grew all around. 

“These trees were just going up,” said John. “It was nuts. They're just fireballs on the tops, tops of trees.”

As they paddled east on Knife Lake, things started to clear. They found an island campsite and jumped in the water. 

“It was beautiful. It's perfect,” John recalled. 

“Blue skies,” said Tom. “We could see the smoke to the west, and it looked bad. I'm like, What? The worst is over."

‘Gotta go, because if you don’t you die’

They got picked up Thursday at Prairie Portage, at the far end of Moose Lake by resort owner Willy Vosburgh, who’d spent the past several days rescuing campers from the backcountry.  

The brothers were  among the estimated 6,000 to 10,000 paddlers in the Boundary Waters and points north when the wilderness was closed. They were two of the last to make it out.

Vosburgh told the brothers of the numerous widespread wildfires that had engulfed the region. They couldn’t believe it.

Remembering back to their worst moments on the journey back, “at one point we had fire on three or four sides of us. We only could go east. North, south and west were completely surrounding us” with fire, said John.

“We just took the water to the east, and we went. And that was the only thing we could do. There was smoke everywhere, everywhere. We were wetting our bandanas, covering our mouths."

Navigating in the front of the canoe, John said he could only see about 7 feet in front of him.

“It was do or die,” said Tom. "It was like you stay here and you wait, and you don't know when they're going to come, and are they going to be able to come? Or you try to get out? 

Tom, who teaches outdoor education, told his brother, “I know I tell my students whenever you're in an emergency, stay where you are because if you stay where you are, someone will come find you, and you will be fine.”

With fires burning around them, though, and the window of escape closing, Tom told his brother, “John, we got to do exactly what I tell people not to do. We gotta go. When it's time to go, you just gotta go because if you don't, you die. You'll die. So we made it. We're here.”

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Dan Kraker

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Tom and John Connelly put in on Saturday for what was supposed to be a 10-day fishing trip through Quetico Provincial Park, across the Canadian border from the Boundary Waters. Then came the fires and a heart-pounding struggle to make it out.

‘We gotta go’: Brothers tell of harrowing wilderness escape as wildfires closed in

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