Yesterday in this blog I reminisced about a trip I took
through hell one year back, the 110-mile mountain bike epic that is North
Dakota's Maah Daah Hey Trail. This is where we ran out of water and were forced
to pour brown-algae slug through T-shirts to filter sediment before dropping in
a half-dozen iodine pills. We rode the trail in 30 hours, nearly straight
through, in 110-degree heat. Only three of the six from my group made the whole
length, the others' bleached bones still out there crackling somewhere in the
Badlands sun. (O.k., that last part I made up.)
But the days before this bike trip, at the start of the long
weekend we spent in North Dakota last July, I experienced a wholly different
type of adventure: Sailing on Lake Sakakawea.
Indeed, if the Maah Daah Hey that weekend was a bit of hell,
then Sakakawea -- a 368,000-acre reservoir
of the Missouri River -- was a big dose of heaven.
I sailed with guide Mike Quinn on the 34-foot Sovereign, a
white and gleaming craft with teakwood decks and a cabin to sleep five.
By numbers alone, Lake Sakakawea is an impressive body of
water, with more than 1,200 miles of shoreline, most of it uninhabited and
wild. At about 170 miles long, the winding lake heads westward through North
Dakota in a massive S-curve to the Montana border.
Clear water up to 180 feet deep is measured at the Garrison
Dam near the lake's eastern end.
In fact, Sakakawea is among the world's largest artificial
lakes, ranking at No. 3 in size in the United States after Lake Mead and Lake
Powell, the reservoirs of the Colorado River in the Desert Southwest.
Our trip -- which I wrote about in New York Times here, http://travel.nytimes.com/2006/09/22/travel/escapes/22sail.html
-- included two days of doing nothing much more than pulling sheets, tying off
ropes, and working the boat at Quinn's command in an exhilarating participatory
trip.
We zigzagged and tacked for the day and into the evening
toward the slowly sinking summer sun. We anchored in a bay near the start of
the state's Badlands region, where Sakakawea casts its long arms into dry hills
and desert canyons. We dove off the boat and swam, and we hiked into the wild
hills during short breaks on land.
Finally, we slept out under the stars, grilling dinner on
the deck of the Sovereign before laying back to be lulled under a deep vaulted
velour of unadulterated silence, of absolute North Dakota nothingness.
