3 photos
From Issue One of the Gear Patrol Magazine. Free shipping for new subscribers.
“That’s an Umiak,” Jessa Frost says as she points to a sleek watercraft hanging from the ceiling. Frost, the program director of the North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota, finishes describing the boat — its name means “woman’s boat,” and it was used by Inuit women to carry their children while the men hunted in kayaks — then leads us out of the student commons into an uncommonly perfect summer day on the north shore of Lake Superior. Down at the dock, the school’s two-masted schooner, the Hjørdis, creaks in the breeze. Behind us, the sound of metal striking metal rings from the blacksmith shop. North House is a place of dissonant elements — Inuit hunting craft, Norwegian sailboats and forge welding — knitted together by a common theme: keeping alive the North’s traditional crafts.
Given its reputation for snow and cold, not to mention a sizable population of Norwegian and Swedish descendants, northern Minnesota is the perfect place for the school, which is based on the Scandinavian folkehøjskole but has expanded beyond Nordic crafts to include those of the Inuit, the Sami and the French Canadian voyageurs. Its home, Grand Marais, is one of the most picturesque towns anywhere on Lake Superior. Part fishing village, part artists’ colony, it draws tourists by the carload all summer long for its beautiful harbor, its eclectic mix of shops and cafes and its proximity to the Gunflint Trail, the jumping-off point for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Out of this artsy-outdoorsy milieu sprang North House Folk School in the mid-1990s, founded by some local residents, initially to teach wood- strip canoe building and Scandinavian bowl making. But the school quickly filled a desire for experiential learning. As its curriculum grew, so did its campus, which fills a quiet space on the marina behind a fish market, with brightly painted wooden buildings that could stand in for a Swedish vacation town in a pinch.
The feel of the campus is one of a utopian neo-Luddite experiment, one that seems to be working remarkably well way up here on the big lake.
North House’s course offerings have swelled from those first boat- and bowl-making seminars to a catalog that now lists upwards of 300 classes. They range from simple one-day lessons in wood-fired baking to a two-week course in which students build a wooden rowboat seaworthy enough to ply the chilly harbor outside the woodshop. In between are weekend classes in everything from forging a Damascus steel knife and tanning a deer hide to embroidery, cooking and landscape photography. While there are a few full-time staff at the school, many of its teachers are guests who come from greater Minnesota or beyond to pass on their knowledge, like acclaimed nature photographer Layne Kennedy, chef Scott Graden and polar explorer Lonnie Dupre, who lives in Grand Marais when he’s not summiting Denali solo in winter. While a few of their classes demand prerequisite knowledge or experience, most are open to rank beginners who don’t know a chisel from a punch — or an umiak from a kayak. The noncompetitive environment builds assurance and a sense of accomplishment, which can end up being more important than the knowledge a student may have gained. Building a pair of shoes out of deer hide isn’t a skill you can take back to the office on Monday. Confidence is.
