The 4 o’clock hour, Wednesday, May 15, 2024

Eli Olson: “I’m a junior in high school and I’m just walking home from track practice. Track season is going well. Jumping is going well. I’m a skier. I run cross country. I do triple jump and long jump. That’s my thing. I just try to jump as far as I can. My personal record is 39 feet 6.5 inches for the triple jump. And for the long jump my personal record is 17 feet 11 inches. I do like to jump. I just put out a hip hop album. I compose music digitally on my computer. And I record vocals and just have fun with it. The album is out everywhere. Spotify, Apple Music, etc. It’s called Sixth Sense. My rap name is Spacebar. I use my keyboard and on my computer I can pick different instruments or different sounds and I can play them into the program with my keyboard and then I put drum over it and make beats and stuff. I’m just going to go home and watch some basketball and eat dinner. Walk my dog.”

Jason Bakken: “I’m just painting doors and trims for this place here. Pioneer Apartments. It’s going good. Not too bad at all. It’s the trim for the inside and the interior doors. They are installing new windows. They are not in yet but they are putting them in. They had to wait for funding. I’m from McGregor, Minnesota. I travel all over and paint on the Range. I like Ely. I know a few people up here. Ely is a great town. I’ve gone to the Blueberry/Art Festivals. It’s about the right size of town. Not too big not too small. My town is quite a bit smaller. it’s about 40 minutes south of Grand Rapids. I stay at the Canoe On Inn. It’s small but it’s nice people. I am a fisher and hunter so I like all the lakes. I’m taking my last break and then I’m going to load up some stuff and carry it inside and I am done for the day. Then I’m going to find a good place to eat around here. I ate at the Boathouse and I painted the outside of that, trim and exterior stuff. Everybody looks at it as they’re going by. They sure gawk around here. And I get to tell everybody is pretty friendly with each other and they all know each other, which is nice for a community.”

Will Goetsch: “I’m a Twin Cities native and now live in northwest Minnesota near Bemidji. We come to Ely every year and go to the Boundary Waters. This will be the 22nd year in a row going in. So, just getting ready to go in. We’ll go in tomorrow morning. We’ll be out there till Sunday so it will be just four days. I’m an engineer for General Mills. I basically work in sustainable packaging, implementing recyclability primarily across all markets and platforms within the General Mills umbrella. Have you seen the commercial for the Nature Valley Crunchy Oats and Honey wrapper that’s recyclable on TV? That’s one of the products that they launched. I hold the patent on that as I worked as a supplier to General Mills beforehand. But basically what it is, is you think of all food packaging is predominately flexible but rigid. Yogurt cups, lidding, bar wrappers, all that stuff today is nonrecyclable. So there’s a push within politics of the U.S. as well as environmentally to clean up and reduce waste. So basically we work in the realm of converting nonrecycleable materials into recyclable materials that will have a lesser impact on overall human waste generation. I just checked in to the bunkhouse here at Voyageur North and kill a little time waiting for a few other members of our group to show up and then we’ll grab some dinner. Found out Sir G’s is closed so we’re going to go to the Boathouse to get pizza. We’ll just kind of get our ducks in a row for tomorrow morning. Once Arrowhead Adventures is open at five o’clock in the morning we’ll grab bait and make our way into the Boundary Waters.”