THE RAKE: Your “homestead” here is amazing. It’s actually more of a campus.
WILL STEGER: We’ve got eleven little cabins; we built most of them during the expeditions in the eighties and nineties. I bought this property when I was 19. I did a 3,000-mile kayak trip that summer where my brother and I went from Jasper, Alberta, to the Arctic Ocean, went over the Rockies and portaged and kayaked down into Alaska. Then we split up and hitchhiked home, and on the way back I had this idea. I saw so many cabins out in the woods, so I had this plan to build a cabin at least two lakes from the nearest road. So visualizing that, I drove up here to Ely. I’d never been here before, I just literally stumbled onto this property. I was lucky that way. I found my place right here.
I bought thirty acres. It was a thousand bucks, which was actually a lot of money. I think my tuition at St. Thomas was $640 a year, and I paid that, too. I paid $60 a month on my college tuition, and another $25 on the land. It was a huge amount of money.
I went to St. Thomas to be a geology and biology teacher. And then I taught junior-high science in Minneapolis for three years. I finished my master’s degree. I worked factory jobs and drove cabs. During all my school years, my eight years of going to St. Thomas and then teaching, I went on a long expedition each summer. Usually it was a kayak trip or a mountain climbing trek. I loved to climb rock and ice. It was a toss-up when I was a teenager whether I wanted a life of climbing or a life up North. Of course, I started in Minnesota. I’d never seen a mountain in my life, but I was naturally attracted to climbing mountains. When I was fifteen, I bought a rope from a hardware store and rigged a top rope, and got a book out of the library, and started climbing. When we got our driver’s licenses, we drove to the icefields in British Columbia, and met other people that climbed. I was really attracted to ice, and glaciers. I liked rock climbing, but I was more interested in mountaineering in cold conditions. My interest in exploring the North is sort of an extension of that.
When you were young, did you think you’d be an explorer?
When I was fifteen, we’d always talk about what we were going to do with our lives, and I told my brother I was planning basically to drop out of society by the time I was twenty-five, and that I’d have my own school when I was thirty. It’s one of those things. You lay out a plan and then totally forget about it. When the Vietnam draft was going strong and I got my number, I had this land. I was twenty-five when I moved up here.
I like Minneapolis, I’ve got family there; I saw its shortcomings, though, and moved way into the wilderness, the society thing. So I moved here and I fought forest fires and climbed in Alaska in the summer. That gave me a little bit of money to live off. I wasn’t too worried about jobs. I always figured I could do some logging, find some work while I finished this place.
How did you get started in outdoor education?
One September I hitchhiked out to Colorado to see the Outward Bound school out there. They were hiring teachers for their winter courses—it was the first time they’d done winter stuff. This program director and I hit it off. I’d never met anyone in Minnesota who climbed and kayaked like I did. He hired me on the spot. That was a big change in my life. I mean, I did the teaching, the master’s degree. Even as a young person, I always saw myself as an educator, though I didn’t necessarily formulate it in my mind as a schoolteacher. I’d had the classroom experience, but outdoor education really felt like a good fit for me. After two really good years at Outward Bound, I became a member of the administration. I was interested in summer courses, but I wanted to work back here at my cabin in the summer. I started to realize that their winter courses should really include dogsledding, but they didn’t want to go into dogs. So I quit on good terms and moved back here, and in a couple years I started my own school with dogs, and that was the beginning of my dogsledding.
Coming here, I wanted to be self-sufficient. That was my main goal. It wasn’t any idealistic deal. It’s just what I always wanted. That’s what I was programmed for, ever since I was young. I wanted to be self-supporting on my income here. I was not going back to the city to make a living. I love the city, I have lots of friends in the city. But when I left the city, that was it. I was for sure going to make it here. I didn’t have a car for twelve years. I’d just hitchhike down to the city. My first thirteen years here, I made a total taxable income of $8,000. It was a real simple life. I wasn’t doing that for any ideal, that’s just how I wanted to live, working the land and living close to nature.
Did you learn a lot about the outdoors from your father?
No. My parents never camped a day in their life. I don’t think I was much different from any kid today. I had this adventurous spirit. I think there’s a destiny in each person. I was very interested in nature, of course, like most kids are. But I kind of knew my destiny when I was fourteen years old. My real fortune was my parents. They had a good relationship, I had a loving, big family. My dad supported everyone. And my parents allowed us to be who we were, as long as we didn’t get in trouble with the law and had a certain grade point average.
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