Janice Matichuk first set foot on her island in Quetico Provincial Park in 1985. Located near the end of Minnesota’s iconic Gunflint Trail, this remote park is the heart of North America’s “canoe country.”

Decades later, and enduring beyond her untimely passing in the summer of 2020, Matichuk’s legacy includes being the longest serving interior ranger in the history of the park.

Over the course of three decades, Janice raised two children on the island. She saved the lives of canoeists who tumbled into the frigid border lakes of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area and Ontario’s Quetico. She had been charged by moose, canoed nearly every inch of the 1.2 million acre park, and watched many young paddlers grow into adults.

There are new rangers at Cache Bay. For the second consecutive season, Peter Kranenburg and Stacey Hofer are at the Cache Bay Ranger Station.

Tom McCann is a visual artist and cartographer who lives in Grand Marais. Tom, and his wife, Nancy, were longtime friends of Janice Matichuk. Tom, Nancy, and their friend, Bonnie Schudy (who was also friends with Janice for many years), paddled to the island in Cache Bay in July. Following that visit, Tom wrote a letter to Joe Friedrichs, a co-host of the Paddle and Portage Podcast.

In this short track, Tom reads the letter that he wrote to Joe from Cache Bay in the summer of 2024.