09/03/2026
Another story of the 50 Voices of the Wilderness series by Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness. I love hearing how the area affects each person in their own way. One of these days.......
Miguel Garcia-Gosalvez grew up in Alicante, Spain — warm rock and scrubby hills, closer to Arizona than anything you'd call lake country. He hiked the mountains as a boy, often alone. But he never sat in a canoe until his forties, and didn't find the Boundary Waters until later still.
Then after his first trip with a friend, he planned his own trip…alone. He's been going back solo ever since.
We interviewed Miguel on our latest Big Red Canoe podcast. Solitude is a hard thing to explain. "The lakes remain steady. The mind does not," he muses. "But it was the most alive I had felt in many years."
Out there, life compresses to a handful of essentials: clean water, enough calories, dry shelter, sound judgment. After a few days, he stops missing everything else. In the quiet, he feels close to his late parents. And when he comes home, he's changed. "I appreciate my family more — my kids, my wife. I listen more. I'm more present. I'm a better person for a while. That's why I need to keep going back."
Looking ahead 50 years, Miguel's hope is simple: that the Boundary Waters stays exactly as it is. Coming from a continent with little true wilderness left, he doesn't take that for granted. "Just knowing that place exists, exactly as it is, is worth protecting," he says. "Once you alter the water, you lose everything." He shakes his head at the idea that there's any safe way to mine next to it. "It has a special place in my heart. Whatever we can do to protect it — it's not enough."
In our 50 Voices of the Wilderness series, we'll meet someone whose life was shaped by the Boundary Waters and who, in turn, is shaping the future of this wilderness.
Listen to the full episode here! https://www.friends-bwca.org/podcasts/podcast-alone-on-the-water/
