Olson’s Listening Point on National Register
7 May
Listening Point, the lake-shore property near Ely, Minnesota owned by nature writer and paddler Sigurd Olson, has just been added to the National Register of Historic Places, according to THIS news story.
The rugged 30-acre property on Burntside Lake is currently owned by the Listening Point Foundation.
Olson, who is well-known to paddlers and nature lovers for his books The Singing Wilderness, Listening Point, and The Lonely Land worked as a canoe-guide in what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Quetico Provincial Park. With a group that referred to itself as The Voyageurs, and which included renowned Canadian wilderness paddler Eric Morse, Olson traveled on the Churchill River in Saskatchewan, the Hayes River in Manitoba, and the Camsell and Great Bear Rivers in the Northwest Territories, among others.
A favorite Olson canoe-quote of ours is:
“The charm of a canoe trip is in the quiet as one drifts along the shores, being part of the rocks and trees and every living thing. At times on quiet waters one does not speak aloud but only in whispers, for then all noise is sacrilege.”
Olson died in 1982 at age 82.
