​In the Boundary Waters, be careful what you eat. Or drink.

A search and rescue team from the Gunflint Trail responded to a call from inside the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Friday evening (May 31) after an account of someone suffering from the ill effects of “mushrooms” was reported to local authorities.

Responding agencies, including numerous members of the Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department (which doubles as an arm of Cook County Search and Rescue), traveled to Alpine Lake in the BWCA. Alpine is located near Seagull Lake at the end of the Gunflint Trail.

A member of the Gunflint Trail fire department who spoke with Paddle and Portage late Friday night said the responders were not sure what type of mushroom the person in distress had consumed. The report from another member of the camping party, which came through via a cell phone call with scattered service, said an individual at a campsite on Alpine Lake was “confused” and making “gurgling” sounds and that something seemed very unusual with the distressed person.

“We didn’t know what type of mushrooms they’d eaten,” said Michael Valentini, a member of the fire department, who served as the incident commander for the situation. “It could have been something found on the forest floor and was then eaten. It could have been something else that they brought with them for recreational purposes. At the time the call came in, we didn’t know.”

It turns out the person ate psilocybin mushrooms and had an “adverse reaction,” more commonly referred to as a “bad trip.”

A total of 14 people responded to the call, many of them volunteers. Motorboats were used to reach the portage to Alpine. At one point, a float plane was considered in cooperation with the U.S. Forest Service, though it was later called off due to darkness and lack of availability.

When search and rescue responders arrived to the scene, the person who was reported to be in distress said they were feeling better. The others in the group agreed the person initially in distress was now doing much better. Members of the Gunflint Trail Volunteer Fire Department do not have the authority to evacuate someone from the wilderness unless they are medically impaired and not capable of deciding if they needed to be taken to a medical facility or transported away from the scene of an incident such as the one that unfolded Friday night. After signing a waiver, the members of the group, including the person who was suffering from the effects of mushrooms, stayed at their campsite in the BWCA.

Paddle and Portage reached out to local law enforcement in Cook County to confirm if any charges or additional action will be taken following this incident. In a statement sent to Paddle and Portage June 3, Cook County Sheriff Pat Eliasen said, “The Cook County Sheriff’s office is responsible for all search and rescue operations inside Cook County borders. We are blessed to have an incredible bunch of volunteers who maintain a high level of training so that we are able to respond to calls for help both inside the BWCA wilderness and everywhere else in Cook County. These volunteers leave their families, their occupations, risk their health, and sometimes lives to answer the call for strangers who need assistance. We do not discriminate based upon severity of calls, but our dispatchers do have the discretion to triage calls based upon a weighing of the situation and the need for a full response. If you are in the wilderness and choose to consume illegal drugs, we will respond, but know that by your choices, you may have taken resources away from someone else.”

The search and rescue teams that work in and around the Boundary Waters are tight-knit organizations primarily made up of trained volunteers. They deploy at the request of other agencies, such as the Cook County Sheriff’s Office in Grand Marais or local law enforcement in Ely. The agencies are funded by in-kind donations, some state and federal dollars, and a levy as allocated by the county sheriff’s department.

The St. Louis County Board of Commissioners, meanwhile, recently asked the federal government to cover the cost of search and rescue operations inside the BWCA. St. Louis County, which is the size of New Jersey, includes Duluth, Ely, and a large section of the BWCA. An ongoing effort to find a missing canoeist continues near Curtain Falls in the BWCA.

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