We're Leaving Grand Marais

and where we're headed next

We’re leaving Grand Marais to paddle from Washington State to Alaska this summer, and we’re not planning on coming back. Here’s why:

Andy and I met in Bayfield, WI, both lead sea kayak guides at an outfitter for the summer, both two people who had got dealt an absolute garbage hand by COVID. I been sent home by the US Peace Corps one whole year before I expected to be, and suddenly had no job, no home, and no life plan. All of my friends had been scattered to their own corner of the US. I moved in with my Grandma (hi grandma!) in Northern Michigan for a little while, then headed back up to Bayfield to sea kayak guide. Andy was in a similar situation. We made a good team.

When the summer ended, I still didn’t have a plan. We kayaked to (yes, to) Isle Royale National Park with a few friends. It didn’t go well.

I applied for jobs in about 20 different schools when I got home. A school in Grand Marais got back to me within the hour. I interviewed the next day, found housing the next week, and moved up just two weeks later.

Andy, living in Two Harbors at the time, was only person I knew in the area. He came up to visit and found a job at a local outfitter in town and moved in with me. Now, we’ve been up here for a year and a half.

Oh hey there, if you’re here for the hiking guides, I’ve got a new one! Check out the Ultimate Outdoorsy Guide to Grand Marais!

full moonrise over the lake the other night— I know it looks like the moon is over the clouds but I swear it’s not photoshopped, just a weird illusion

Grand Marais is beautiful & hard

Grand Marais is beautiful, and I’ve made some wonderful friends since moving here. I’ve been lucky enough to explore some beautiful trails, kayak plenty, and land a couple of absolute dream jobs in freelancing.

It’s also been really hard. The housing situation up here is tough. We’ve been lucky twice, but more than half the friends we’ve made have had to leave, unable to find affordable housing.

It’s a transient town as is. The joke here is you either have two jobs or two homes. I peaked at four jobs at one point, which didn’t leave a lot of free time for friends. Then the friends I have had— hospital employees, other teaching aids, forest service, EMTs— many even with two or three jobs couldn’t make it work up here and had to leave, both because of the cost of living, housing issues, and because of the work environments that come with that kind of understaffing. And every one of these people at one point wanted to stay for the foreseeable future— on the surface it seems like the sort of place perfect for outdoorsy 20-somethings. But the roots to support those people beyond a summer just aren’t there.

It just isn’t a feasible long term place for a lot of people in their mid-20s, not without outside help, not during a pandemic.

A lot of people have told me I’m “living the dream” up here, and part of that for sure is due to how I use Instagram. The truth is I’m happy to be leaving, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone in their 20s move up there. It was really hard, and not in a good, character building way. In a scary, lonely way.

Tourist Towns

Grand Marais isn’t the first tourist town I’ve lived in, but it’s the first place I really got to firsthand experience what over-tourism does to a community. In some ways the tourism is great— it provides jobs, and keeps businesses in the town open. If you want to have restaurants in Grand Marais, you have to have tourism. To some degree, tourism is part of a healthy community here.

But tourism is also pricing people out, and making it nearly impossible to find an affordable place to live. Looking at a map of downtown Grand Marais on Airbnb, you can really see the ways in which nightly rentals have infiltrated residential areas. The downtown area pictured below, particularly North of 61, is where our hospital, schools, and grocery stores are; it’s where the affordable housing and apartments are— or rather, used to be.

Some Airbnbs are locally owned, but a huge chunk of them are bought up by investors from the Twin Cities, at rates working residents looking to buy a home couldn’t hope to compete with.

This isn’t to say don’t come to Grand Marais and don’t stay in an Airbnb, but rather try and stay in a local lodge, or an Airbnb outside of the downtown residential area managed by someone local.

Ships headed south near Two Harbors

Vacation Culture

The last time I wrote about some of the uglier parts of tourism, I lost a handful of subscribers. Which sucked, but gave me a lot to think about.

Working in the tourism industry in-person, part of the job is sugar coating life in a tourist town. The people you’re guiding or helping tell you you’re “living the dream”, and you say “yes, absolutely”, not "all my friends have moved because they can’t find affordable housing and I work three jobs to afford to live here and hardly have free time. It’s beautiful here, but I work hard for it, and it’s not always worth it”. Part of our culture surrounding vacation is that vacations are times when we don’t have to worry about the real world, and this freedom from consequences of our actions is something we deserve.

We have this sense of a right to a good vacation— I’ve seen it in the people who get angry at the guide (me) for the three-foot waves and bad weather, in the people who yell at wait staff about “ridiculous” wait times, and in the people who leave trash on the trails. Some people (not you, probably, but definitely some people) behave differently than they would at home and feel less responsibility for their actions because they’ve paid a good chunk of money for this vacation and are entitled to a good time for it, even when that means yelling at someone just doing their best, or leaving trash on a hiking trail because it just didn’t occur them that that place doesn’t have a clean up crew and needs to be treated with respect.

The person who’s paycheck is dependent on good service is obligated to tell you what you want to hear, deliver that guilt free vacation, even if it means answering your questions about life in that town dishonestly (which I’ve done frequently). Even online, my and other “travel writers” livelihood is dependent on telling people what they want to hear, and people don’t want to feel guilty about a vacation.

People like me who work in the tourism industry can’t talk about some of the issues in tourism without losing money, of which we don’t have a ton to loose. As a result, people traveling are not used to hearing about the issues that would make them feel guilty about travel anyway, making it even more uncomfortable when we’re asked to think about them, especially when you’re asked to by a travel blog, a place you come for happy travel inspiration.

If tourism culture & ethics interests you, this article from the Washington Post covers over-tourism in Hawaii, and what happened after Hawaii asked tourists not to come.

Where to next?

As previously mentioned, we’ll be spending this summer kayaking from Washington up to Alaska! After that? We’ve got a soft plan to move somewhere new— I’ll tell you more when it feels a little more solid. We’re not planning on returning long-term to Grand Marais.

But we’re young (ish, getting up there) and have kayaks, and I’ve spent a lot of time being miserable about what I lost during Covid and I’m not going to waste any more time feeling sorry for myself.

Some happy kayaking content:

A couple of bonus photos & little stories for my paying subscribers— thanks so much guys! You’re really keeping the lights on and the bell peppers dehydrated!