BABBITT — When Amos Kolodji told his students that he was going to bike to work last fall, they didn’t believe him.
“’You can’t do that; you live in Ely. That’s 17 miles away,’” they told him.
Their reaction planted a seed in Kolodji’s mind. He realized that despite living deep in the Northwoods, these kids hadn’t been exposed to the endless ways to explore the outdoors.
As the first-year middle school math teacher at Northeast Range School in Babbitt started exploring the outdoors around his new home, that seed only grew.
Kolodji grew up in Hibbing and attended college for engineering in Duluth before deciding to become a teacher. He spent countless hours in the Boundary Waters from a young age — that’s where his parents met. But there’s much more to Northern Minnesota than the Canoe Wilderness.
Instead of just biking to school, Kolodji decided to take a strange way to work once a month. He paddled White Iron and Birch lakes overnight in a snowstorm for the first commute, portaging in between lakes and to the school.
“The paddling through the night did not impress them. The portaging in the dark did not impress them,” he said. “Carrying a canoe did impress them, they were like, ‘Surely you left it at the lake. That’s so far away.’ It’s a really lightweight canoe, it’s a really short distance.
"And camping out really impressed them, so that kind of led me to think, ‘Okay, I want to do more overnights.’ Because they’re like, ‘You just slept out? That’s okay?’ And I was like ‘Yeah that’s okay. For God’s sake, you guys live in Northern Minnesota, you’re so lucky.’”
Throughout the rest of the school year, Kolodji hiked, skated, cross-country skied, paddled, scootered and winter biked, often camping overnight along the way.
“My goal this whole year was not to show the kids, 'Look how cool I am.' The goal this year was, ‘Hey, look how cool your backyard is and look that you could be doing these things,’” he said. “... You’ve paddled, you’ve skied, you’ve ice-skated, you’ve hiked. You could do these.”
For his final trip of the school year, Kolodji wanted to try to connect multiple communities in the large area the school covers.
He started by biking to school on a Monday, camping halfway, then rafted the Embarrass River with his bike on the raft from Babbitt to Embarrass on Tuesday. He camped that night and then stashed his bike and took the bus back with the students Wednesday morning.
After school Wednesday, he got a ride back to his bike and then rafted the Embarrass River to the Pike River from Embarrass to Tower. He camped again, bused again and got a ride back to Tower after school. He then biked home from Tower on Thursday, finishing just in time for the last day of school Friday.
“I’m really hoping that’ll just be a way to see all the kids’ communities, try to bring my passions to their communities, show them ‘Hey, you can go paddling out your back door or biking out your back door,’” Kolodji said in an interview before his final adventurous commute of the year.
“It’s safe and there’s a way to do it that’s safe. And try to generate some excitement for them to get outside, and then for next year to help them get outside.”
Kolodji said he feels bad he didn’t accomplish one of his original goals of getting outside with the kids. That was part of the inspiration behind his final epic commute.
“I thought if I can’t do a trip with kids, it’d be really interesting to go and meet kids where they are and see their communities,” he told the KAXE Morning Show after the raft trip. “I did a lot of these trips between Ely and Babbitt, Ely and Babbitt, and realizing when I tell my kids about this, a lot of the kids don’t live between Ely and Babbitt.”
Next year, he said he hopes to start some sort of outdoor program that would ideally include overnight adventures.
“A lot of these kids are really outdoorsy,” he said. “They do a lot of four-wheeling, a lot of snowmobiling, a lot of fishing. But there’s still a big percentage of the kids that don’t. And I don’t think it’s because they hate the idea, I think so much of it is exposure.”
Kolodji said he also underestimated the challenge of working a full day after an extra-long commute.
“I apologize to all of the parents for your children’s math education. I did try really hard to teach them math,” he said. “But on those days, I had a little bit of the mentality of, ‘You know what? Don’t let your schooling get in the way of your education.’
"So I’d spend a couple minutes telling the kids about this trip, answering questions about this trip. And I think me being tired was showing them some of that.”
Still, he wasn’t as tired as he thought he would be. The feeling of beating a challenge and getting to share it with his students kept him going throughout the day. Coffee helped, too.
All the adventuring has been a great way to get to know the community, Kolodji said, and he recommends others give it a try when moving to a new area. He said he hopes his story helps people understand that an adventure doesn’t have to mean a massive trip.
“And, if you’re the kind of person that’s doing adventures and going outside and doing cool things, then you should be required to help give that opportunity to a kid,” Kolodji said.
“Who cares how big of a trip you’ve done or what crazy thing you did, if you did not then try to get someone else outside and give them an opportunity?”
Listen to the full KAXE Morning Show interview with Kolodji above.
