Ty Bleeker, canoe manager for Camp Menogyn
Ty Bleeker manages the canoe fleet for YMCA Camp Menogyn, working out of the open-air York Factory workshop. Ty started out as a musher at Menogyn, then became a trail guide for two years before accepting his dream position.
Ty and his crew of guides and volunteers repair and restore Menogyn’s fleet of kevlar, plastic, aluminum, wood canvas, and cedar strip boats with the goal of getting them all back on the water for more adventures.
The interview transcript, photos, audio and video are below.
TY BLEEKER:
Today we have a lot of groups returning from the Boundary Waters, so that’s both canoeing trips and border route trail hiking trips. We also have a group coming as far as Yellowstone National Park where they were on a three-week hiking trip.
And then all the campers, they clean their gear, they return the boats, they take a shower and sauna, and then six o’clock dinner tonight, big banquet meal. So fanciest meal we have here all week at Menogyn, followed by the only time we get dessert in camp.
My name is Ty Bleeker and we are here at Menogyn York Factory. This is the canoe shop for Camp Menogyn.
We have a beautiful outdoor workshop enclosed by timber frame pavilion. You can look across the pavilion and see our bay and the boathouse and the hub of camp. So a lot of activity here going on. I like how we’re open and feel involved with the rest of camp.
There’s a lot of canoes to manage. To the best of our knowledge, we have about 123 canoes and canoes will come and go throughout the season.
I am the one who’s responsible for York Factory and overseeing the daily operations of the boats themselves, but I can’t do all this work by myself. So we have volunteers in York Factory and we have unassigned trail guides who will be here. Before aluminum canoes and plastic canoes and Kevlar canoes, the canoes that were in the Boundary Waters were all of our wood canvas canoes.
Menogyn has 33 wood canvas canoes. We’re really proud of them all. We have 18 that are ready to go on trail.
Every summer we’re looking to restore three or four more back to trail status, water-worthy and ready to go back on trips to the Boundary Waters. This one right here is one of our restoration projects from the summer. So it’s freshly painted and Mazzy is actually painting the logo on it.
Mazzy will write the name of the boat in here and then she’s going to paint a little fisherman logo in there as well. So someone on a still lake.
MAZZY:
So we’re gonna have a couple stripes down that are kind of a little wavy so it’s kind of like ripples in the water. My name is Mazzy. My title is a floater, which basically just means that I bounce around from different departments here at Menogyn.
I also really like working with my hands and doing something a little more artistic is really fun for me.
TY:
We love the themes of our boats and all of the themes are related to their names and it’s also a great teaching tool to teach the campers an Ojibwe word. None of these boats names are going to be like anything they’ve heard. So it’s a great point to try and keep the Ojibwe language alive in the hearts and minds of the campers who come here.
This boat is Bizaan, Ojibwe for quiet.
I ended up working for Camp Widjiwagan in Ely first. They convinced me work for Widjiwagan instead of Menogyn.
So summer of 2018 I worked as a trail guide for Camp Widjiwagan and because Menogyn was short-staffed that summer, Widjiwagan sent me as a staff member to lead a trip at Menogyn and came to this community. Love the place, love the people, love the culture and I was hooked and that made me want to switch from Widjiwagan to Menogyn. My first two seasons at Menogyn were in the winter so I started as the dog musher for Menogyn.
Summer of 2021 I started as a trail guide and guided for summers of 22 and 23 and now this is my first summer retired from trail guiding and I’ve become the canoe manager here at York Factory. York Factory is named after a trading outpost in northern Manitoba called York Factory and so that was a big outpost for the Hudson Bay Company. It was a trading outpost but they also built boats there.
That’s where York Factory takes its name from. We don’t actually build any canoes here. Well, nowadays we don’t build canoes so I’m here with one of our exceptions.
This boat was actually built here from the cedar that was harvested on site. Menogyn went through a phase of building our own boats here, cedar strip canoes. So this one was built in 2007 and it’s been dry docked for a while and this summer we really dug into it to do a restoration for this beautiful old cedar strip especially since it is from wood that was grown here on camp.
So this is a special boat and I’ve wanted to work on this boat for a long time. It’s almost ready to go we just need to put the gunnels on and do a finished coat of varnish and all the other things that make it pretty and good to go. By the end of the summer this one will probably go on trail.
I was quite familiar with York Factory before getting this position because York Factory was always interesting to me so I was always hovering around like a moth to a flame. So I was trying to be here as much as I could and absorb as much as I could from the other canoe managers who worked before me but specifically had I done any of the work like no. So it’s it’s a lot of like seeing it done before and kind of knowing a general idea but this summer it really was a big hands-on with learning how to do this.
When I was a trail guide you have a lot of times where you’re canoeing or backpacking and the conversation with the campers starts to lull and then your mind starts to wander at those moments and so my mind would always wander back to York Factory and I would think what am I excited to do when I get off trail on the weekend and a lot of people like they want to go into town and go to the co-op and go swimming at the beach and what I always wanted to do was spend the weekend in York Factory building things. Yeah my dream came true three years as a guide and now my fourth year I’m here as canoe manager and I get to stay in camp I get to see everyone else go on trail and hear about their stories but I get a more stable existence here with the boats and working on projects.
Our oldest boat is a wood canvas canoe from 1933. It was donated last summer and it went out on a couple trips this summer but just because of its age the paint was cracking on it so we took it off the water and are waiting for it to dry out so we can paint the boat and send it back on trail next summer. 1933 is our oldest canoe but we have several more that are from the 30s and 40s for our oldest canoes and our our youngest wood canvas canoes are from the 2020s so they’re still being made we have a lot of like vintage old towns in our fleet and we also have 12 Saliga canoes.
Joe Saliga, famous canoe maker in Ely, Minnesota. He made 261 canoes in his lifetime and Camp Menogyn has 12 of those. The name of this boat is Nind Anoki.
This boat was built at Menogyn in 2007 by a number of people and the name Nind Anoki it comes from Ojibwe. Most of our wooden fleet have Ojibwe names. We did the best we could with naming them.
We had some Ojibwe teachers come here this week and they took a look at all of our boat names so when we named it we thought Nind Anoki meant “built together” but the Ojibwe teachers they told us it means “I work.” Yeah the canoe is saying I work and soon this canoe will actually work. Yeah we’re excited to get it back on the water.
The goal and vision for York Factory is to get all these boats restored and back on the water. We really love our colorful canoes. Colorful boats really distinctive.
If you ask a camper about a wood canvas canoe they’re immediately going to say it’s heavy it’s fragile I don’t want it. They do need a greater ethic of care than our more durable aluminum and plastic boats but they’re worth it because you get a boat it has a personality it has a story it has a history that you can add to. You can be part of that story you’ll fall in love with that boat.
You treat them with good care because you care about them and you love the boats. I think my favorite boat is Ode’imin. “Ode” is Ojibwe for heart and then “-min” is for berry, so it’s heart berry.
It’s a good boat. It’s a really large 18-foot long wood canvas canoe and I took that for a three-week Quetico session and we put it through a lot. Quetico especially coming out of the pandemic and wildfires when the Canadian government didn’t get as deep down into the Quetico to clear the trails.
It was a rough trip. We put it through a lot. It’s yoke broke and then the boat kind of started self-destructing along the trip.
The gunnels were coming apart cracked the deck plates and I brought it back to Olivia Ahrens, the canoe master at the time, and she was like “what did you do to this boat?” Olivia fixed all the broken parts and pieces to it and got it back on the water and I’m very happy to see a couple other guides fall in love with that boat and it’s returned to the Quetico for another three-week session and thankfully it’s yoke held and all the rest of it held together. It’s just part of the story of these boats.
They do need a lot of maintenance but they’re not museum pieces and they’re meant to be used. I think a lot of our younger campers especially they’re a little afraid to use these boats because they don’t want to damage them but they’re meant to be used. They can sustain damage.
If they get damaged too much they come back in here and that’s what my job is to fix it and get it back on the water for another group. Use them, enjoy them, fall in love with them and if they come back with a little bit of damage or a few scrapes and scratches we’ll fix them up and we’ll send them back out.
CHUCK OLSEN:
Just like the people.
TY:
Yep, yep, absolutely.
CHUCK:
Do you get a chance to take boats you’ve worked on out for a paddle and relax?
TY:
Yeah, I do get that chance and I wish I took more of that chance. We have our islands around here so we call them Cat, Mouse and Dog Island. There’s a little clearing on Dog Island where you can bring up your canoe and then hang out for a picnic.
It’s fun to go out to the islands. It’s a good destination. It’s beautiful here year-round and I love it here. Every season has its different personality.
Chuck Olsen October 16, 2024
