Be the Reason

A couple of years ago, a mother and daughter walked into an outdoor shop where I was side hustling, packing list in hand. I knew immediately it was a summer camp list. The daughter was headed out on a river trip to the far north of Canada, on the Thelon River – big distance and big water. Within thirty seconds I could tell that mom had never sent a kid into that kind of “wild” before. She was trying to hold it together over a rain jacket decision.

Phyllis Cook poses with the catch of the day from the Gods River in Northern Manitoba in 1983.

PHOTO CREDIT SAM COOK

A week or so later, the mother returned seeking some different advice. Not about rain gear, not about head nets, or the right footwear, but about a letter and what she should include. Parents were invited to send along a letter to be opened mid-trip on the 6-week adventure.

I froze for a second, not because I lacked an answer, but because some part of me didn’t think I’d earned the right to give one. I’ve spent some 30 days on that same river myself, but my instinct is still to wave it off. Meh, that’s just what I do. It never registers as a big deal while I›m the one doing it. It only looks like something from a distance. So, I told her the only thing I know to be true: don’t just tell your daughter you’re proud; tell her you’re in awe, and that what she is doing is special and unique. But mostly, I wanted her daughter to know how fierce she was.

That mother came back into the shop weeks later to say it was the best advice she’d ever gotten. I was speechless and emotional. I don’t think about that moment as mine, but rather as an opportunity to pass on that enthusiasm to the next generation. It wasn’t until I sat down to interview Phyllis Cook this summer that I understood where that advice had come from, because Phyllis said almost the same thing about herself.

A Farm Kid Who Just Wanted to Go

Phyllis grew up the youngest of four on a Kansas farm, and her outdoor life traces back to a bicycle and a gravel mile she rode chasing sunsets that stopped her cold. Nobody taught her to love that. It didn’t have a name yet. “Nature therapy” and “forest bathing” are terms that would come generations later. This was just go. Exploration, curiosity, and a sense of wonder fueled her rides.

That instinct followed her onto rivers in Missouri and into a canoe with a young man named Sam Cook on the Kansas River, a trip that ended with a tow truck ride back to Topeka. Eventually, it carried her over 800 miles north to Ely, Minnesota, where she and Sam went to work for a canoe outfitter and never really came back from the Northwoods.

If you’ve spent time in northern Minnesota paddling and various outdoor circles, you might know Sam Cook’s name. What’s easy to miss, standing next to that kind of local fame, is that Phyllis was never just along for the ride. In her early thirties, laid off from a social work job in Duluth, she built her own thing from scratch, creating Wilderness Ways, a guiding outfit that took women – many of them first-timers – into the Boundary Waters and Quetico. Canoe trips in summer. Backpacking in fall. A February dogsledding weekend out of a musher’s place in Finland, Minnesota.

Phyllis Cook (Middle) hauls a toboggan across a frozen lake in the Boundary Waters flanked by Steve and Nancy Piragis of Ely, MN.

PHOTO CREDIT SAM COOK

She leaned on mentors to get it off the ground, like Judith Niemi of Women in the Wilderness, and a retired executive who volunteered his time to help her build a business plan for a region where guiding women wasn’t yet a known thing to sell.

She also guided two summers of Boundary Waters trips for adults with mental illness. One night, a violent storm hit – trees came down and tents were flattened at a nearby site, but her group came through intact. Her tentmate said afterward, half in awe, “We could have died.” Phyllis’s answer, then and now: “But we didn’t!”

Ask her for her proudest outdoor moment, and she skips past the big-name trips, like running huge water on the Gods River in Manitoba while in the early 80s. Instead, she lands on something smaller: three canoes of women behind her on a Wilderness Ways trip, and a quiet but poignant thought said only in her head: I’m doing this! It was her own endeavor, one where she put her skills to work and passed on her love of the outdoors.

Down to the Third Generation

I asked Phyllis how all of this made its way to her own kids and eventually her grandkids. Did she have to drag them along? Did it stick?

She didn’t hesitate. When her daughter, Emily, was in graduate school at Georgetown, she applied for an internship that would put her in Niger for eight weeks. The program asked if she’d be comfortable sleeping on a mat on the floor if it came to that. Emily responded that she slept on the ground in a sleeping bag in the Boundary Waters for a good part of her childhood. Emily and her husband, Jeff, have since taken their own child canoeing and camping. Phyllis’s son, Grant, spent three weeks camping through the Nordic countries with his wife, and they’ve camped their way through Crete and Corsica as well.

“I think they have always loved it,” Phyllis said. The adult children and their families continue to join Phyllis on trips to the wilderness. Her advice for getting it to take root in the next generation is as straightforward as everything else she says: “If you enjoy something, expose your kids to it, and hopefully they’ll like it.” No campaign, no convincing. Just enough exposure, early and often, that a mat on a floor in Niger doesn’t sound like hardship. Instead, it sounds like another opportunity for an adventure.

Phyllis Cook removes her headnet to prepare for dinner along the Gods River during a paddling trip to Hudson Bay in 1983.

PHOTO CREDIT SAM COOK

The Chain Keeps Going

Phyllis has spent 50 years being overlooked by society in outdoor spaces. Instead of hardening into bitterness about it, she’s spent that same half-century quietly making room for the next woman coming up behind her. Her advice for whoever comes next isn’t complicated. Learn the skills by being willing to try them, not by having them all figured out first. Take care of the outdoors; it’s the thing that gives you calm, wonder, and room to be fully yourself. And do your own thing inside a good partnership at home, even when someone else’s name is the one people already know.

I told Phyllis once, a few years back, that she’d been an example to me and others, someone who has blazed trails for the next generation of women adventurers. She said she’d never really thought of herself that way before and that it made her pause. Neither had I, until that mother had approached me for insight on her daughter’s mid-trip letter. I heard my own appreciation for Phyllis come back around, and it solidified something for me. It’s not enough to recognize the people who came before you; it matters just as much to elevate those who are just getting started.