Bryan Hansel

Minnesota landscape photographer Bryan Hansel caught COVID early in 2024 and remained ill for months. “I remember not having any energy at all,” Hansel recalls, “just kind of wanting to disappear; it was awful.” Hansel teaches up to twenty photography workshops a year, and to power through constant fatigue, he was guzzling forty ounces of coffee with breakfast. Then his chest started hurting, and he feared his heart was going bad.

Hansel is 54 years old and has lived in Grand Marais, MN on Lake Superior and gateway to the Boundary Waters wilderness, for twenty years. He and his wife, Ilena, settled there when she took a teaching job. Before becoming a full-time photographer, Hansel owned and operated a kayak guiding business. Ilena is now the manager of Cook County’s Soil and Water Conservation District. Their son, Apollo, is in fifth grade.

Hansel sought medical attention after his chest started hurting. But when his doctor put him on a treadmill and wired him up for a radiology stress test, Hansel ran far and felt fine. The doctor called him and said, “You can eat as much bacon as you want.” In other words, his heart was fine. But this didn’t help his exhaustion: “I just couldn’t function, my brain wouldn’t function,” he recalls of his lost year.

Hansel’s photos feature fleeting moments of natural drama. The compositions in his best shots resonate with an elemental energy derived from austerity, as though stripping away extraneous details reveals the earth’s essential nature. One stellar image depicts a fuchsia sky at dawn over Lake Superior and a black rock clad in a pale cap of ice. When he’s at his most active level of shooting, Hansel gets out for a sunrise or sunset five times a week. For sunrise, that entails getting up early enough to drive to the location and hike or paddle to the site. “I want to get to a spot an hour or 45 minutes before sunrise or sunset. Then I look around for different compositions and see what clouds are doing.” He’ll hang out shooting for up to an hour after sunrise or sunset, watching the light play and looking for new compositions. Then he’ll go home with 100-150 photos, load them onto his computer, and delete 95 percent of them.

Hansel was born in England while his father was stationed there as a U.S. Air Force cryptologist. Before he turned one, however, his parents returned to Dubuque, Iowa. Hansel’s grandfather was a developer who had built more than 1,000 homes when the town was booming, and Hansel’s father went into the same line of work. In the 1980s, Dubuque fell into a severe economic depression, and Hansel’s parents sold their home to keep the family business afloat. Hansel moved almost every year as a kid. He spent his free time outside. One year, they lived near Catfish Creek, IA. Aside from saying crick rather than creek, Hansel doesn’t have an Iowa accent. “We used to spend a lot of time in the crick,” he reminisces, “messing around in water.” Hansel’s parents remain today in Dubuque, and he likes returning to lead photography workshops in the dramatic Driftless landscape. “If that location were in California, some of the sunrise locations I go to, you’d have 100 photographers there every morning. But because it’s the Midwest, nobody goes there,” Hansel says.

He’d fallen for film photography in high school inspired by a teacher. Hansel recalls: “I cleared my schedule as much as I could to spend all my time in the darkroom. The coolest thing was watching the photos appear. You start with a blank white piece of paper, dip it in the chemicals, and almost like magic, the image appears on it.” Hansel moved to Iowa City and enrolled in the University of Iowa undergraduate writer’s workshop—the most prestigious such program in the country. Hansel loved reading F. Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Carver, and Ernest Hemingway, and gravitated toward the “short, pithy” styles of the latter two authors. He employs a similar minimalism in his photography.

After college, Hansel wanted to paddle the entire Mississippi River but didn’t have a canoe, nor the money to buy one. Instead, in 1996, he hiked the Appalachian Trail from north to south, documenting the trek with a 35mm film camera. He finished his thru hike, returned to Iowa City, and worked for Scheels Sporting Goods. At a work event at an environmental learning center in southern Minnesota, he met his future wife. They began dating and eventually decided to move somewhere with more wildlife than Iowa. Ilena found a job teaching in Grand Marais.

During this period, Hansel was switching to digital photography. On a long trip in the Boundary Waters, he broke his first digital camera, then revived an old film camera for his next trip—paddling the Mississippi River 400 miles from northern Minnesota to Dubuque. A kayaking magazine agreed to pay him for the resulting article and photos. After the trip, though, when he took 14 rolls of slide film to his local lab to get it processed, the lab ruined 13 rolls. He lost the magazine assignment and hasn’t shot film since.

Hansel is a prodigious poster on social media, sharing daily photos on Facebook and Instagram to tens of thousands of followers. Aside from publishing photos in dozens of national and regional publications, Hansel writes for websites such as PaddlingLight, which he founded, and Paddle and Portage, a Boundary Waters-themed news source based in Grand Marais. Joe Friedrichs, journalist and founder of Paddle and Portage, says: Hansel “is the type of guy you want on your side in a bar fight. He’s fearless and willing to walk through the fire if it means truth is on the other side. The context of this is that Hansel is a fantastic reporter and writer. Most people think of him as a photographer, but I always look to his writing and investigative skills first.”

Hansel recently wrote an article for Paddle and Portage in which he canoed into the wilderness seeking the remains of illegal dams built in the Boundary Waters 100 years ago. He draws parallels between the unknown profiteers who built the dams and today’s growing roster of threats to America’s public lands. In the article’s closing he writes: “I realized I may not have conclusively solved the mystery of those who blasted the holes in Brule and Winchell… I’m not sure it matters, because I know who did it. We all do. It’s the same men doing it today. A hundred years later, they wear different names and faces, but they’re the same.”

In addition to thru hiking the Appalachian Trail, Hansel did notable trips like sea kayaking 800 miles from Lake Huron to his home in Grand Marais, as well as paddling to Key West with well-known adventurers Dave and Amy Freeman. Now that he’s a parent, these long trips are harder to do. He’s traded epic journeys for those he describes as “quirky.” In 2021, he retraced a route that was completed in 1879 by Minnesota’s state geologist, Newton Winchell.

“Winchell was a Minnesota version of Indiana Jones, except he’s a geologist instead of an archeologist,” Hansel says. Using old maps, original land surveys, and aerial photography, Hansel pieced together a route starting in the Grand Marais harbor. Solo, he portaged his canoe into the Superior Highlands via a powerline clearing, then traveled a mix of roads, hiking trails, active Boundary Waters portages, myriad waterways, and some bushwacking with a canoe that “really sucked.” He carried Winchell’s journals and read from them at camp during the 12-day adventure. Winchell, being a geologist, was primarily interested in rocks. “I’d never paid attention to the rock,” Hansel remembers. “When you’re reading the rock, I started noticing the different colors of rocks, the types of rocks; it allowed me to experience the Boundary Waters in a new way.” He completed the 160-mile loop, more than 30 miles of which were portages. On the last day, he canoed the Poplar River toward Lake Superior to near Lutsen Resort. When the rapids started, he portaged along the Superior Hiking Trail, then walked through the Lutsen golf course with his canoe overhead. One of the golf cartways, he was amused to note, lined up perfectly with an old portage trail.

After spending much of 2024 ill, one of Hansel’s workshop clients—a family physician—theorized that the quarts of coffee he imbibed daily to combat his long COVID malaise had given him severe heartburn that he’d mistaken for heart trouble. Hansel quit drinking coffee, took an over-the-counter antacid, and has regained his energy. He has a busy teaching schedule for the remainder of 2025. In September, he spent two weeks leading workshops in Grand Teton National Park, followed by three Lake Superior-themed ones. Many of his 2026 workshops are sold out, with several in Minnesota and others in the Badlands and Death Valley.

Hansel’s photos are often evocative of deep solitude, and in the rare instance that a person appears in an image, they are almost invariably alone. Leading workshops seems a far cry from solitary wandering with his camera through the wilds, but Hansel relishes teaching. “You’re part teacher and part guide on those things,” he notes. “I’ve always enjoyed teaching and guiding, and it combines them, and I’ve always enjoyed photography. Three of my passions are combined into one job, which I think is rare for people to experience. I feel privileged and lucky.”

Hansel is driven to share the magic he finds in the natural world through his work. In the final lines of Hansel’s Paddle and Portage article, he writes: “Luckily, the land is still whole, still offering its gifts, worth defending. But it doesn’t protect itself. It needs people…like us, to stand up and say enough, to stop those men from doing what they always do. To keep them from taking away the places where we can dip a paddle, propel a canoe, and glide across a mirror-calm lake reflecting the blue sky above.”