I've just returned from a research trip for the young-adult novel I'm working on, Blue-Eyed Wolf. Well, actually, it was a mixture of a research trip and a retreat with a friend who needed some time away from home to concentrate on her writing. We went to Gunflint Lodge, a marvelous old Minnesota resort on the Gunflint Trail north of Lake Superior. The time we spent couldn't have been more perfect.Blue-Eyed Wolf is set on the edge of and in the Boundary Water Canoe Area, a wilderness of lakes and forests in northern Minnesota bordering on Canada. It's a magical place and one I've visited many times (and Gunflint Lodge is one of my favorite visiting points). I went back to a different area in the early fall just before that resort closed for the winter, but the story I'm writing begins in May, 1967, and ends in May, 1968, so it encompasses winter.Early March isn't exactly deep winter, even in northern Minnesota, and it especially wasn't deep winter this year. We were assured, though, that they still had a good snow base there, so we headed off with enthusiasm and a sincere hope not to drive into a March blizzard. The roads remained clear, the skies blue, and when we got there, the snow base was indeed deep, though melting fast. Gunflint Lake had two feet of ice, though, and ice houses and vehicles dotted the lake here and there.We spent our mornings writing. I revised and polished my last 25 pages and in the three days we were there wrote another 25. (I usually consider five pages a good day's output, so apparently I needed the time away, too. Probably in my case more time away from e-mail than anything else.)Our afternoons were reserved for the outdoors.One afternoon we went dog sledding . . . in the rain as it turned out, but we returned to our cabin wet and happy. I imagine the soaked Alaskan huskies enjoyed curling up inside their small houses at the end of our ride as much as we enjoyed lighting our fireplace and curling up in front of it. And now Blue-Eyed Wolf will have a dog sledding scene. Our musher answered a dozen questions, demonstrated his techniques for controlling the sled, and gave me the title of a good book to recheck details. By the day's end I knew exactly how the dog-sledding scene would work in the novel.The next afternoon we went snowshoeing. I've lived in Minnesota for many years and have snowshoed before, though more often in metropolitan nature reserves than in deep forest. What I hadn't learned previously, though, was that if you step on one snowshoe with the other and don't notice what you've done, when you try to lift the trapped foot you will topple forward like a tree. And I did just that. While I wasn't hurt—rather amazing considering that it was a 73-year-old body doing the toppling—the moment did add spice to the concern we were beginning to feel that we might be just a bit lost.Once more we made our way happily back to our cabin after deciding to use the setting sun as our guide instead of struggling with the trail map we kept misreading. And once more I had a new scene for the book. So guess what? My novice snowshoer is going to step on his snowshoe and topple like a tree! And he and my main character will get just a bit lost, too.I am an unapologetic coward, but in pursuit of stories I have gone whitewater rafting—over a seven-foot falls, would you believe, hiked the high desert of the Oklahoma panhandle and peered into an abandoned wolf den. I have stood much too close—in my mind, anyway—while a naturalist dug through the snow to reveal a hibernating bear curled beneath the roots of a fallen tree. (On that trip I held a tiny cub, her fur fragrant from the balsam needles her mother had nested in. I never washed the gloves I wore that day. Instead, I carried them around in my pockets and held them up to friends from time to time saying, "Smell that. That's what a baby bear smells like.")What a privilege to keep enlarging my life, one carefully sought experience after another. What a privilege to keep writing stories!