Times columnist publishes travel book about St. Croix Watershed
Like many who live here, Angie Hong has grown attached to the St. Croix Valley. The water education senior specialist at the Washington Conservation District brought her to the area in 2006, and it was then she “fell in love with” the area.
She had followed her now-husband to Minnesota after graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and was immediately smitten. Though they both wanted to move to the area sooner, it wasn’t until 2011 when she and her husband would be able to purchase a home in Stillwater.
“We joked for the first couple years that it feels like we’re on vacation all the time. It’s such a sweet little community,” she said, later adding, “It was really beautiful.”
An adventurer at heart, she explored the area, finding hidden pathways or taking paddleboarding excursions down the St. Croix and into the shallows of the channels at William O’Brien State Park. From learning about unusual species living in the river to teaching others about the nature around them, her job has taken her along the rivers’ watersheds and natural landscapes, across the county and into northern Minnesota and western Wisconsin.
Those adventures and pieces of education she has shared through columns in the Forest Lake Times and the Stillwater Gazette for years.
And people took notice.
“For years, people have been saying you really should write a book,” Hong said. She’d laugh them off, mostly acknowledging a significant time commitment she felt she didn’t have.
“I had a job, a kid, a life,” she said.
It wasn’t until the early days of the pandemic that she began considering writing a book.
“Everything slowed down just enough,” she said, later adding, “For me, suddenly I had all this time.”
She would grab a paddleboard and take her son and her dog out for paddles on the river, or exploring local parks or hidden paths.
“There were so many cool places, and I wanted to share all these special places with people,” she said.
So she began to develop her idea for the book. Lonely Planet, a travel blog, was her inspiration.
“I want it to be like you really get to know this area, what the environmental history is, what the special places are. Yeah, there’s recommended destinations, but there’s also a lot of stories,” she said.
Some of those stories stem from her own personal journeys in the land, like her paddleboarding adventures with her son.
“We’ve been doing that for years,” she said. “When he was really young, and we got the standup paddleboard, I took him and the dog. I said ‘This is either going to be the best decision of my life, or the worst decision of my life,’ trying to get all three of us on this paddleboard together, but it worked!”
Other stories are some from her own connections with the area through her column writing. Nora Olson, a reader of her columns in the Stillwater Gazette, called her up out of the blue one day and invited her to check out her prairie restoration at her home in Stillwater township.
“If somebody wanted to kidnap me, that would be a way to do it,” Hong joked. “It was just inspiring to see that love and care and commitment.”
Yet other opportunities presented themselves as she was writing the book. Through social media, Hong connected with a young member of the Leech Lake Tribe of Ojibwe in northern Minnesota. He presented her the opportunity to go wild ricing on the Moose Horn River.
“That was this really unique and special experience,” she said, noting the “long and rich history” of gathering wild rice.
It’s those stories, she said, that make her travel book more than just a guide.
“It’s also a story of getting to know the place and the people, and getting to know the story of this place and what’s it’s been over the years,” she said.
But even for those who know the St. Croix Valley well, she said, there’s plenty more hidden places and treks for all ages and types of adventure, from on the water to trekking into the prairies or through the woods to find hidden waterfalls.
“I think no matter how long you’ve lived here, it’s always fun to be surprised and to find something you didn’t know was there – to find a new destination, and it turns out it’s only 45 minutes away from your house,” she said.
Her knowledge of local ecology is interspersed throughout the book, like talking about the bryozoan colonies found in the St. Croix River.
“It looks like a giant wad of snot,” she said.
Her book includes not just the local area, but the entire watershed itself, which boasts about 8,000 square miles for the 169 miles of main riverway. She mentions a herd of elk near the top portion of the watershed, a meadow in Wisconsin known as a wildlife photography destination where sandhill cranes flock to, or further north into the Namekagon Barren, where in the winter you can experience male grouts dancing for females in the mating ritual.
“A lot of the places are places I, myself, have visited or interacted with for years,” she said.
She hopes the book will spark locals to learn about and explore the nature around them.
“There are still these surprising things most people don’t know. There’s also just so many little hidden gem destinations that … most people don’t even know exist,” she said.
“Exploring the St. Croix River Valley: Adventures on and off the Water” is available now for pre-order through the University of Minnesota Press. The book is expected to release in July.
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