Shannon Fiecke of the Shakopee Valley News reports:

The idea came to them over the Fourth of July, as they were testing out a friend’s pontoon.

Three weeks later, 17-year-old Preston Nielsen of Shakopee and his friends had built a plywood raft, capable of carrying them 50 miles from Le Sueur to Shakopee.

“We thought it’d be fun to do something before we all left for college and missions for our church, so we decided to build a raft and float it down the Minnesota River,” said fellow Shakopee High School senior Spencer Gunnell.

The raft, essentially sheets of 1/2-inch bare plywood laid over six 50- to 55-gallon plastic barrels, was mainly crafted by Nielsen in his parents’ garage.

Last Friday afternoon, Gunnell and Nielsen were joined by three friends in a Huck Finn-like adventure down the river.

Although the trip didn’t go exactly as planned and wasn’t quite as exciting as Tom Sawyer’s tale, the boys did hear a band of coyotes howling at them as they camped along the riverbank.

The young men — nearly all whom have obtained or are in the process of getting their Eagle Scout badge — embarked on their journey shortly before 3 p.m. last Friday.

The teens hoped they would complete the journey in under 24 hours, estimating they would travel between 2-1/2 mph and 4 mph, sleeping over at one of the camping spots along the river between Belle Plaine and Jordan. They mapped out their route ahead of time, using bridge overpasses as markers.

However, the river current was slow (averaging about 2 mph during the trip), and the group figured they had only traveled about 12 miles by 9 p.m. Friday, said Shakopee senior Taylor Isle.
It was getting dark then and there were a lot of logs and trees in the water, so they decided to camp on a sandbar they discovered when going around a bend.

A couple guys never slept, and the rest stayed up most of the night, building a campfire, eating, talking about their day — and goofing around.

They heard around a dozen coyotes on the other side of the river and saw the bushes moving when they flashed their flashlights around.

“It was kind of scary” to hear them wrestling around, yelping and then hollowing, Isle said.

The group tiredly launched the raft around 5 a.m. Saturday, discovering they were even further behind than they expected when they came around a bend and didn’t see an anticipated bridge.

“The morale went down a little bit then,” Isle said.

The group members figured that if they wanted to make it all the way to Shakopee, they would have to paddle hard nonstop and probably still wouldn’t make their destination until later in the evening.

So they arranged (by cell phone) to be picked up at a boat launch in Belle Plaine around 1 p.m., so they could drift up the river and goof around instead.

Although some of the guys had canoed before in the Boundary Waters, none had done a trip like this, with no adults along, Isle said.

“We’re either the coolest parents — or the stupidest,” said one of the mothers, Cindy Johnson, humorously. “I’m not sure which.”

Although they did the planning themselves, Isle said the group had the support and advice from their parents.

“I was very nervous, but it seemed like every safety issue, they had an answer for,” said Johnson, who lives in Spring Lake Township.

Her son Riley Johnson, a Prior Lake High junior, and David Hebron, a Prior Lake graduate, were also along for the trip.

The teens are “very good kids,” said Johnson, who was grateful the project kept them really busy the last three weeks.

The group wants to redesign the raft so it’s a little big larger and more aerodynamic, so they can float faster.

The guys hope to plan another trip next summer on a different river or longer stretch of the Minnesota River. They’d also like to include some friends who couldn’t make the trip this year.

“It was a lot of fun, even though we were just creeping along,” Isle said. “Even though we were never too far away from towns and civilization, it felt like we were.”

Shannon Fiecke is a staff writer for the Shakopee Valley News. She can be reached at sfiecke@swpub.com.