‘Chief cook and bottle washer’ hands off her beloved Minnesota mom-and-pop resort

Sprawling, spring-fed Burntside Lake sits just outside Ely, Minn., one portage away from the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. The lake’s water is so clear and sky-blue that it was once featured in Hamm’s beer advertisements. At night, a full moon shoots a glittery tractor beam across its inky expanse.

Guests of Camp Van Vac, on Burntside’s south shore, have vacationed amid this scenic beauty for more than a century, surrounded by quietude and tall pines, joined by the occasional bear. The place is unlike any of Minnesota’s hundreds of lakeside vacation rentals Minnesotans. Not really a resort or a lodge, “camp” aptly describes Van Vac’s rustic accommodations (the vintage cabins lack bathrooms and are heated by wood stoves) and the camaraderie cultivated among families who have been coming for five generations.

A visitor’s first stop is Van Vac’s stone-and-log office where, for decades, they’ve been greeted by Nancy Jo Tubbs. She’s been a fixture at her family’s resort since she was born right upstairs, in 1947. “Dr. Snyker came from Ely,” she can’t help but add.

Tubbs, a writer and raconteur (she was a longtime columnist for the Ely Timberjay),knows such details matter. And she’s been responsible for every little thing required to rent out 25 antique cabins for 40-plus summers.

That means managing Van Vac’s daily grind (taking reservations, making beds) and long-term preservation (removing downed trees, reroofing cabins). Plus, whatever else pops up during her dawn-to-dusk days, whether that’s directing electricians to replace a burned-out breaker box or lending salt to a guest making an apple pie. Tubbs does these things with the confidence of a wolf-pup handler (she was the longtime board chair of Ely’s International Wolf Center) and the vigor of someone known to express an affirmative as “Yepper!”

Serving as Van Vac’s “chief cook and bottle washer” has made for a wonderful, if taxing, life. And as Tubbs winds down her final season, she’s happy to relinquish her role.

“My knees and hips are ready,” she said.

But it’s no simple thing to make changes in a place where so little has changed for so long. Van Vac is not only among the oldest resorts in Minnesota, but one of the few to have remained so frozen in time. Not to mention one of the rarest few helmed by a solo female proprietor.

At a time when so many of the state’s mom-and-pop resorts have been sold off to developers and parceled out for luxurious lake homes, and when vacation rentals tout granite countertops, Jacuzzis and cable TV, Van Vac beats against the current of modernity.

“We’re seeing a lot of renovations and amenities being added to resorts, and the wonderful thing about Camp Van Vac is that it has maintained its original charm and rusticness,” said Eva Sebesta, executive director of the Ely Chamber of Commerce. “People can really unplug.”

As Tubbs prepares to pass Van Vac’s stewardship to the next generation, she reflected on the secret to its staying power. “There’s a real attraction to the simplicity,” she said. “I don’t understand it, but I love it.”

Pick a cabin, any cabin, and open its creaky wooden door. Breathe in the organic, nostalgic scent of age and step back to an era when Ely promoted itself as the “Playground of a Nation” and implored visitors to “fish, swim and kodak.”

In 1917, a couple known as Aunt Kate and Uncle Van — Tubbs’ mother’s aunt and her father’s second cousin, respectively — moved to the property. Van Vacton Harriswas a suspender-wearing timber cruiser who scouted North Country forests for a mining company. His wife was a Duluth schoolteacher.

The Harrises hired their Finnish neighbors to build cabins along a peninsula with a granite outcrop at its tip. Today, the structures have electricity and running water, but in Van and Kate’s day, they were illuminated by kerosene lanterns. At check-in, guests were handed a bucket to fetch their water from a nearby spring. Food was cooled by the huge blocks of ice that Van and his neighbors cut from the lake and stacked in the icehouse to last all summer. Cabins rented for as little as $15 a week.

When the Harrises retired in the 1940s, Tubbs’ parents, Winnie and Buell Tubbs, took over. Tubbs describes her father, a former Marine drill instructor, as a man who could split wood all day and carry a hundred-pound canoe over a milelong, uphill-both-ways portage. He once came into the kitchen with an ax buried in his shin. He also bravely lobbed firecrackers at one trash-seeking bear and shooed another one off by whacking its tush with a broom.

Tubbs had the run of the resort with two half-siblings, a couple of cousins and the teenage staff who lived on-site. She spent her childhood running around barefoot, catching frogs, water skiing “until our arms and legs fell off.” She swam or fished off the dock and roasted marshmallows around the bonfire.

Playmates were infinite.

“My best friend would be in camp one week, and then they’d leave, and then a new best friend would be in camp,” Tubbs said. “So I always had kids to run with.”

Chores were equally abundant. Turning over cabins and washing “a heck of a lot” of dishes were typical tasks for girls. Boys sold minnows, bailed boats and hauled water.

Tubbs went to college in San Diego and spent summers at camp. In her 20s, she moved to a city north of San Francisco to work as a reporter, where she met her future husband, Tom Speros, a self-described “city kid.”

In 1984, after Tubbs’ mother had died, she and Speros moved to the camp. Their tenure literally started with a bang — they arrived to find Buell on the porch, aiming a gun at a red squirrel. At least Buell had not tried to ward off his new son-in-law.

“Tom was really game, but he was learning everything,” Tubbs explained. “And my dad was not amused by that.”

Tubbs and Speros replaced the wooden boats with aluminum ones and added showers to the central bathroom building. The couple ran the camp for nearly two decades before Speros died, leaving Tubbs as the sole proprietor.

Tubbs’ most recent big change was installing Wi-Fi in the office, where she spends her days among racks of life jackets, stacks of puzzles and shelves of books for borrowing, all watched over by a taxidermized mink. A century-old map of Burntside Lake — the west and north shores are labeled “roadless area” — hangs under a sign that reads “No whining.”

Taped to the office’s front door is a list of “6 Things You Need to Know.” Amid useful information about settling up and checking out, pontoon rental rates and procedures for outdoor fires, is this nonsequitur: “Butterflies taste with their feet.”

It kind of tells you everything you need to know about Tubbs: The no-nonsense proprietor has a wry side, too.

Van Vac guests are fond of saying they feel like family, and Tubbs plays the role of de-facto matriarch, keeping the peace so all can enjoy it. (Her dock and swim raft policy reads: “No pushing. No shoving. No exceptions. When it occurs, the raft will be pulled out of the lake for the rest of the week. FAIR WARNING, Y’ALL!”)

Tubbs may be a self-proclaimed introvert, not at all gushy or effusive, but she’s cultivated an environment where guests feel at home. And inspired to give back. Each May and October, volunteers show up for seasonal work weekends — a practice hard to imagine at a mega-resort. The crew washes windows, hangs curtains, replaces drawer paper, rakes leaves — and plays pranks, including one involving barbecue sauce applied to a doorknob.

Jacque Passow of Minneapolis has been attending work weekends since Tubbs took over and said that, as someone who mostly sits at a desk all day, she relishes the sense of accomplishment that comes from refilling the woodshed.

“It’s the perfect way to get away from your life,” she said of Van Vac. “There’s just a magic about it. You’ve got cold running water, you’ve got a wood-burning stove. What more do you need? Maybe a mouse trap?”

In the guest books, Van Vac visitors rave about the small moments that make up a relaxing vacation: the breathtaking blanket of stars, lapping waves and loons, hot-cheese bologna Thursdays at the local grocery, long naps. But guests also see Van Vac as a place to celebrate major life milestones. One caught a “keeper” by tying a diamond ring to a fishing line.

“If you are lucky enough to find this place, it is proof once again that you do not have to be a millionaire to live like one!” one visitor wrote. “There is nowhere in the world where life makes more sense than on these paths next to this lake,” penned another.

Colleen Krebs, of Minneapolis, first came to Van Vac at 4 months old and got married on one of Burntside’s islands. She typically spends a month at camp, often joined by relatives from as far away as California — undeterred by having once encountered a bear in her cabin’s kitchen. (She hadn’t shut the door.)

Krebs is one of the few guests who remember Aunt Kate. “She was really kind of strict and known to kick people out if they didn’t behave properly,” Krebs recalled. But Krebs also noted that one of her cousins, who worked at Van Vac as a teenager and was fired after burning down a shed, somehow managed to return as a guest.

“It’s a place where people really develop a loyalty and affection,” Krebs said.

Tubbs doesn’t have children, and as she got older, longtime guests wondered about Van Vac’s fate.

They were relieved to learn that Tubbs’ handpicked successor was right there among them: Derek Houtkooper, her longtime right-hand-man.

Houtkooper, who is in his early 40s, discovered Van Vac when he was bartending at the historic Burntside Lodge nearby. He oversees maintenance of the cabins and grounds, meaning he might be replacing a light fixture, filling gravel-road washouts, jumping a guest’s truck battery, or retrieving a 14-foot Lund some city slicker abandoned after flooding the motor. (Oops.)

Over time, Houtkooper came to know the property’s quirks, including that the cabins are numbered in the order they were built. He learned which aging guests need help hauling gear, how to manage Cabin 12′s fussy faucet, and, generally, to jury-rig a so-called “Van Vac-ish” repair when a full-scale fix isn’t possible. (His sign in the women’s restroom reads: “Caution! Please sit gently. Toilet is loose due to sinking floor.”)

During the shoulder seasons, Houtkooper staves off decay that could become an excuse to tear down the cabins. He glazes windows and pressure-washes and stains the old logs to keep out weather and beetles.

“I feel like I’m kind of a protector from this being developed,” he said of the property.

Tubbs also has been training Houtkooper’s partner, Jessica Meyer, on office operations. The couple plan to move into Tubbs’ home on-site (Tubbs will live in Ely), and they look forward to giving their kids a more carefree, nature-immersed lifestyle.

“It’s an experience that you can’t have anywhere,” Meyer said.

Houtkooper says he appreciates how Van Vac’s guests don’t mind eschewing modern conveniences. And how Van Vac’s extended “family” helps contribute to its upkeep. When the place lost power for a week after a massive blowdown in 2016, guests with canceled reservations showed up anyway to help with the cleanup.

Houtkooper and Meyer plan to make a few tweaks to Van Vac, including reviving the naturalist programs, potlucks and singalongs that dwindled during COVID. They plan to restock the 50-year-old pop machine, and, eventually, build cross-county ski trails and a couple of winterized cabins on the adjacent property.

But mostly the couple see themselves as guardians of the Van Vac legacy and keepers of its pristine land.

“From the first time that I stepped onto this property, I felt a deep connection with this place,” Houtkooper said. “I think there’s a lot of people that feel the same way, because they spread their loved ones’ ashes here.”