2026-10-13 · Caribou Lake near Lutsen (Cook County, North Shore)
Hot Dogs, Cat Food, and a Blue Bucket — Caribou Lake's Fight Against Rusty Crayfish Ends Up on the Plate
On Caribou Lake outside Lutsen, Yusef Orest's Crawdaddies operation and the lake association's volunteer trappers spend the season pulling invasive rusty crayfish — little lawn mowers of wild rice and weeds — and turning them into boils, farmer-market sales, and even a James Beard kitchen in Minneapolis.
The bait of choice is not romantic. Frozen minnows mixed with cat food. Sometimes bits of hot dog. You drop a $15 minnow trap on a string, come back a day later, and the bucket starts moving.
I don’t know what that says about Minnesota, except that we will try anything twice if it might save a weed bed.
The office with a sunset
Ground zero is Caribou Lake — pines and rocky cliffs outside Lutsen on the North Shore. MPR’s Dan Kraker rode along on a warm August evening with Yusef Orest, who steers a small flat-bottomed boat and pulls traps like an underwater trapline.
First trap: roughly a pound. Meal for somebody. The rest were full too — crayfish four and five inches long, skittering in a big blue bucket. Twenty traps. About fourteen pounds. Then he rebaited and dropped them again.
“This isn’t a bad office,” he told the reporter, looking at the sunset.
Day job: renewable energy. Side hustle: Crawdaddies, about seven years running. He’s been obsessed with crayfish since he was a kid. The invasive part came later — and gave the work a second meaning.
Little lawn mowers
Rusty crayfish are not from here. Native range is the Ohio River valley. They likely arrived as fishing bait and have shown up in at least 300 northern Minnesota lakes. Once they settle in, there is no known wipe-out button. They reproduce fast and chew through aquatic plants, including wild rice beds that matter culturally and for the fish hiding in that green.
Amanda Weberg, aquatic invasive species supervisor for Cook County Soil and Water, calls them “little lawn mowers.” She has also shown up at community events in a bright red crayfish costume.
Orest got grants from the SWCD and partners for equipment. More than a hundred traps go in starting in May; he works them every couple of days through the end of September. Last year: about 1,400 pounds off Caribou. This year, by late summer, he was already well over 2,000. He reported about $14,000 in sales — enough, he said, to finally break even and hire part-time help. He also called harvesting invasives a “marginal business.” Nobody gets rich on cat-food bait.
The association, the wedding, and the fancy kitchen
The Caribou Lake property owners’ association has paid Orest for two years. Volunteers run about 200 traps of their own. President Tom Rider called the invasion a “slow-moving freight train.” The group spends about $15,000 a year. They are pulling tens of thousands out, he said, and the numbers keep climbing. Productive, yes. Sustainable forever without more eaters? That is the worry.
Orest hosts a community crayfish boil each year and sells at farmers markets and online. Earlier this summer a Twin Cities couple planning a wedding boil had their shipment fall through. They called him. He met them in Hinckley with the cargo. They told him he saved the wedding. Not a sentence I expected to write about a North Shore side hustle.
His restaurant client is Bûcheron in Minneapolis — James Beard Award for best new restaurant last year. Chef Adam Ritter gets the crayfish cleaned, drained, and overnighted on ice. Tail meat on green gazpacho. Bodies and shells into a sauce for crispy chicken, with Swedish meatballs for a Scandinavian twist. Ritter visited the lake this summer, learned he was cooking an invasive, and wants more recipes. He calls the meat a milder lobster, sweeter.
Look, I have burned frozen pizza with more confidence than I have for Midwestern crawfish cuisine catching on overnight. Still: trap them, eat them, give the wild rice a chance.
Anyway
Fall is when the traps come up. The association keeps worrying about the long haul. Orest keeps saying it is not rocket science — a cheap trap, a little bait, a string, a day.
Caribou Lake is still pine shade and rock. The blue bucket still moves when you dump a good pull. Somewhere between Hinckley and a James Beard kitchen in Minneapolis, a North Shore side hustle is turning a problem into supper.
If you can’t beat ‘em, the saying goes. On Caribou, they are at least trying to eat ‘em.