The Big Moose, the Podcaster, and the Fire That Changed the North Shore Forever

On the morning of February 6, 2024, I planned to go swimming at the YMCA in Grand Marais, about 5 miles from where I live. It was just before 7 a.m. when I pulled up. During the short drive from my house, I’d received several text messages, which was unusual that early in the day.

One friend wrote: “What are you going to do about the fire?”

Another said: “This is big news on the fire!”

My first thought, in a sudden panic: My house was an inferno. Gone were the photo albums of me fly-fishing during my college days in Missoula. My computer was destroyed. My audio equipment. My ice fishing gear. All gone.

I soon learned my house was fine. The main lodge at the 140-year-old Lutsen Resort, however, was not.

One of the most iconic and treasured landmarks on Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior, the Lutsen Lodge, one of the oldest continuously operational resorts in the entire state, had burned to the ground overnight. Nearly two years later, this past December, the resort’s owner, Bryce Campbell, was arrested by special agents from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and charged with arson and insurance fraud.

I’ve lived on the North Shore for more than a decade. As a journalist known for digging into stories that most regional reporters shy away from—things like a local guy murdering a pedophile with a moose antler, a cult leader who believed aliens were coming to Lake Superior to transport people into another galaxy, or stories about people who simply die in the Boundary Waters—the Lutsen story pulled me in right away, and I made a podcast about the fire. While my official news beat isn’t the weird and the dark, that’s the first description that comes to mind.

At the center of this story is Bryce Campbell, a businessman who never graduated from high school, who came down from Canada to Minnesota’s North Shore with the dream of building a resort empire, one that included Lutsen Resort. The podcast has layers of darkness: money, sex, jail. All the captivating ingredients are there.

In a state rife with historic lakeside resorts, the fire destroyed perhaps the grandest and most historic lodge of them all. No guests were staying at the lodge that night, and the business was falling into seemingly inescapable debt—payroll was in danger of being missed that week. Campbell disputes any suspicion, claiming he’s innocent, the fire was an accident, and everyone is out to get him. And while he protests that the media paints an unfair picture of him and his business dealings, court documents and people who worked for him tell a different story, not to mention the arson and fraud charges.

What happened at Lutsen—the fire and the debt and this guy who came from Canada with designs on making this iconic resort into something much bougier and more inaccessible before the whole thing went up in smoke—is unquestionably the biggest of all the weird and dark stories I’ve covered over the years. Even the North Shore old-timers can’t recall a story that’s generated this level of shock and curiosity. Is Bryce Campbell a con man who finally went too far? Or is he really just a victim of a terrible rep generated by a vindictive local press? The answer depends on who you ask, and I’ve asked everybody with knowledge of the situation some version of those questions, including Campbell himself.

In certain circles up here on the North Shore, Bryce Campbell is known as the Big Moose. The dude is a towering figure, 6'5" and pushing three bills, though he told me that at his last doctor’s appointment, the nurse measured him at 6'4". “Old-age shrinkage has begun,” he said.

Campbell landed on Minnesota’s North Shore in 2018, not long after he and his mother, Sheila Campbell, purchased Lutsen Resort for about $6.7 million. After initially staying in a room at the resort, he later moved to a condo at Burlington Bay near Two Harbors, part of the Superior Shores resort that he purchased in 2020. His mother stayed behind in Manitoba, where Bryce is from originally. Bryce’s husband, Steven Day, also stayed in Canada, running a hotel in Fort Frances, Ontario, that the Campbells purchased in 2014.

Almost immediately, Bryce Campbell set out to change the way Lutsen Resort looked and felt. He hired architects and contractors to physically reshape the resort’s main building. He wanted to remodel the third floor, an area that was being used for storage and office space, and open it to guests. He had a vision for a high-end spa to be built on the property. The restaurant was upgraded to include fancier entrées, like smoked goose chowder and venison carpaccio. Campbell’s vision was high-end: Forget the price became his philosophy. And then the lodge caught fire.

Pretty much the entire state of Minnesota, including the State Fire Marshal’s office and the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, blames Campbell for the fire. He maintains he had nothing to do with it. In the fire’s aftermath, and before his arrest, Campbell agreed to sit down for interviews with me on two different occasions; the second was recorded, something no other journalist in Minnesota had accomplished. In that interview, I asked him to his face if he started the fire that destroyed the lodge.

“Pretty straightforward question,” he said. “No, of course not.”

As much as I wanted Campbell to be like Tyler Durden in Fight Club, he wasn’t. He isn’t edgy or cool. He’s clumsy and self-deprecating. He knocked over his bottle of diet soda twice during our interview, apologizing each time, as though I had a stake in the outcome of his beverage.

On that day, Campbell sounded like a heartbroken, nearly humble guy—at least when the tape was rolling—but those days are over, at least for now. Released from jail on bond, Campbell isn’t doing interviews anymore. Not with me. Not with anyone. His attorney won’t respond to messages, and I’ve tried. Nonetheless, media organizations across Minnesota are intrigued by Campbell’s journey from Canada to the North Shore. The Star Tribune and the Duluth News Tribune both made attempts at writing a profile of sorts, but they were absent any direct comments from Campbell.

My first meeting with Campbell in January 2025, about a year after the fire, was at a pub near Lutsen. Campbell didn’t want me to record audio at that meeting. I’d reported on Campbell for years at that point, though we’d only communicated by email—this would be our first in-person interview. He lumbered into the pub and ordered a diet soda. Other than his beard, he looked a bit out of place—he didn’t have the vibes of someone spent from a day working or playing outdoors, as many on the North Shore tend to exhibit. He’d spent the day trying to sell a used van, he explained. We found a back corner table, and Campbell sat but never removed his large parka. His hands constantly moved throughout. He’d be holding his soda with one hand and tugging at his shoe with the other, then he’d switch, and suddenly his other hand was on the soda.

Campbell’s nervous behavior hasn't been limited to his handling of diet soda. In January of this year, one month after he was arrested for arson and fraud, he filed a federal lawsuit claiming Auto-Owners Insurance company breached its contract by refusing to pay out a claim related to the 2024 Lutsen Resort fire. The Big Moose wants his money was my thought when I learned he was suing his insurance company. The media gobbled it up. Who wants to write about zoning issues or truth-in-taxation meetings when you can cover a guy accused of torching his own resort?

It can get exhausting trying to keep up with what Campbell is doing, literally. I last saw him in March of this year, speeding in his black Cadillac Escalade down Highway 61. He was pushing 80 in a 65-mile-per-hour zone between Two Harbors and Duluth. For a guy out on bail, the Big Moose was in a hurry to get somewhere fast.

Campbell is currently still residing in the Lutsen area, calling a dorm-style crash pad home. It’s the type of place that even a college kid might think of as utilitarian. Given that Lutsen is only 60 miles from the Canadian border, Campbell is most often traveling south these days. One of the conditions of his $100,000 bond is that he can’t leave the state or country.

Meanwhile, I’ve become a repository for Campbell sightings around the North Shore. It’s not something I particularly enjoy. People send me pictures when they see him in public or when he posts things on the internet. Someone saw him at a Starbucks in Duluth in January and snapped his photo.

“Is this Bryce Campbell?” the person asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“Holy fuck,” they wrote back.

None of this came up in our first conversation at the local pub, of course. Campbell hadn’t been arrested yet—that would come 11 months later. The room where we talked was dimly lit, but there was a lot of energy in our conversation. In retrospect, his energy made it all seem much brighter than it actually was. As we sat there talking, the Big Moose told me he doesn’t trust the media. They’re out to destroy him, he said: the Duluth News Tribune, the Star Tribune. All bad enterprises, in his book.

“And then there’s you,” he said, looking right at me. “You’ve been my harshest critic,” he added, before knocking back his diet soda.

Campbell and I got off on the wrong foot a few years back. In late September 2022, Lutsen Resort was issued a cease-and-desist order by the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The order came about after Campbell hired a company to repair Lutsen Lodge’s red covered bridges that were damaged by Poplar River flooding that spring. The company drove some heavy machinery, including an excavator, into the river during the work, disturbing the delicate bottom of a state-designated trout stream. The company did this, it claims, at Campbell’s express instruction. In typical Big Moose fashion, he claims otherwise. Campbell says the contractor went rogue, digging up the river of its own accord.

Two different DNR staffers, a conservation officer and a fisheries biologist, told me they were stunned when Campbell “threw the contractor under the bus” during a meeting about the illegal river work. I also spoke with the regulatory project manager at the Duluth office of the Army Corps of Engineers, who further confirmed the accuracy of the contractor's account. Campbell was furious when my story was published, though I gave him a chance to respond, which he did via email, blaming “third party contractors and sub-contractors” and characterizing “what had started as a simple clean up and repair” as changing into something “more involved.”

Nonetheless, he loathed the bad press. A friend of mine who owns a Gunflint Trail resort told me that a few weeks later, during a meeting of the Visit Cook County board of directors—where the Moose was serving as treasurer at the time—Campbell went on an R-rated tirade about me in front of local business owners.

The resentment seemed to intensify a couple years later when I wrote a story about a Minnesota judge stripping Campbell of ownership of his other resort on the North Shore, Superior Shores, near Two Harbors. He took control of that property on a contract for deed in January 2020. At the time, the $15 million price Campbell paid was believed to be a record sale for a North Shore resort. It didn’t take long for things to spiral out of control.

In a court hearing in July 2024, a resort executive brought in to essentially rescue the resort per court order declared the situation Campbell created at Superior Shores a “financial disaster.” There was a tremendous number of bills piling up, the court heard. “We have vendors demanding payment,” the Superior Shores “rescue squad” rep told the judge. I broke the story, and media across the state picked it up. Once again, Campbell was furious.

Nonetheless, Campbell and I kept in touch via email about the court’s ruling. The tone of the emails started to shift slightly, particularly when I told him that some of what he said in court was reasonable. It’s a complex story, he and I agreed.

“Superior Shores was to be my ultimate conquer [sic],” Campbell emailed me just before midnight on July 31, 2024, almost six months after the fire.

Campbell described the double whammy—the fire at Lutsen and the court-ordered loss of his other North Shore resort—as the stuff of Hollywood folklore. “This recent saga would appear to be right out of a movie!” he wrote, using an exclamation point for emphasis. “I have been absolutely crushed by the recent events, not only the events themselves, but the betrayal that has come with them.”

Evoking the conspiracy in the Roman Senate to assassinate Julius Caesar, Campbell is most notably referring to his former general manager at Lutsen Resort, Edward Vanegas. Campbell hired Vanegas, another outsider, from Colorado, where he’d been running a chain of restaurants. Vanegas, who wears a trilby hat, has a bit of an Italian-mobster vibe to him. He’s what a character of The Godfather might have looked like if Francis Ford Coppola had run out of money mid-movie. Nonetheless, he’s a joy to talk to. He’s forthcoming and witty, and he has a great sense for important details. He can recall the phone call where Campbell told him he went back to Lutsen Resort right before the fire started with such vividness you feel as though you were listening in.

“I have to tell you something,” Campbell told Vanegas a month after the fire. “I was there.”

“You were where?” Vanegas asked.

“I went back to the resort.”

“You went back?”

“I had to pick up something I left a couple days before.”

“At that time of night?”

Campbell proceeded to tell Vanegas he was inside the building less than 30 minutes before the fire was reported to the authorities. This was a massive shift from his original story that he was asleep at his condo near Two Harbors after picking up a Domino’s pizza. As soon as Vanegas learned Campbell was in the building just before the fire started, he hung up on his former boss. They are no longer on speaking terms.

Vanegas is a key source for information and background on Campbell. He’s not shy about discussing the financial woes of the resort in the lead-up to the fire or anything that took place afterward, including details about where Campbell was the night of the fire.

“Et tu, Edward?” Campbell might ask his longtime associate.

That’s a romanticized thought, because the Big Moose probably isn’t familiar with act 3, scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. If you asked him what he thinks about Marcus Brutus, he might wonder if he’s another debt collector. Campbell told me he’s only read a few books in his adult life, including one entitled Great Lodges of the Canadian Rockies. That book inspired him to get into the resort business and drove his attempt to make Lutsen Resort something it never was: an upscale refuge for elites.

Campbell entered the resort business at a young age. In 2001, when he was just 17, his family bought their first commercial property, a small drive-in restaurant in Manitoba. Now, still just 41, he’s the owner of North Shore Resort Co., which sits under the umbrella of the Campbell Hospitality Group, a Canada-based company he founded with his mother in 2002. By the time Sheila Campbell died in August 2021, at the age of 64, their group had acquired nearly half a dozen hotels in Manitoba, Ontario, and Minnesota. Bryce’s father and Sheila’s husband, Kendon Campbell—who ran a 600-acre cattle farm near Reston, Manitoba, when Bryce and his two brothers, Curtis and Nick, were growing up—largely stayed out of the hospitality business, though according to Vanegas, he did come to Lutsen for a few days after the fire.

Along the way, Campbell Hospitality Group bought Main Street Inn and Suites and Rest’n Inn, both in Manitoba. It purchased the Copper River Inn in Fort Frances in 2014. After renovating the hotel and expanding its restaurant, Campbell was named the Entrepreneur of the Year in 2015 by the Rainy River District Chamber of Commerce. In a photo attached to the press release, Campbell is tan and smiling, with the look of a brand-new papa who had just welcomed his first child into the world.

Campbell told me he’d aspired to be in the food and lodging industry since he was a tween. “My dream of hospitality began when I was 10 going on 11 with our annual family vacation in Jackson Hole, [Wyoming],” he said. “I was mesmerized by the hotels and resorts, and that year my ‘when I grow up’ switched from wanting to be a veterinarian to wanting to own a resort.”

Campbell said he was never interested in formal education. He was always in a hurry to get into business for himself. The month he should have been graduating from high school, he was working the grill at the drive-in restaurant he co-owned with his mother. “I decided to only write half of my final exams, and for the rest of the month I learned how to flip burgers and clean the ice cream machine,” he told me.

He points to the day his mother died as one of the worst days of his life. Others, including Vanegas, say that when Sheila died, things changed. Campbell became more assertive with how he wanted to run Lutsen and his other businesses. There was nobody left to question anything. The Big Moose was in full control.

Over the course of his six years in Minnesota, Campbell developed a reputation of being an unsavory character, in part because of all the money he owes. Just prior to the fire, Campbell and his businesses owed more than $14 million in past-due and near-due debts, while sitting on a mere $34,000 in their collective bank accounts. The National Bank of Commerce in Duluth reportedly issued a default letter on one of his mortgages for Lutsen Resort less than two weeks before the fire.

It’s more than just the money, though. I’ve dropped Campbell’s name on dozens of people who live on the North Shore, and most didn’t like him out of the gate. A retired businessman who requested anonymity told me that Campbell once showed up to an impromptu meeting of local movers and shakers and claimed he wanted to buy Superior National Golf Course, located across Highway 61 from the Lutsen Resort. Campbell discovered it was set to hit the market and, full of brash confidence, said he’d pay cash for it right then and there, and then abruptly walked out.

“We were all like, ‘Who the hell was that?’” the source recalls.

It didn’t take long for Campbell’s neighbors on the North Shore and his most frequent guests at the lodge to raise eyebrows at the way he wanted to change the vibes at Lutsen Resort. He wanted more Mar-a-Lago energy than he did historic-lodge-serving-wild-rice-soup. He wanted clients with deep pockets, people willing to spend big on a luxury vacation. Vanegas told me at one point that Campbell expressly pointed out he didn’t want “people who drive Subarus” checking in at Lutsen Lodge anymore—anybody driving one of those safe, sensible, four-wheel-drive vehicles should keep on driving up the shore. The thing is, if you count the number of Subarus driving up and down Highway 61 on any given day in August, it’s a whole hell of a lot of business.

Kevin Brown doesn’t drive a Subaru. He drives a Honda Odyssey minivan. Regardless, back in 2020, Brown left a bad review online about one of Campbell’s Minnesota resorts. “We had gone to Superior Shores for Christmas for over 20 years,” he told me last July. “After Campbell bought it, we called up there and were stunned by the dramatic increase in rates, but more so by the rudeness of the staff.” Brown proceeded to write a negative review on Google.

“Bryce tracked me down,” Brown said. “He somehow figured out I owned a business in Minneapolis and left me a one-star review in retaliation.”

Brown shared the experience online, which led to him being contacted by the owners of Aesthetic Home, an antiques store in St. Paul. Those owners had left a negative review of the Superior Shores restaurant, Brown said, and had received an even worse review: “I can’t imagine purchasing any home decor items from someone with this low of class and trashy taste,” a person with the username “Bryce Campbell” posted.

According to their records, Brown explained, Campbell never purchased anything from either business before posting the harsh reviews. “The whole thing just seemed really petty and vindictive,” Brown said.

The second time I sat down with Campbell came two weeks after our first conversation at the Lutsen pub. For this one, in late January 2025, about a week before the one-year anniversary of the Lutsen Resort fire, we both agreed that our conversation would be recorded. I was working on a multi-episode podcast, The Fire: A North Shore Story, which would be released nearly 12 months later, in December 2025, one day after Campbell was arrested and charged with arson and fraud.

For this conversation, I’d traveled to Fort Frances, Ontario. Campbell instructed me to meet him at the Copper River Inn, a hotel he still owned at the time. He said he was living there with his husband, Steven Day, in one of the rooms.

During the years that Campbell has lived in Minnesota, the couple have lived apart, with Campbell staying at a condo on the Superior Shores property and Day staying up at the Copper River Inn. Campbell is a notorious speeder, and he picked up at least eight traffic violations between the Canadian border and his properties on the North Shore. I’ve never interviewed Day, though I’ve attempted to. The last time I contacted him, in April of this year, he told me to leave him alone. Campbell sold the Copper River Inn last summer after owning it for about a decade, and it’s now a Quality Inn. As soon as I arrived, Campbell came walking out with a pair of 20-ounce sodas in plastic bottles.

“Hey, how are ya?” he said, juggling to hold both bottles with his left hand so he could extend his right for a handshake.

When Campbell was arrested, some wondered if he would have caffeine withdrawals in the clink. The guy drinks 80 ounces of Diet Coke every day. On a workday, he’s known to put down a few caramel macchiatos, too.

The day we met in Canada, Campbell had on a collared black shirt under a blue pinstripe blazer. His dark hair was neatly combed. He seemed nervous but also in good spirits. I walked past a huge stuffed moose before meeting him in the lobby, and he led us into a large, empty conference room with a circular table located in the middle. I recorded approximately 90 minutes of audio. There were some talking points we agreed to, a road map for our conversation, including what he wanted to say about the night of the fire.

“Pulling up, everything looked orange,” Campbell said, describing the scene he encountered. The “orange” he’s talking about is the lodge burning into the night sky. It was his second time to the resort that night. He’d also been there a few hours earlier, that time to fetch a mysterious personal “travel bag,” he would tell the authorities. Campbell wouldn’t talk to me about his whereabouts before the fire. That subject was off-limits during our recorded conversation. “I have to be careful about what I say,” he told me.

“I didn’t expect to pull into nothing. It was literally just orange and two chimneys.”

—Bryce Campbell

What’s been shared in the criminal complaint is that Campbell snuck around the resort sometime around midnight, about 20 minutes before smoke started to fill the lobby of the lodge and about 30 minutes before the building was engulfed in flames. He initially lied to investigators, saying he wasn’t there before the fire started. He changed his story when authorities tracked his phone records and picked up the vehicle he was driving that night on surveillance cameras from Tofte to Grand Marais. He didn’t want to be seen, he later confessed, as he was there “doing something personal.” Campbell told me it was off-limits to ask about being in the lodge before the fire started. He wanted to stick to telling me about what he saw later, around 3 a.m. on the night of the fire.

“I didn’t expect to pull into nothing,” he said. “It was literally just orange and two chimneys. You saw burning debris, but the building was gone already.”

Campbell paused his story; I could see him straining to recall the precise imagery of the night, as if he wanted to choose just the right words to describe the scene. Then, while thinking about the building and the fire and how it all went down that night, he said, “That’s fast.” Campbell said those words quietly, trailing off on the recorded tape, as though he was still in awe that a fire could do that much damage so quickly.

Before we agreed to the interview, I’d reported in local North Shore media outlets long before Campbell was arrested that he’d been in the lodge about 20 minutes before the fire started. I confirmed this story a year before his arrest through multiple sources and published numerous articles in 2024 describing his whereabouts the night of the fire. If the story were wrong, Campbell would have sued me for it. He didn’t.

It wasn’t until that interview in Canada that Campbell confirmed he went back to the scene of the fire the night the resort burned. Nobody remembers seeing him at the fire that night, but he told me he was there. His description was theatrical as he recounted what he saw, explaining that he literally fell to his knees as he watched the building burn to the ground. “The drop-to-your-knees thing, it’s actually kind of like that in real life,” he said.

Campbell told me he stayed in that prone position for several hours, like a reincarnation of Andy Dufresne after crawling out of the prison’s sewer in The Shawshank Redemption. Two days later, Campbell said, he was staring down at his legs, wondering why his knees appeared swollen. “I was like, Oh yeah, I was in the snow and on the ice for hours,” he said. “And so I ended up with, like, frostbite on my knees.”

Buried beneath all of Lutsen Resort’s ash and rubble are memories. So many Minnesotans celebrated milestones there—weddings, anniversaries, childhood vacations to Lake Superior. And it was the vibe of the place too, before Campbell took over, that people loved. From the exterior, along Highway 61, situated right next to the Poplar River as it cascades into Lake Superior, the lodge was a stately wooden structure, painted brick red with a massive stone chimney. Inside, you were first struck by the smell of the lodge building, its giant exposed pine timber columns designed by iconic architect Edwin Lundie and its huge stone fireplace—it all commingled together to smell like history. All those memories were vaporized and transformed into something more sinister by this fire that now seems so much more traumatizing than the forest fires that break out regularly in this part of the world. It’s kind of like watching an episode of The Cosby Show in 2026. You can recall the good times, the memories, but something is off. It’s hard to think about.

Sophia Ginis is a member of the Golden Valley City Council. She was married at Lutsen Resort in July 2015. “It was one of the best days of my life,” she said. “The place has a forever place in my heart.”

Ginis says the Lutsen fire shifted things in her memory bank, but so did all the changes Campbell made to the establishment before the fire. In fact, weddings went away altogether during the Big Moose’s short tenure as Lutsen’s owner. Gone, too, were outdoor activities like guided kayak trips on Lake Superior and the outdoor playground for children. The biggest changes were perhaps the ones to the resort’s restaurant, which Campbell christened as The Strand, a nod to the Norwegian word for beach or coast. The restaurant never had an official name before. Titles aside, the most obvious changes to the restaurant came in the form of menu items and their prices. The days of a $15 burger after a day on the slopes at nearby Lutsen Mountains were over, replaced by $100 prix fixe entrées.

For Ginis, the one thing Campbell can’t take away is her ideal wedding day. “It was about 75 degrees,” she told me. “There was a light, wonderful breeze coming off the lake. No flies. No mosquitoes. Just a few puffy clouds in the sky. It was beautiful and sunny. I mean, you could not have designed a more perfect day.”

On top of all that, as Ginis was walking down the aisle at the outdoor wedding, two bald eagles started flying overhead. Transcendent isn’t the precise word, but it’s the first that comes to mind.

When Campbell and team took over Lutsen Resort, Ginis wanted to give them a fair chance, she said. When their remodel commenced, she was open-minded. “At first, I was really kind of excited about it,” she said. “I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this place is getting invested in.’”

When the prices at the restaurant went up and the food quality went down, it was too noticeable to maintain her optimism, Ginis said. “We actually stopped eating there,” she said. “We had to start trying other places. And then not too long after that, it burned down.”

Given the history of the lodge and the saga of the fire, it’s no surprise that some of the state’s highest-profile media personalities are interested in the story of what happened at Lutsen Resort. Among them is Cathy Wurzer, host of Morning Edition on Minnesota Public Radio and cohost of the long-running TV show Almanac, which airs Friday nights on Twin Cities Public Television.

I’ve been on both of Wurzer’s shows talking about Bryce Campbell and the fire at Lutsen Resort. I was on Almanac the night after Campbell was arrested in December. Just before the show went live, Wurzer referenced the arrest and said, “You called that one.” I told her I still wasn’t convinced that Campbell started the fire. “Oh, come on!” she exclaimed.

Unless he confesses to the crimes he is accused of, something that is very unlikely given my knowledge of Bryce Campbell, we may never know how the fire started at Lutsen Resort. And despite a mountain of evidence that makes it seem like Campbell did the things he is accused of—including that he was on scene just before the fire started, that he was Googling for a chemical accelerant that investigators found at the scene of the fire, and all of the evidence of his desperate need for money amid accumulating debt—the guy is innocent until proven guilty.

Even without his attorney disputing the findings in the courtroom, there are justifications not outside the realm of plausibility. Multiple sources told me that on the night of the fire, Campbell was traveling to the Grand Marais area to meet some guy for a casual hookup. Campbell himself testified during insurance proceedings that the reason he was in the building less than 30 minutes before the night watchman dialed 911 to report the fire was because he was “doing something personal” and needed a “travel style kit bag” from his office.

What he did after he left the resort sometime shortly after midnight does not make him guilty of arson, but if he did go there to get the travel-style kit bag, that gave him a reason to be at the lodge the night of the fire. Campbell also told authorities he was inside Lutsen Resort a few nights before the fire, around midnight on February 2, 2024, “hooking up with somebody.” That night, according to the criminal complaint, Campbell attempted to avoid being seen by the night watchman but was spotted nonetheless, near midnight, a time he would otherwise typically not have been there.

About a week after the fire, according to the criminal complaint, Campbell’s husband, Steven Day, messaged him on Facebook. Day asked Campbell what he planned to tell the investigators regarding his whereabouts the night of the fire. “Well, I definitely can’t tell them,” Campbell responded. “Especially after everything, can you imagine if our extra-curricular activities got out in the news?”

Investigators reported in December that the fire originated in the basement of the lodge. The criminal complaint states that investigators found residue from Swissmar fire gel, a fire accelerant, on a water heater in the basement. Records for Campbell’s phone also show he searched for “Sterno-fuel,” “fondue fuel btu,” and “swissmar” in January 2024, a month before the fire. However, Vanegas says he and Campbell were looking for a fuel source to help with the resort’s new fondue bar. Vanegas maintains Swissmar was the fuel source they chose, and multiple cases of it had already arrived at the resort. On January 19, Vanegas texted Campbell, “The new Swissmar gel bottles came in. We did a test. Works great.”

Does being in a building before it catches fire make you guilty of arson? No. Does the seemingly insurmountable debt make Campbell’s claims of innocence harder to support? Indeed, it does. A jury of our Minnesota peers will likely be the ones to decide the fate of Bryce Campbell. Not a podcast. Not a TV news program. Not a magazine profile. Hunter S. Thompson, the late gonzo journalist, once noted that in a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. “In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity,” he wrote.

When I first spoke to Campbell on that dark, cold night in the corner of a local pub near Lake Superior, it was clear even then that the road ahead would be a long one. We spoke about a lot of things that night, from the pros and cons of living in a small town on the North Shore to why I prefer ice fishing to fishing from a canoe. We talked about other resorts up and down the Shore and more personal things, like Campbell’s family vacations to the International Peace Park in Alberta and Jackson Hole. It’s hard to picture Campbell trekking across the Grand Tetons, but there he was in his story, a young man up in the mountains.

Lutsen Resort was just a few miles down the road as we talked, now all black ash and charred debris under a cold January moon. It became that way from a fire. A fire that changed Campbell’s life and has impacted countless people throughout Minnesota. The Big Moose looked me right in the eyes when he told me he didn’t start the fire at Lutsen Resort in February 2024.

And then he reached for his diet soda.