The SHT, yo.
Absolutely glorious weekend. It was snowing when we set out down the trail on Friday morning, and we walked approximately 18 miles over the course of the weekend (15 with packs, 3 sans) and yet somehow I still wasn't really ready to be done when we got back last night. We're already planning our next trip.
But I'll let the pictures do the talking. Well, okay, most of it.
Sorry in advance that the vertical shots are kinda small. LiveJournal seems not to want them to be any larger no matter what. You can click em for a closer look, though.
Actually, the text in this section is kinda small, too. Must be because I wimped out and used the rich text setting to deal with this multitude of pictures. Apologies...
It's juuuuuust starting to look like autumn on the North Shore. Give it a couple weeks and it'll be even more gorgeous.
It drizzled and sort of...slushed? alternately with some watery sunshine most of Friday, but we weren't too cold as long as we were walking, and our clothes turned out to be adequately waterproofed.
We got to our first campsite on Sonju Lake mid-afternoon. It was very, very cold, but warm food and hot cider (the powdered stuff--I know, I know, but it tastes like nectar of the gods when you're cold and sore from hiking) helped a lot. Plus, Allen is a genius and figured out that boiling water poured into Nalgene bottles = hot water bottles for the sleeping bags. That kept us pretty cozy. The wind was whipping through the trees that night in a disconcertingly wintry fashion, but the next morning the lake looked like:
Yeah, it was that calm. We didn't hear much birdsong while hiking on Friday, but when we woke up in the tent on Saturday morning, with the wind having died down, it was silent. I mean, SILENT. I've never heard that much lack of noise out in the woods. Except, you know, when a tree falls with no one there to hear it.
I took the above picture from a little island on Sonju Lake called Lilly's Island. Spelled wrong, I know, but I took a picture for
littlebiskit anyway.
There had been a frost the night before, too. Made the boardwalk and the reeds all fancy and sparkly. Plus there was a nice mist on the water.
AND A CONSPICUOUS LACK OF MOOSE. Grr. Oh, well.
The rest of Saturday (and Sunday, for that matter) were warmer, but not too warm, and filled with, as the weather report had promised, "abundant sunshine." Perfect hiking weather. And, apparently, perfect hunting weather. Gunshots were also abundant. Which made me slightly nervous because:
Note how my jacket is the EXACT color of the leaves. But since the season isn't open for anything larger than a grouse, we were probably pretty safe. I guess I could have gotten shot by a confused bow hunter. But I didn't. Yay!
Yes, I did let actually Allen use the camera a few times. In this picture, I'm pointing out one of the friendly signs marking the Superior Hiking Trail. Allen took this shot in Crosby Manitou State Park, where all the signs looked like that, with the happy little logo. Out in the more wilderness-y section of the SHT, all we got was a blue blaze on trees here and there. It did the trick, though. We aren't still wandering around out there. (Yay again!)
Okay, onward. Here's where we ate lunch on Saturday:
It's on the East Baptism River. Mirkwood-esque, huh?
Saturday afternoon we came to the last campsite on the SHT before hitting Crosby Manitou (where we'd have to actually pay for a campsite). The state park won out in the end anyway, though, after some debate--partially because we had run into a couple extremely loud, giggly and rather confused girls earlier who had declared their destination to be that very campsite. I had an inkling they might prove to be our Mary Ellens. (Read A Walk in the Woods if you don't get that. You should read it anyway.)
So instead we hiked on into the state park and chose a campsite off the self-registration board. There was one that promised a view of Lake Superior, so although I was a bit skeptical inwardly (picturing a little blue glimpse off on the horizon somewhere through the trees) we chose that one. It was a serious hike, much more vertical than anything we'd done yet, and we were kinda sorta starting to regret our decision, and then we reached the top and got this:
Totally worth it. And that's only a little chunk of the panorama. The campsite was up even a little further from there, so after setting up camp we came back to the outlook & cooked and ate dinner on the big rock outcropping there.
Yes, apparently I'm married to the Marlboro Man.
Later we stole the bench from the outlook and carried it up the hill to our campsite. The campsite description on the self-registration board had promised benches around the firepit--but some previous camper had apparently felt it necessary to burn the benches in the aforementioned firepit.
Amazing stars that night, with the Milky Way clearly visible (I don't think I've been that completely removed from light pollution before in my life), plus we could see the lighthouses on Madeline Island and Isle Royale blinking quietly way off on the horizon of Lake Superior.
The sunrise the next morning was pretty cool, too.
We hiked back to the car and ditched our 40-50 lb. packs (ahhhh), loaded up a plain ol' knapsack with a few provisions and hiked off to see the Manitou River. I gotta say, the actual SHT was maintained way better than the trails in the state park. Willing volunteers vs. underpaid government employees. Go figure. But we got down there eventually and ate a snack by the Manitou cascades.
Back to the car, on with clean clothes and, in my case, flip-flops (HEAVEN after three days of hiking boots) and then we headed north to Grand Marais for lunch at the Angry Trout--because it's very, very hard for us to go to the North Shore and NOT go to Grand Marais. It's like a big, fishy, artsy magnet. First, though, I had to put the hiking boots back on because we took a little side trip that Allen spotted in our SHT guidebook--up an extremely vertical slope to White Sky Rock and another totally-worth-it view:
That's Caribou Lake, by the way. I discovered this morning that something very close to exactly that photo is the October picture for our Scenic Minnesota wall calendar.
Anyway, yeah--lunch in Grand Marais, then the long trip home. I really hadn't thought I was all that sore or tired, but I was asleep--and I mean this pretty much literally--as soon as my head touched the pillow last night. But this morning I was barely sore, just a little muscle tightness in my calves. Skipped the gym anyway, though--like Allen said, "Hon, you've been at the gym all weekend."
Here's a final few favorite pictures, and then I'm done. I promise!
