A couple Weekends ago....

I had a really good time.

I decided that I needed time away, so I decided to spend some time alone. I picked up a last minute flight out to Seattle, Erik picked me up, and the next morning, he dropped me off in the Cascades about 45 minutes east of Seattle. I'd picked out a hiking trail from a guide book late the night before.

It was a 1 mile hike to the trail junction and other 3 mile trail to the top of the mountain. In the 3 mile hike, I climbed 4000 feet, reaching an altitude of 5630 feet. This took about 4 hours including lots of time for photos.

I passed a hiker and his friendly dog heading down. He smiled and told me that I'd have the peak to myself. I saw no one else for the remainder of the evening.

As I crossed the treeline into the alpine, I was greeted by flaming red flora and interspersed pines. I'd brought along Mason Jennings & Jolie Holland lyrics to sing to myself, but I only had 2 random lines stuck in my head from "Stairway to Heaven." I hadn't listened to this song for months.


And if you listen very hard
The tune will come to you at last.

I now knew why monks build monasteries on the tops of mountains, "and it made me wonder" if Robert Plant was doing the same thing I was when he put pen to paper.

Irony how the thin air was deep breaths for the soul.

As I reached the peak, clouds were streaking across the sky at high speed...visibility was low, but I was able to make out some alpine lakes in the backcountry. I could see down, but no longer across the canyon.

It was getting dark, and I setup camp at 5300 feet. Campfires were not allowed at that altitude, but it didn't matter, because everything was wet anyways. I was making dinner over my stove, when I heard a noise behind me. I spun around to see a mule deer not 20 paces away, walking around like nothing was going on. It didn't seem very impressed or scared by me. This made my wonder what business he had up here, and perhaps a bear would too.

At about 8pm, it was getting dark, and I called it a night. I woke up in the middle of the night, and I felt something cold & wet on my face. It was ice. I reached out of my sleeping bag to discover that my breathe was condensing on the outside of my sleeping bag and freezing . Wow. It was cold, but I was comfortable in my bag.

In the morning, I woke up, thinking that I need to pull down camp and get going, but it was beautiful out.

The morning of Saturday the 13th, I climbed the 300 feet back to the peak and saw an awesome sight. Beyond ridge after smoky ridge was Mount Rainier......reaching from the horizon for the heavens. Even Mt St. Helens was visible (from Oregon) The sky was crystal clear, and clouds were blanketing the valley thousands of feet below. I was sharing this view with no one else. I sat in awe on the frosty rocks until most of my extremities were numb from the cold, and headed back to camp.



I tore it down, and back down I went.

I'm coming down the mountain, and this whole. darn. valley's. mine.

Superior Hiking Trip Recap

Friday night, K and I stayed with Dan Bakken in Duluth. If you didn't already know, Emily is about 8 months pregnant. We left her at home and went out for a few beers.

As we left Duluth, we really didn't have a good idea where we were going to go. We had tentatively planned "lutsen area," but our planned dropoff point was by reservation only, so we checked the trail manual and made last minute plans for a different route. We would leave our truck at a parking lot and would have a shuttle bus drop us off farther north. We would get back by foot.

We got rained on when we got to the parking lot near Finland, MN. It stopped just as we were picked up by the shuttle. The driver was a very friendly retiree. We told him where we wanted to be dropped off, and he said "backpacking for 3 days, huh?"

"Uh, nope. We'll only be out for two. "

silence.

He dropped us off at Cook County road 1, and we began our trek. Early going, most of our walking was flat, spanning through different types of forest: birch, deciduous, mixed, pine, cedar, etc. Some places were dry, others muddy. Wild daisys were in bloom everywhere, and we also saw many wild orchids. At one point along the trail, we heard a ruckus in front of us, and a very pissed off bird with its feathers in display--which was either a small turkey or a really large grouse--stepped onto the trail and tried to charge us. Kris gallantly fended it off by tapping his trekking pole on a rock in between us. This was all very funny--I was a bit uneasy about running into a rampaging bull moose, since we had seen some large & fresh tracks, but instead we joked about the potential newspaper headlines about 2 hikers getting mauled by a bird in the north woods.

We ran into a few steep hills, and we handily ascended & descended them, stopping briefly to enjoy the views, of course. We ran into a couple of ladies camping along the way, and as much as this sounds like the beginning to a porno, we only gave them a smile & a nod as we passed. At lunch time, we came across Alfred's pond, an idyllic lake surrounded by a thick barricade of tall pines with a boardwalk that goes out to the edge of the water. The entire trip would've been worth it if this was the only thing I saw. The dragonflies seemed very hesitant to give up their place on the benches--they didn't budge for close up photos and as soon as I stood up, they were almost magnetically drawn back to their spots. A few otters swam over to inspect the visitors munching CLIF bars in their neighborhood. Otters make farting noises, if you've never heard an otter.

We made it to the caribou river by about 3pm, which was the end of 1 of 3 legs we planned to complete. It was amazing; water rushing, splashing, and falling off angular black boulders. The next leg was George something something Manitou state park. This section was mostly hills & gorges, and was quite challenging. My feet were bugging me a bit, and I stopped to take my boots off and clean out dirt from the inside. Too late--I had huge blisters on my heels which had already torn open above my heels along my achilles tendons on both feet. I applied some Dr. Scholls Moleskin around the wounds, and got back to the hiking. We took a 1/4 mile spur off the trail to check out the view from a summit. A fantastic view of a river valley, and even farther off, Lake superior. In a very Forrest Gump-like way: You couldn't tell where the world ended and the sky began.

We were running out of water a few miles from the end of the park, and ran across a small stream. We refilled our water bottles with the help of Mr. T's water purifier. I doubt it was necessary to purify the water at all.......but who knows if a big brown bear dropped a big brown bomb upstream?

Most of the time, there were horseflies & mosquitos circling my head, looking for an easy landing pad. Kris and I devised an eco-friendly alternative to gross, partially effective bug sprays: Train a squadron of dragonflies to escort you through the woods. This would be perfectly synergetic: dragonflies eat mosquitos, and humans are to mosquitos as minnows are to walleyes. (except for the size) Unfortunately, most of the dragonflies we saw were already well fed.

We ended up seeing a couple people at a few of the campsites within the park along another river, but we didn't have a permit to camp in the park, so we kept on going with our eyes set upon a site about a half mile outside the park. We got to the site at 7:40pm, only to find that it had already been occupied by a guy and his girlfriend......we made an impulsive decision to bolt another 2.3 miles to the next spot down the trail rather than bargain with the guy. It would be getting dark soon, and we wanted to setup camp while it was light. We'd been averaging about 2mph throughout the day. That may sound slow, but consider the effect of stopping here & there to marvel & take photos, steep hills, rocky descents, and you quickly realize it's a pretty aggressive pace.Throughout the day, we had passed through some of the densest forest I'd ever seen, and occaisionally we'd have to hop over a fallen tree here & there, but these last two miles easily had more fallen trees than entirety of the 17 miles we'd covered during the day. Leading the two of us and being a person who's always in a hurry, I set a very fast pace. We made it to our site in 40 minutes, and we were elated to see our site--we'd been walking for 10 hours, and it was suh-weet. The site was on a small triangular shaped piece of land flanked by a river and another stream, which intersected at the far end.

Kris set up the tent while I tried to gather wood from fallen trees for a fire. This isn't easy without a hatchet, and although there was a ton of it, wet rotting birch won't catch fire. Kris found some sticks along the river a bit farther off, and he got a fire going. Unfortunately, the larger pieces of wood were too wet. We ate tuna-gouda wraps and pad thai(kudos to Kris for his stove and picking up just-add-hot-water-meals) in front of a collection of sticks glowing orange.

The ground was hard, but I slept ok. It got pretty cold in the night, but I had a pretty warm blanket. (Thanks Gramma Frieda) Kris and I both heard *things* moving around nearby during the night.

In the morning, we had slightly burnt apple cobbler and oatmeal. We cleaned up our site, and took off. This hiking wasn't nearly as difficult as the state park, but I could tell I was getting very fatigued. I could tell I wasn't picking up my feet as high as I had the day before, and the floor of the forest/path here was an endless network of interlocking tree roots for the first half, and fairly rocky for the second half of the day. I was stumbling often.

We stopped at Lake Sonju, which has a boardwalk out to a small rocky island. It was yet another pristine lake surrounded by pines. This was probably my favorite destination within the trip. At various points along the trip, there are notebooks for people to jot notes. Just the day before, a guy said he ran into a friendly big white dog who tagged along with him. We took a load off on the island had a quick lunch. Trader Joe's wildberry trailmix was perfect for the occaision.

We then came upon Lake Egge, yet another *yawn* gorgeous pristine forest lake with water as smoothe as mirror glass. Not even the fish dared to break the surface on the largest inland lake we saw that weekend.

Along the trail, we ran into a couple small groups going the other direction, some backpackers and daytrippers. And we met a friendly white dog with beautiful blue eyes. She wouldn't stay still for me to take a photo, but she walked with us for the last few miles back to our truck, playfully zigzagging across the trail through the woods. We were considering taking the dog with us, but decided to leave it at the parking lot. As we were leaving, a pickup stopped, a guy whistled and the dog jumped into the truck.

Overall, it was a very pleasing experience. Even though I'm still covered in mosquito bites and my heels still have open sores. But they will all heal.

Totals
----------------------------------
Miles covered: 29.5
Mosquito bodycount: ~3,000
Blood-gorged Mosquitos that left a huge blood spot when I slapped them: 3
CLIF bars consumed: 8
Woodticks: 3
Other hikers encountered: 11

Things I've learned

Picking wildflowers and transporting them over 220 miles to a girl scores big points.