Travels Outside the Box

be patient...

Not much in this blog lately, we know... but after a summer of travels - Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Toronto, Iowa, canoe camping the St. Croix, backpacking on the North Shore, the cabin - we have been appreciating some weeks at home!

Stay tuned - we've got some trips coming up - New York City in October (our first trip there!) and Colorado in early November. We'll get some posts here after that.

posted by Outdoor2some @ 1:17 PM 0 comments

five days of bliss

[Gish on the dock.]

Well, Gish and I took our annual cabin trip again over Labor Day weekend... This is one thing that is so constant in our lives that we look forward to its predictability every year. We always go up over Labor Day and it ends our always busy summers in a perfect way.

This year, we changed things up slightly. We drove up on Saturday morning instead of Friday night, to avoid the holiday weekend exodus of northbound RVs and boat trailers. And we extended our stay to the Wednesday after, again to avoid the Monday southbound traffic.

Saturday morning we started it off right, with a proper greasy breakfast at the king of greasy breakfast places - Al's Breakfast in Dinkytown. Then we hit the highway. Got up to Grand Marais, the jumping off point for the Gunflint Trail, by about noon. Had some lunch at the Angry Trout and wandered around town for a bit to acclimate ourselves to the holiday life. We love Grand Marais and I could almost see us living in a place like that if not for the October through May winters they have. It's a touristy town, but with enough bohemian, granola, artsy woodsy types that it has a gravity to it we like.

I brought my bike along - my do-anything, beat-up, gray touring steed - and did something I have always wanted to do - ride from Grand Marais up the Gunflint to the cabin. The trip is 32 miles of windy two lane blacktop through remote dense forest. It's a bit sketchy, due to the narrowness of the road and the numerous blind corners and rollercoaster hills combined with logging trucks and muddy pickups towing trailers. But I have to say it was thrilling. The first 4 miles out of Grand Marais are as close to a mountain as you can get in Minnesota. It's about a 5-6% grade that switchbacks up to the top of Pincushion Mountain before settling into the undulating remainder of the Trail. I ended up on the gravel shoulder for the whole climb and, without a warmup, the climb was brutal (the beer at the Angry Trout didn't help either). Gish followed in the car after a suitable headstart and I was thankful to see her pass me at about mile 15, and then again at mile 28. OK, I didn't ride the last 4 miles. But I did some more riding later in the weekend to make up for it.

Other healthy pursuits at the cabin included a short paddle on Poplar Lake from the cabin over to an island cabin owned by some friends of ours. They were doing some painting (trim boards, not fine arts) when we approached and after cleaning up, we joined them for a tour of their island and a bottle of wine and some lunch. It was a relaxing and pleasant day. We paddled back and watched the sun set from our own dock on the air mattress with a book that day.


[The Devil's Kettle.]

We managed two nice short hikes - one up the Brule River in Judge Magney State Park to the Devil's Kettle and one to Honeymoon Bluff, near Hungry Jack Lake on the Gunflint. The Devil's Kettle is so named because at this point in the Brule, the river is split in two sections, one of which continues down towards Lake Superior and the other which disappears into a perfectly round hole in the rock and descends straight to Hell. OK, nobody knows where it goes (painted ping-pong ball tests have gotten no results) but the name of this phenomenon is very descriptive.


[Jason on the Brule.]

One striking image was that of a deer lying dead in the river below a 100 foot sheer cliff. It had obviously been leaping through the woods above and didn't know about the cliff and plunged to its death below. It was an eerie sight and one that stays with me for some reason. It reminded me of all those paintings of Native Americans in times of old, herding bison off of cliffs in the Great Plains to kill them.

The hike up to Honeymoon Bluff was equally spectacular, with a steep but short climb up to a premontory overlooking two or three lakes hundreds of feet below. It is so encouraging to still be able to see so many thousands of acres of wilderness in every direction.

Other than our hikes, bikes and paddles, the weekend was spent sleeping late, building fires (the carbon monoxide from which may have contributed to the late sleeping!) and eating well. We managed a lunch at the Trail Center Bar and Grill which is only a mile down the Trail from the cabin. We had decadent burgers and shared a coffee malt - yum!

On the drive home on Wednesday we capped off the trip with a stop at our favorite restaurant on the North Shore, the New Scenic Cafe, on old Highway 61 between Duluth and Two Harbors. This place is not to be missed and is a civilized way to start or end a North Shore trip.

The cabin trip always decompresses us because of its utter lack of routine, stress or distractions. This year more than ever it was therapeutic for both Gishani and me and we're already looking forward to next year's trip.

posted by Outdoor2some @ 7:08 PM 1 comments