Off Our Arses, Into the Woods

So after declaring ourselves lazy bums on Tuesday, we knew we should probably shake off the winter blahs and actually head outside for some fresh air. We'd heard that a couple people had snowshoed on a nearby trail so we decided to head over to see if the path was firm enough to walk on with just boots. (While snowshoeing sounds awfully romantic, they're putzy and cumbersome - given my druthers, I always opt for just boots for winter walking.)

We've hiked this trail a few times before (here and here) and I spent a lot of time off the trail last summer in search of blueberries. The approximately 1 mile long trail leads to a 1600 + ft hill with a panoramic view of the surrounding woods. The trail has gotten a lot of use in the summer since it opened last spring, but it doesn't appear to get much winter traffic. That's too bad because when there's a packed trail, it's actually faster to hike in the winter because you don't have to pick your way over stray rocks and roots all the time. I think the view in the winter is just as nice as the summer view.

I hope you've had a chance to get out and enjoy some late winter sunshine. They say action is the antidote to despair, so if you're suffering from winter gloomies, your best bet just might be to get out in the winter world!  
 P.S. Need another excuse to get outside? The sun starts providing Vitamin D around March 15 at this latitude.

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Ah, February Sunshine!

Lucky us: we've recently had a slew of sunny days. We're also experiencing a pretty impressive range of temperatures each day, consistently on a range from -15 below to 40 above. That means dry pavement (hooray for a drive home made almost entirely in 5th gear!), sparkly snow, and some beautiful frosty trees and shrubs. Since our cabin has a fantastic southerly exposure, it's also made for one toasty cabin.

This morning, we woke up to 57 degree cabin, so Andy started a fire, we ate some breakfast and then headed to town for the weekly errands. When I came back a little after three this afternoon, the cabin was a stuffy 88 degrees! Ick!

It seems a little ridiculous to have the door wide open in February, but sometimes you've just got to waste a little energy. That said, I knew I didn't want to waste the sunshine, so I headed out on a little hike down the lake in the late afternoon while I waited for the cabin to cool down.

I can't get enough of these blue skies. If you could put sunshine in a bucket, I'd take a big slurp out of it and then dump it over my head.

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Clearing Trail

Remember a couple weeks back when I mentioned the new/old hiking trail we're reopening on the museum and nature center grounds where I work? Yesterday, Andy, I, Andy's aunt and cousin, spent our Saturday afternoon clearing the end of the trail to the scenic overlook where the trail will now end. Initially, the trail went past the scenic overlook and into a federally designated wilderness, but for maintenance reasons (aka, you can't use chainsaws in a federal wilderness), we're ending the trail before we hit the wilderness border.

The trail is about a mile, maybe a mile and a quarter, long and the first half had been cleared out in March. Because the trail's been unused for nearly 15 years, there's all sorts of undergrowth that needs to snipped away from the trail, not to mention a slew of fallen trees (from a windstorm and a forest fire) that need to chainsawed off the path. Believe it or not, the picture below is of the cleared path: 

There might be a little work to do yet . . . .

I always get swamping duty because I can't be trusted with chainsaws and I actually really enjoy grabbing bits of charred tree truck and hurling them off the trail.  There's such visceral satisfaction in taking a hiking path that's all tangled up with deadfall and undergrowth and making it passable. 

 

No matter what the path looks like getting there, there's always one heck of a view at the end of the path.

 

It's still too early for wildflowers to be popping out, so I contented myself with taking some pictures of lichen.

As we stomped back through the woods, chainsaws on our shoulders, backpacks filled with empty waterbottles and cookie bags, we found a moose hiding out in the brush. Can you spot her?

Soon Andy and I will be clearing another trail, so to speak. We leave tomorrow to go visit my brother in southwestern Michigan. It's a 15-hour drive (one way) and I'm already having nightmares about crossing the five-mile long Mackinaw Bridge. Still, I'm excited to see a new part of the country (the only time I've been in Michigan's lower peninsula was to change planes in Detroit) and catch up with my brother.

I'll be popping in and out during the week as time allows and I have a guest post or two for you to enjoy during my absence. Have a great week!
 

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Across the Ice, Over the River and Through the Woods . . .

You know what's really weird when you think about it? Ice.

For oh, about  seven months of the year, the bay outside the cabin looks like this.

For the other 5 months it looks more like this:

In a neighboring bay, ice turns the lake into a veritable highway.

Of course ice makes a rather capricious roadway. Ice is in its very nature is treacherous. When too much snow builds up on the ice, lake water leaks over the top of the ice to mix with the snow and creating slushy conditions that are anything but fun to traverse. Wind can cover up paths across the lake's flat frozen terrain in a matter of minutes.

We've been getting a lot more sunshine and warmer temps lately and that means the lake ice is starting its slow spring melt. As the layers of ice and snow melt down, past treks across the ice are re-revealed since compacted tracks from snowmobiles, snowshoes, and boots take longer to melt.

It can be kind of disconcerting to walk across melting ice. As I write this I can hear the ice groaning and cracking outside as it adjusts to warmer "spring-ier" temperatures. But our  recent  warm "spring" weather was followed by subzero temperatures in the last couple days which refroze the ice into a concrete like substance. Yesterday Andy and I set out down the new (and short-lived) ice "sidewalk" to see where the wind might blow us.

After all that ice talk, it was lovely to find some running water by the "Ripple", where the lake feeds into a river.

On the way home, we scrambled down a cliff,

cut through a swamp

(which wasn't quite as stable as the lake ice),

found cliff side icicles,

even spied some evergreen polypody poking up through the snow.

It was beautiful springtime hike, all brought to you compliments of the wonderful, mysterious substance known as ice!


Where's your favorite place to wander in the springtime?

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Wordless Wednesday: Walking in a Winter Wonderland

They said on the radio the other day that December is actually sunnier than November. Thank goodness, I say. With the days getting shorter and shorter, we need every bit of sunshine we can get.

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Days Off Are Good

Here’s a newsflash for you: days off are good. Alright, not exactly rocket science, but every once in a while, it seems we all need a reminder of the fact. For whatever reason, we like to forget that recharging isn’t an option luxury, it’s a necessary component of everyday life, especially if we’re planning to hang onto our sanity for too terribly long.

Lately days off haven’t been happening around here. As a result, crankiness abounded and everything started to seem like a lot of work. So on Wednesday, after I completed the last phone interview necessary for the August batch of articles, Andy and I decided to take a hike.

Last year, the Forest Service completed a new 3-mile loop trail in the area called the Centennial Trail (last year was the Superior National Forest’s centennial) which follows an abandoned railroad bed from the 1890s and goes past several test pits of an abandoned mine from the same era. In addition, the trail offers a snapshot of the forest fire/blowdown events of the last decade. The interpretative trail is pretty much in our backyard and despite sending several inquiring visitors to our respected work places to go hike the new path, neither Andy nor I had actually hiked the entire trail.

The trail itself isn’t terribly difficult, but it’s awfully interesting. Along the way, there are 14 markers along the pathway which point out unique historical and natural history factoids about this path which goes under where a wooden rail trestle once stood and passes through a 120 year old rock cut. This is the corner of our woods that was, more than a century before, a bustling town of laborers, complete with a brothel. Now, looking at the pathway through scrubby brush, it’s hard to imagine the blind optimism that prompted prospectors to stomach the expense of building a railroad here which would remove only a single load of minerals during its entire life.

Andy peers down into one of the test pits along the trail, where mineral prospectors searched for minerals in the soil. They found iron ore . . .  just not quite as much as they found farther west in the state, on the Iron Range.

The world is filled with all sorts of stories like the story of the Paulson Mine that we learned about on the Centennial Trail on Wednesday. But often, we get so swept up in our own stories that we forget that our lives are drastically enriched, and dare I say, improved by the stories of others. Yesterday – my Monday – I felt inspired and refreshed. In this world of deadlines, lunch breaks, and salaries, we can forget, especially if we’re writers, that the most important thing we can do is keep our ears, eyes, and hearts open to new stories and experiences. If we can remember to do that, every day has the potential to feel like a day off.

Centennial Trail overlook, looking towards Gunflint Lake and showing burn from the Ham Lake Fire and blowdown from 1999.

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Turning Towards Home

Today we pulled out of Portland, made a pit stop at a foggy Mt. St. Helens, before dropping our luggage at the night’s hotel and heading into downtown Seattle to return the rental car. After one last tour through Pike’s Place Market and impromptu stop at the Elliot Bay Bookstore Café, we took a somewhat shady bus ride back to the hotel and here we sit. Tomorrow we return to the Midwest: for me, it’s just a rest stop before next week’s NYC trip; for Andy, it’s the return to home and everyday life.

Saturday’s rest day proved highly effective: it’s been a busy couple days. On Sunday we had a chance to catch up with a friend. After brunch in a restored Victorian house, we headed out to the Multnomah Falls. Located about a half hour outside of in the Columbia River Gorge, Multnomah Falls attracts pretty much every Oregonian and their grandma on a sunny Sunday. On the ride out to the falls, we caught a great glimpse of Mt. Hood in the distance. Unfortunately, the pictures Andy snapped of the mountain turned out about as well as my pictures of Mt. Rainer from my Sept. 2008 trip to Seattle.

I swear, there are mountains in those pictures . . . somewhere.

While it certainly wasn’t meant as such, this trip’s turned into something of a Twilight trip. Multnomah Falls which plunges 542 ft and then another 69 ft makes a cameo appearance in the Twilight film during the baseball game.

It’s a steep mile-long hike with 11 switchbacks to get to the top of the cliff where the fall makes its dramatic drop. Wood sorrel and trillium dots the cliff's side.

Headed back to the guesthouse for a round of National Parks Monopoly and a cookout in the backyard.

We weren't quite done with the Columbia River Gorge. Yesterday we did a circle tour of sorts, out of Portland, down around Mt. Hood and back up into Portland via the Columbia River Gorge. Although it was apparently snowing on top of Mt. Hood - we didn't get spectacular views, we had some nice hikes in the Multnomah Falls: one at the Horsetail Falls where you actually get to hike underneath the rock the waterfall plunges off of and another short poke through a gorge.

Had a lovely dinner at Jake's Famous Crawfish in downtown Portland last night. Today we took a slight detour to see some Mt. St. Helens stop. It was far too foggy to see any of the blast zone (a real pea-souper, so to speak) but we had a nice stop at the interpretative center near Silver Lake. We will have to go back sometime when the view is better.

We've seen a ton over the last week and a half. I'm anxious for a chance to catch my breath, but there's a part of me that sad to see the trip end.

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