It’s nice and cool when the alarm goes off at 4:30. I hit the snooze button for 15 minutes knowing we will pay dearly for that later in the morning when the temperature begins to soar. Even so, it’s so hard not to indulge in a few extra minutes of rest. Once up, we break camp as quickly as possible, hoping to get a few miles in before the heat becomes unbearable. We do alright and are on the trail just after 6. (more…)
We wake up at 5 am and can feel the heavy humidity in the air and on our sleeping bags which we barely crawled into last night because of the heat. We are getting the sense that the drought and this kind of heat is a little unusual for Minnesota at this time of year. We move quickly but, tried and true, an hour and a half seems like our usual pace for packing up, so we hit the trail by 6:30, hoping to knock off some miles before the sun really starts heating things up.
For the first time in quite a while, we “sleep in” until 6:30, and it feels heavenly. Matt has a coffee date with our host, Chris, to say good-bye before we hit the SHT for real. We have lots of packing and real-world tasks to get done before we leave for the start of the next section which won’t be until around 3. (more…)
After three days of significant mileage on the Duluth section of the SHT, today is a deliberately light day of hiking, only 7.4 miles from the downtown Rose Garden to the Martin Road Trailhead parking lot. This is an opportunity to rest our feet a bit, but we also need to end early because we have a lot of other work to get done. When we are finished hiking today, we need to shuttle our car to the northern terminus and then drop off our three resupply boxes in towns along the way back so that we can begin the true backpacking portion of the SHT tomorrow. (more…)
Today’s endpoint is at the Leif Erickson Rose Garden, which is on the waterfront in downtown Duluth, only about a mile and a half from our friends’ house, so our shuttle times are getting a lot faster. I follow Matt down to the lakefront, park the car and hop in the passenger seat beside him. It’s a 15 minute drive back to Waseca Street where we will continue hiking along Kingsbury Creek where we stopped yesterday. (more…)
The alarm goes off and we begin to stir. This is Day 2 of the Duluth section, and we need to start establishing a routine. I make coffee while Alison gathers breakfast and throws it in the cooler. Then it’s out the door to do our self-shuttle, dropping one car off at today’s ending destination and then driving to the Grand Portage Trailhead where we ended yesterday and will begin hiking today. (more…)
Today is the day! Today we start hiking the Superior Hiking Trail, a 306-mile long trail that stretches along the Arrowhead of northeastern Minnesota from the Minnesota/Wisconsin border at its southern terminus to just shy of the Canadian border at its northern terminus, and we are quite eager to get started. (more…)
Camp One stirs to life at 3 am as the first shift of climbers awakes. Breakfast is served twice to accommodate trekkers and climbers, first at 3-4 am for those who need an early pre-dawn start, and again from 8-9 am. Mercifully, we are in the second group this morning. (more…)
We have been trekking in Kyrgyzstan for 23 days now. We have only four days left, and we have saved the biggest challenge and hopefully the best scenery for last. For our final trek, we will be hiking around Peak Lenin, Kyrzygstan’s highest peak at 23,405 feet. They say that Peak Lenin is one of the easiest 7000+ meter peaks to summit, but we have no interest in going that high. (more…)
Take A Hike Photography 