![[Lake scene drawing]](http://images.midwestweekend.com/graphics/lake_scene.gif)
It's winter in Monticello, and the livin' is easy.
For trumpeter swans, the largest water bird in North America, the Mississippi River town is a virtual Club Med, thanks to balmy waters from the nuclear power-generating plant upstream and a daily all-you-can-eat spread of dried corn.
The first swans showed up in the winter of 1986, as Sheila Lawrence was feeding the ducks and geese in the yard of her riverside home. They appreciated her hospitality, and every year more came, first by the dozens, then by the hundreds.
In summer and fall, hikers by the thousands take to the hiking trails on Minnesota's North Shore.
In winter? Not so many. But those who strap on snowshoes to climb river gorges and follow the blue blazes of the Superior
Hiking Trail are rewarded by stark beauty.
The brittle winter sun throws everything into high relief: Black lenticel pores seem to pop out on trunks of birch that are a
brilliant white against the blue sky.
On the North Shore, it’s a happy day when snow is as abundant as scenery.
Despite its miles of cross-country ski trails, the western shore of Lake Superior gets only modest amounts of lake-effect snow, because the storms that do blow in from the east tend to dump it inland, where the land mass is colder.
But we go, even if we have to hike instead of ski. We love to be on the North Shore, near moody Lake Superior and its dramatic,
ice-draped river gorges.
It took me nearly 20 years of hiking on the North Shore to tackle Eagle Mountain.
It’s the highest point in Minnesota, but it’s not exactly on the shore; it’s 14 miles inland, as the crow flies. I was used to tramping along the rocky river gorges whose horehound-tinted waters rivers boil furiously down to Lake Superior; I was used to drama.
But the 3½-mile hike up 2,301-foot Eagle Mountain was just as dramatic. The path, a root-choked corridor through cedars and spruce, soon enters the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Passing through bogs, partly on boardwalks, it skirts mirrorlike Whale Lake, then picks its way through gantlets of rock up to the top, where hikers gaze upon a spectacular panorama that includes the North Fork of the Cascade River and Zoo, Shrike and Eagle lakes, set amid waves of greens and yellow.
On Duluth's Hawk Ridge, a bird in the hand is worth at least two in the sky.
They're impressive when spotted overhead. But up close, it's easier to get to know a bird — say, the northern goshawk, a fierce predator whose image once adorned the helmet of Attila the Hun.
As she held a young goshawk by the legs, naturalist Willow Maser struggled to make herself heard above its high-pitched screeches.
In the north woods, it's easy to fall in love with sled dogs.
They're exuberant and adorable but also focused, intense and explosive — sort of like kindergartners crossed with Olympic athletes.
For huskies, life is simple: They live to run. Anyone who has watched the start of the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon has witnessed the drive of a husky, a four-legged Ferrari that snaps into warp speed at the rustle of a harness. And anyone who has seen the dogs along the trail will be struck by their apparent deep satisfaction at spending hour after hour running and pulling.
In a blizzard, nothing is better than holing up with an expert cook, a bottomless cookie jar, a steam room, a big hot tub and one of the best ski-trail groomers in the Midwest.
One January, the stars aligned in the heavens and I found myself in the best possible place to be during a blizzard: Maplelag. This ski resort in northwest Minnesota is renowned for many things — all-you-can-eat meals, personable owners, hundreds of stained-glass windows and signs from defunct train depots — but it’s most famous for its ability to conjure a bit of snow into world-class ski tracks when the rest of Minnesota is bare.
On this weekend, however, no alchemy was necessary. As my husband and I drove west, snow began to fly, and by the time we nosed the car into Maplelag’s drive, a foot had fallen. Another foot was on the way, making trail-grooming wizard Jay Richards the happiest man in the Great Northwest.
Twenty years ago, dining on the North Shore was pleasant, if a little utilitarian. A meal often came with a view, but most of the menus had the same fish, steak, chops and burgers you could get anywhere.
Things have changed. One Memorial Day weekend, my husband and I ate at three of my favorite places and two newer ones, one of
which definitely was worth a detour. A three-star culinary weekend on the North Shore — who knew?
On old Highway 61 between Duluth and Two Harbors, the cheery New Scenic Cafe is a fixture of fine dining. I had my usual, the pistachio-crusted goat-cheese salad, with a starter of sashimi tuna tacos, but I was a little envious of my husband's salmon, which came with wild rice so savory I made the server ask the chef how he prepared it — and I don't really like wild rice. We finished with a slice of one of the restaurant's renowned pies, raspberry-rhubarb, warm and topped with vanilla ice cream.
There’s only one place in the Midwest where potholes are a tourist attraction instead of a nuisance.
Standing at the bottom of the 35-foot-deep Bake Oven, touching walls as smooth as vinyl, it’s easy to imagine the scene 10,000 years ago, when sheets of water from a melting glacier roared past Taylors Falls, into what now is the St. Croix River Valley. They came with such fury that whirlpools laced with sand and gravel drilled cylindrical holes into solid rock — potholes, the world’s deepest.
On the Minnesota side of the river, that fury must have had apocalyptic proportions. Behind Angle Rock, where the river takes a hard right, there’s an otherworldly place of giant slabs and cavities. Here, so many potholes formed that they merged into what now is called the Devil’s Parlor. The Bake Oven, where one pothole bored into another, is nearby, along with the Lily Pond, the Hourglass and the 67-foot Bottomless Pit.
Long before reality shows turned survival into a stunt, there was John Beargrease.
With no fanfare and no road, the Ojibwe man delivered the weekly mail between Two Harbors and Grand Marais until 1899, using a dog team in winter. Using only four dogs to pull packs of up to 700 pounds, Beargrease could make the round-trip in a few days.
His stamina spawned a legend. For 26 years, mushers from around the nation have come to trace his path, racing each other from Duluth to the Gunflint Trail in the John Beargrease Sled Dog Marathon.
During three days at Giants Ridge one January, I kept wondering: Where are all the people?
The sun was shining, the snow was ideal, and most schoolchildren still were on winter break. The handsome Lodge at Giants Ridge was giving discounts on its already low midweek rates, and kids could ski free.
All that, and no lift lines.
I like Duluth. I like watching the ore boats, I like strolling on the Lake Walk — in fact, I like anything that gives me a good view of mercurial Lake Superior, which pounds away at the foot of the hills on which the city is built.
I even like Duluth in the winter, when, if you don't keep moving, you might wind up as stiff as the bronze statues that line the lakefront.
And I do move in Duluth, right down the slopes of Spirit Mountain, which, not coincidentally, give me great views of Lake
Superior. And I do it cheap, at least on weekdays.
One March, I went up to Duluth but woke up in Siberia.
Twenty inches of snow had fallen overnight. A savage 70 mph wind was howling around the glass-walled lobby of the Willard Munger Inn. Swirling snow had turned the air white.
But then my niece and I noticed cars crawling along Grand Avenue. Then more cars. So we bundled up and got in our car, and to our surprise, made it all the way across town to Lester Park. Dozens of other skiers already had been on its Lester-Amity Ski Trail, creating tracks that we gratefully followed into the sheltering forest.
A few steps into the forest, and it hit.
The tang of cedar bark and pine needles, moistened by droplets of mist from waterfalls. The loamy richness of earth carpeted by ferns.
It was that north-woods perfume all Minnesotans instantly recognize, a powerful eau de outdoors that gladdened my heart and also made it sink with the realization that I'd stayed in the city far, far too long.
As adults, we sometimes forget how great it is to be a kid.
People give you toys to play with. They show you new games and explain things in interesting ways. They feed you freshly baked cookies and s'mores.
Kids take it for granted. But I didn't one January, when I got to stay at Deep Portage Conservation Reserve, in the woods north of Brainerd.
Every week, a few dozen people join an exclusive club high above Minnesota's North Shore.
To get there, they lug all their food and gear 1¾ miles up and down a steep hill. They draw their own water and make their own fires. They clean and then lug their garbage over the same hill.
And they consider themselves lucky.
While people in cities to the south are searching for crocuses, folks on northeast Minnesota's Gunflint Trail are enjoying some of the best skiing of the year.
It's not that the Gunflint is so much colder. It's that there's so much snow it keeps itself refrigerated, like glaciers.
"We have a really good base,'' says Heather Telchow of Golden Eagle Lodge. "Even after these warm days, the snow is like brand new. I grew up in Faribault, and I'm used to it disappearing in a few days. But we don't lose snow like that up here. We keep it forever.''
One winter, I went to summer camp.
It was the German-language immersion village in Bemidji, Minn., to which my daughter went for eight years. She always returned starry-eyed and eager to go back: "I wish I could go there year-round,'' she'd say, sighing.
I’d always wondered what kind of pixie dust the Concordia Language Villages counselors sprinkled on children. Then
Concordia started offering family weekends in winter, and I got to find out.
In Ely, one picture is worth a thousand tourists.
Who could ignore the call of its photogenic expanses of sky-blue water and rocky islands amid spruce forest? Who isn't drawn to a shimmering image of the northern lights, or of a moose and calf browsing in a patch of wild calla lilies? To see Ely is to want to be there, enveloped by tranquility.
The scenery has been around for a long time, ever since glaciers carried off the soil and left a stony, stripped-down landscape
that, to many, is the essence of the north woods.
Around Ely, beauty is stripped down to essentials.
There's little but water, stone, spruce and sky in the northern Minnesota wilderness, what conservationist Sigurd Olson called "the naked grandeur." Still, it enthralls visitors from all over the world.
In winter, snow, ice and silence settle over the forests and lakes, and stars plaster the inky night sky. For many, Ely's pull is even stronger then.
In November 1905, the people of Minnesota saw Lake Superior at its most malevolent.
As dozens of ships left Duluth-Superior Harbor in the calm after a violent storm, an even worse storm hit, with blinding snow
and winds of more than 60 mph. The 4,840-ton steel steamer Mataafa turned back and, just as it was about to slip into the
harbor entry, was lifted by a giant wave, upended and smashed into first one concrete pierhead, then the other.
Another wave whirled the 430-foot boat around and grounded it 600 feet off the beach, where mountainous waves cleaved its stern from its bow.
In the 1920s, when the first resorts appeared along this remote, 57-mile highway that dead-ends near the Canadian border, guests had to have a certain sense of adventure.
The Gunflint Trail first was blazed by the Ojibwe, then used by fur traders, trappers and loggers. It was still a zigzagging roller-coaster through the woods when vacationers began to come. The first visitors in spring often had to patch the single phone line, which moose tended to snag and drag. Gasoline lanterns in their cabins often became plugged, and bears sometimes made appearances near cabins.
Still, they had it easy. After the guests left, resort owners faced a long winter of splitting wood for fuel, getting around by dog sled, harvesting ice and trapping for food and clothing.
Once, passenger trains crisscrossed the state, and lighthouses guided sailors on the Great Lakes.
Trains and lighthouses are beloved relics now, symbols of a simpler past. In the iPod era, they seem antique, like Grandpa's buggy or Grandma's butter churn.
But don't relegate them to history's dustbin just yet.
Up north, there's a lake cabin with my name on it.
I don't own it, and I never will. But for a week in July, it's mine.
Only a generation ago, most middle-class folks in this area could think of nothing better than renting a little housekeeping cabin on a lake.
In the middle of Minnesota's Wild River State Park, a ski’s length from 35 miles of groomed trails and a 10-minute trek from the St. Croix River, sits a cozy little house surrounded by forest.
For one winter night, the two-bedroom, carpeted house, a private residence built not long before the park was established in 1978, belonged to me and my children. We arrived at dusk, and my children swarmed over it as only children can do, giving a running commentary: "Boy, this is a nice cabin,’’ said 6-year-old Peter. "Wow, a nice shower. Isn’t this great? And oh, look’’ — he peered out the window at a big thermometer — "you can tell the temperature.’’
It was 0 degrees. But we settled in happily, building a fire in the wood-burning stone hearth, making spaghetti in the modern kitchen, then sliding a movie into the VCR and watching it while eating popcorn popped in the microwave. It was a little odd, being the only humans that night in one of Minnesota’s largest state parks, but we were definitely comfortable.
At the top of Minnesota, there's a spectacular national park — half water and all scenery.
Not only is it beautiful, but it's also the only national park we have, which you'd think would impress most people. But not, apparently, some of the locals.
My husband and I found that out two minutes after we'd arrived on Rainy Lake and were chatting with the friendly young woman checking us into our B&B.
Along Minnesota's northern border with Canada, more than 200,000 people a year find an increasingly rare commodity — absolute wilderness.
The million-acre Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is barely changed since voyageurs used its chain of lakes and rivers to push deep into the continent's interior. Today, the foot trails over which they carried canoes and 180-pound packs are used by vacationers, who wind their way from lake to lake in search of the perfect combination of woods, water and solitude.
As they paddle along the glassy waters of more than 1,000 lakes, they may see moose, lynx, otters and beaver, who have rebounded from near-extinction at the hands of trappers. In the evening, at nearly 2,200 campsites, they listen for the trill of loons and the howl of wolves, whose numbers also have rebounded.
In my family, we take care of ourselves. In fact, my ancestors not only didn’t have servants, they
wereSo when I finally went to a full-service lake resort one summer, I felt a little like an imposter.
During the heady days of the Roaring Twenties, a group of Duluth businessmen conceived a plan.
They would buy 3,300 acres of land along Lake Superior and on both sides of the Arrowhead River, encompassing beach, waterfalls and rocky gorges. They’d buy another 8,000 acres inland, where caribou still roamed and lakes were thick with fish and fowl. They’d build a clubhouse, with tennis courts and golf course and swimming pool. And they’d name the whole thing for Naniboujou, the powerful but benevolent Ojibwe spirit who claimed this northern wilderness as his own.
“If Naniboujou is your guide,’’ they wrote in the prospectus, “it is a smooth path through majestic groves, between rocky walls, over mossy ledges, through clumps of spruce that moose have nibbled . . . and to mysteries known only to those who belong.’’ There would be every comfort, and yet “simplicity and the charms of outdoor life must prevail.’’
Half a century ago, a Minnesota logger who lived in a forest full of hungry bears decided that if you can't beat 'em, join 'em.
By the time he died at age 86, Vince Shute had fed generations of black bears, become best friends with a bear named Brownie and inspired bear-lovers all over the world.
Shute wasn't a sophisticated man, but he had a heart.
Ever since there's been a Minnesota, people have wanted to see its abundant waters.
The first curious tourists came up the Mississippi in the 1820s with the first steamboats, to see St. Anthony Falls and nearby
tepees and to dine on buffalo, elk and sturgeon.
By the 1850s, city folk in the East already were pining for the unspoiled wilderness; one of them, Israel Garrard, was on a hunting trip from his home near Cincinnati when he saw a point on Lake Pepin, a widening in the Mississippi, and settled there. In 1865, he opened the Lake Side Hotel, and Frontenac became Minnesota's first resort.
Everyone loves a teddy bear, especially one called Ted.
He's likely the world's largest black bear, at 850 pounds, but he doesn't throw his weight around. When his fellow bear Honey doesn't want to play, which is often, he merely whines, "like a foghorn,'' says curator Donna Phelan. And when he wants to make friends, which is all the time, he makes a "wonderful amiable sound, an umph-umph-umph.''
Ted, Honey and a cub named Lucky live on two acres outside the North American Bear Center in Ely, which opened in May 2007 with 40 exhibits. Many are based on the research of Dr. Lynn Rogers, whose work with bears around Ely is world-famous.
In Minnesota’s state parks, the goodies go way beyond hiking trails, picnic sites and fishing piers.
Minnesota parks house their visitors, too, not only in campgrounds but in suites and cabins and lodges and even a few
split-level homes. Of course, they're very popular. (See Lodgings in Minnesota state parks.)
But the most popular place of all is the Illgen Falls Cabin in Tettegouche State Park, especially in summer. For what could be better than having a 45-foot waterfall, spa and swimming hole in the back yard, with entertainment from a corps of cliff jumpers?
Not far west of the Twin Cities, the Mississippi River town of Monticello is known for two things.
Passersby on I-94 can't fail to notice the nuclear-power reactor that marks the town. In winter, it's the power plant that attracts a flock of trumpeter swans, which thinks the plant's warm discharge waters are a little spa just for them (See Snow birds).
Of course, the flock of swans draws a flock of swan-watchers. One January, my husband and I were among them, standing along the shore of the river and marveling at the raucous crowd of hundreds of birds, jostling for food and attention.
In winter, only the most dedicated pilgrims make the trip to Itasca, Minnesota's most revered state park.
Yet the park is beautiful without its forest canopy. It's easy to see its bones, the lumpy quilt of knobs and kettles laid down by retreating glaciers. It's easy to see the 300-year-old pines that escaped loggers. And it's easier to listen — to the sassy chatter of a squirrel, the prehistoric croak of a crow, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker.
In winter, the park grooms 32 kilometers of trails for classic and skate skiing. On the trails, skiers see the legacy of Jacob Brower, the far-sighted surveyor who, in 1891, used his own salary to start piecing together the state's first state park.
After years of traveling around this region, I can answer nearly every travel question except one: “Can you give me the name of a good lake resort?’’
No, I can’t. Only you and your therapist know what you consider a good lake resort.
Staying at a Minnesota lake resort is not like staying at a Marriott. There may be chipmunks living under your cabin, and fish that nibble your legs when you wade. Squealing children may run past your window while you’re trying to read.
In Bear Head Lake State Park near Ely, there are three places to spend the night: a tent, a rustic camper cabin and a modern split-level.
On a subzero day in winter, one is better than the others.
Minnesota's state parks are sprinkled with houses or cabins that can be rented. Some are marvelously atmospheric, such as the
log cabins built in Itasca for the tourist trade. Others came with annexed land and the state remodeled them; in Tettegouche,
the Illgen Falls "cabin'' is handicapped-accessible, with a big deck, gas grill, gas fireplace and kitchen with microwave, full
refrigerator-freezer, computerized oven and glass-ceramic range. (See Lodgings in Minnesota state parks.)
The skies were leaden and forbidding as Lake Superior slid into view and we descended into Duluth. The wind mauled our hair as we stood alongside the harbor canal, waving to the crew of the Sea Pearl II as it pushed toward Malta with a load of grain.
Driving up the shore, we listened to taped stories of shipwrecks: The sidewheeler Lotta Bernard, pummeled into pieces off Gooseberry Falls on Oct. 29, 1874. The steamer Edenborn, hurled into the mouth of Split Rock River and broken in two on Nov. 28, 1905. The Lafayette, pulverized against a cliff near Encampment Island on the same day.
Ahhhh. This is the North Shore I know and love.
Ever since it was settled, Park Rapids has been a crossroads for tourists.
The trains that hauled out white pine at the turn of the century brought in summer guests, who were met at the depot by resort owners and taken to the lakes in wagons.
When highways were built, Park Rapids became the gateway to Itasca State Park, 20 miles to the north. After the rail line was abandoned, it became the western trailhead of the Heartland State Trail, one of the nation's first paved bicycle trails.
Out in the countryside, it's a good time to go hunting.
There's so much to scout out — autumn colors, new trails, interesting shops. Lots of people head for the river valleys, to orchards on the St. Croix and towns along the Mississippi.
But one October, two girlfriends and I headed north instead. And in an overlooked part of the state, between Brainerd and Mille Lacs, we found a rich vein of fun.
In 1896, a St. Paul man named J.A. Berkey came to Minnesota's Leech Lake, threw out his line and reeled in a whole new industry.
"He set up white tents for some men from Kansas City, who fished their guts out and said, 'We’re going back and telling everyone,’ ’’ said Renee Geving, director of the Cass County Museum.
The hook was set. Over the years, Leech Lake’s reputation as a fishing hole grew as big as its muskies, which can be huge. The town that grew on the shores, however, wasn’t called Berkey, or even McGarry, after the town founder, a resort owner who is credited with coining the slogan "Land of 10,000 Lakes.’’
A hundred years ago, Grand Marais was a wind-buffeted outpost at the tip of the North Shore, stomping grounds of trappers, loggers and fishermen. The dirt road connecting the village to Duluth often was impassable, and winter provisions had to be brought in by steamer before Lake Superior iced over.
But amid the hardship, there was always art.
Swedish immigrant Anna Johnson was first to create and sell art, at the log trading post she operated with her husband after their 1907 marriage. Trained at Augustana College in Rockford, Ill., she painted, drew and worked in stained glass, leather and ceramics. Some of her many oils now hang in a log replica of her store, the Johnson Heritage Post Gallery.
In Bemidji, three faces tell much of the town's story.
Chief Bemidji stands facing the lake the Ojibwe called Bemidgegumaug, or "river flowing crosswise.’’ His real name was Shay-Now-Ish-Kung, and he fed the white people who settled on the lake's shores in 1888. Their settlement became the first town on the Mississippi, which starts 35 miles south in Itasca State Park, winds north to Bemidji, flows through its lake and turns south again.
A stern, square-shouldered Paul Bunyan stands a block away, at the edge of the old-fashioned amusement park. When he and his blue ox, Babe, were built for Bemidji's first Winter Carnival in 1937, the town's lumberjacks were still around, still telling stories of the logging camps that, not long before, had fed the area's magnificent white pines into the maw of the sawmill.
To hear resort owners in the north woods tell it, Brainerd is the Times Square of Minnesota.
“It’s crazy down there,’’ they say, shaking their heads. “It’s a zoo. We don’t want to be like Brainerd.’’
In Wisconsin, people talk the same way about Door County. Those places are busy, all right. They’re busy because plenty of people like that kind of atmosphere — the restaurants, the golf, the shopping, the fancy condo resorts.
In winter, a spa vacation sounds like just the thing.
Relax, rejuvenate and renew. Cleanse the skin, clear the mind. Get rid of stress and enter a portal to tranquility.
Like a lot of women, I thought a spa vacation would make a good girlfriend getaway, a relaxing break in routine. And I figured that somewhere there must be a nice little spa for working-class folk.
It took plenty of sisu to settle Embarrass.
It's the consistently coldest spot in the Lower 48; arctic blasts blow up against the Laurentian Divide and pool over the township, which set a record of 64 below in 1996. The soil is poor, allowing farmers to do little more than grow potatoes and raise a few cows.
The very word Embarrass is French for obstacle, and comes from French voyageurs' opinion of the local river: curvy as a corkscrew and usually too low to navigate.
It's no secret there's buried treasure right here in Minnesota.
It's in every gravel pit, along every railroad track, on every beach. All you have to do is look to find a Lake Superior agate, Minnesota's official state gemstone.
And every July, agates also can be found spread over Moose Lake's main street — 350 pounds of them, some even polished, hidden along with 1,200 quarters in 4 tons of rock.
It was a warm, sunny fall day in the heart of Minnesota. The woods were aglow with color, and there were many ways to wallow in it — on trails for hiking, paved paths for biking, lakes for boating.
But something was missing. Where were all the people?
Apparently, they were on the North Shore, fighting for space amid crowds that arrive as reliably as spawning salmon.
The corner of Third Avenue and U.S. 2 in Grand Rapids doesn’t exactly look like the edge of the wilderness.
The Blandin Co. paper mill is across the highway, its flat roof studded by smokestacks that send plumes of white smoke into the air. Trucks rumble past, en route to North Dakota or Duluth.
But this is the beginning of the 47-mile Edge of the Wilderness scenic route, Minnesota’s first National Scenic Byway. Just 10 blocks from U.S. 2, it leaves the city center and begins to skirt McKinney Lake. Then it winds northward, past pristine forests, undeveloped lakes and the occasional quiet village.
Sinclair Lewis was thinking about Otter Tail County when he chided Minnesotans for not knowing about their own "haunts of beauty.''
Few know that Otter Tail County has more lakes than any other county in Minnesota — 1,048 — or even that it has lakes at all. It also has the state's densest concentration of giant mascots and roadside sculpture, as well as two state parks, a picture-postcard mill and Inspiration Peak, the state's second-highest point after Eagle Mountain on the North Shore.
The rolling landscape was created by the back-and-forth scraping of glaciers from four ice ages, which left a glacial moraine of kames, piles of sand and gravel dropped by glacial meltwater, and kettles, created when block of ice fell off the glaciers, pressed into the earth, melted and filled up again as ponds and lakes.
Ten thousand years ago, the melting of Minnesota’s last glacier transformed a placid beach into a rugged coast.
It’s a 150-mile stretch of wild beauty, lined by piles of jagged black basalt, cobblestone beaches and the mouths of dozens of rivers, tumbling down from the old beaches of Glacial Lake Duluth. Seven state parks follow their winding gorges, marked by rapids and waterfalls, and the Superior Hiking Trail crosses them on its way from Duluth to the Canadian border.
This is Minnesota’s breathing space, to which tourists return like spawning salmon, year after year, or whenever we need to fill our lungs with brisk Lake Superior air. We can’t swim in the water — it’s about 40 degrees, even in summer — but we can look at the views and walk through the forests, and we do.
On the northeast tip of Minnesota is a coastline of uncommon beauty, lined by sheer basalt cliffs, cobblestone beaches and the mouths of dozens of rivers rushing into Lake Superior through narrow, winding gorges.
This is where Minnesotans go to breathe.
Since 1924, when the first highway opened, the North Shore has been a refuge for city folk tired of congestion, for farmers tired of flat fields, for blue-collar workers tired of the grind. It didn't cost much to come up for a week, rent a little cabin and breathe deeply of air laced with the fragrance of cedar, pine and freshwater waves.
For Minnesota bicyclists, there are two seasons: winter and trail construction.
That's a good thing, because bicycle tourists crave more trails and towns crave more bicycle tourists. That little ribbon of asphalt, they've discovered, can put them on the map.
"In our area, it seems one city after another is fighting for trails," says Stearns County parks director Chuck Wocken.
It's as wide as seven axhandles and a plug of tobacco, and as smooth as a flapjack griddle.
It unfurls over a landscape dotted with lakes created, according to north-woods legend, by the tracks of a giant lumberjack and his faithful blue ox.
It's the Paul Bunyan State Trail, and it links Minnesota's main Bunyan shrines: Brainerd, where a winking, talking Paul welcomed generations of tourists to "Paul Bunyan's Playground'' until it was moved to a nearby theme park in 2003. Hackensack, where a midget Paul Jr. waves next to his behemoth mother, Lucette Diana Kensack. Bemidji, where a stern 18-foot Paul started the colossus fad in 1937.
The Iron Range never has been for anyone who didn’t want to sweat.
Ever since iron ore was discovered on the shores of Lake Vermilion, this strip of Minnesota has drawn people who wanted to work. One of the world’s richest deposits of iron ore lay under the forest, and waves of Finns, Slovenes, Italians, Swedes, Croatians, Poles, Germans and Serbs came to shovel it out.
On the Vermillion Range, hard ore lay in vertical shafts, and the Soudan mine near Ely eventually reached seven football fields into the Earth. To the south, softer ore lay along a wooded ridge of hills, an exposed stretch of the Laurentian Divide that the Ojibwe called the sleeping giant, or Mesabi. The Mesabi Range runs nearly 120 miles, from just east of Grand Rapids to Hoyt Lakes, and its ore could be dug out of open pits.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Wow! An SNA, it turns out, is a fantastic place to see spring at full throttle.
In Minnesota's early days, creating a park was no picnic.
As the public admired the towering pines around Lake Itasca, loggers dreamed of the miles of board feet they could produce.
"No measure was ever more unreasonably harassed and opposed," wrote park founder Jacob Brower. But in 1891, the Legislature gave the people their first state park by one vote.
By rights, the northern Minnesota hamlet of Dorset shouldn’t even exist.
It’s on the road to nowhere, a mile and a half off the highway that links Park Rapids to Walker. It’s not on a lake. It has virtually no houses.
It does, however, have a knack for hyperbole. In the 1920s, it tried "land of clover, the big white potato and the dairy cow.’’ It tried boasting of "the shortest state highway in Minnesota running through its downtown’’ and, until 1986, was "the smallest town in the United States with a bank.’’
The origins of Paul Bunyan are lost in the wood smoke of long-ago logging camps.
The mighty lumberjack most likely was born in the camps of Maine or Nova Scotia. Nevertheless, northern Minnesota towns have taken the legend and run with it.
Akeley calls itself Paul Bunyan’s birthplace, and it’s got a good claim — it was the headquarters of the Red River Lumber Co., where, in 1914, a publicist named William Laughead is said to have written the first Paul Bunyan story in a company brochure. Today, Minnesota's largest Bunyan, a fiberglass 33-footer, kneels with outstretched hand outside the town's Paul Bunyan History Museum, where a 28-pound fish is labeled "Paul's Minnow."
As soon as we turned off the highway into Nisswa, my children’s heads began to swivel.
"Souvenirs . . . Gift Shop . . . Moccasins,’’ read 9-year-old Madeleine. "And look — Candy Store.’’
"This is a cute town,’’ said 6-year-old Peter, noticing the covered sidewalks. "It’s like a cowboy town.’’
Exploring the Minnesota landscape on a scenic byway, you'd expect to see some singular features.
But Waters of the Dancing Sky Scenic Byway turns up a whole new face.
This is a burly part of the state, a scratchy-wool, buffalo-plaid kind of place that might seem Bunyanesque in nature but actually was the stomping grounds of a real-life legend, the shorter but tougher voyageur.
On a September day in 1894, Hinckley, Minn., was hell on earth.
As a logging and rail center midway between St. Paul and Duluth, the town had grown quickly. But during the summer of 1894, less than 2 inches of rain fell. Small fires smoldered in the countryside, many started when hot cinders from trains landed in tinder-dry slashings — the crowns, stumps and branches left behind by logging crews.
On Sept. 1, breezes fanned small fires near Mission Creek and Pokegama, villages south of Hinckley. They joined, and the flames, breaking through a thick layer of warm air, were turned into a fiery cyclone by cool air traveling down from above.
Only tough guys lasted for long around Lake Superior, and Father Frederic Baraga was one of them. The Slovenian priest arrived in 1831 and spent a long and frenetic life canoeing and snowshoeing between Ojibwe settlements in Sault Ste. Marie, Grand Portage and La Pointe.
One day in 1846, Father Baraga, learning of a possible epidemic among the Ojibwe in Grand Portage, set out from Madeline Island in a small boat with an Ojibwe guide. A terrible storm arose, but they were blown over a sandbar and into the quiet mouth of the Cross River, where the town of Schroeder is today. In thanksgiving, they erected a small wooden cross at the site, later replaced by a granite one.
The Snowshoe Priest, who compiled an Ojibwe dictionary in his spare time, became the first bishop of Upper Michigan and lived until 1868. He's buried in the 1890 Romanesque cathedral of Marquette, where efforts are under way to canonize him.
On lazy summer days, Walker is a classic northwoods Minnesota town.
I've been going to a lake resort near there with my family for years. We ride our bikes into town on the Heartland State Trail,
eat ice cream at the Village Square and buy muskmelons and corn on the cob from the stand near the gas station.
The pace is slow, serene — unless a Crazy Day Sale falls on a cloudy day, in which case the resorts empty and shoppers crowd into the town of 1,100 like sheep to salt.
When you live in the frozen north, you may as well embrace winter.
After the second wimpy winter, I decided I might be using them a lot. So I called the ski school at Lutsen Mountains, on Minnesota's North Shore, and asked instructor Marcela Perez-Abreu how I could get over the “intermediate hump.’’
“That’s a tough plateau to break,’’ she said. “But you’re going to break it a lot easier and faster with some instruction.’’
It was an early January day in western Minnesota. A biting wind was blowing off the prairie, and the mercury was sinking faster than the Titanic.
But it didn’t matter. I was at Maplelag, where the world is my iceberg . . . um, oyster.
At Maplelag, no matter how inhospitable the outside world is, the lodge’s stained-glass windows turn the wan rays of winter into gleaming golds and apricots. The steam billowing from the giant hot tub creates a dome of warmth amid the tundra. Bottomless cookie jars and baskets of hot fry bread keep guests fat and happy.
Cruising along western Minnesota’s Central Lakes Trail, it’s tempting to keep a scorecard.
Egret, five. Blue herons, seven. Beavers, three. Turtles, two. Loons, three. Pelicans, 20. Giant concrete coots, one.
Lots of warblers, hurtling over the trail like guided missiles, and warbler-sized dragonflies. Chipmunks racing the bike across blacktop. Patches of wild rose, and fountain grasses waving their pink heads in the breeze.
To a bicyclist setting out on the Lake Wobegon Trail, there are few signs that this is a storied landscape.
There’s a lake surrounded by cattails and frequented by fishermen and canoeists. There’s another lake across the road, where teen-agers flirt and toddlers play in the sand.
Down the trail, a clump of showy lady slippers pops out of the weeds. A great blue heron rises from a slough with languid flaps. A painted turtle scrapes at the dirt next to the trail, making a nest for its eggs.
Once, a wind-whipped sand spit was not the most desirable address in Duluth.
The Ojibwe preferred the lush estuary of the St. Louis River, which flows into Lake Superior at what today is Duluth-Superior Harbor. The French explorer Daniel Greysolon, Sieur du Lhut, for whom the city was named, didn’t waste much time on the lakefront when he arrived in 1679. Nor did the early fur traders, who hustled straight up the St. Louis, which, via the little Savanna River, connects Lake Superior to the Mississippi.
The St. Louis looks sleepy, but it's the largest Lake Superior tributary in the United States. With Ontario's Nipigon River, it contributes about one-fourth of the lake's annual water input.
There are seven residential learning centers in Minnesota. All are non-profit, funded by a variety of governmental entities and
private foundations, and serve the public at large as well as Minnesota schoolchildren.
All hold day programs, and some schedule special weekends for families or groups of friends. They also can be rented for retreats and family reunions.
Audubon Center of the North Woods: This center near Sandstone in eastern Minnesota, off the Willard Munger State Trail, has a high-ropes course and indoor climbing wall. 1-888-404-7743, www.audubon-center.com.
Big, bad Lake Superior.
It’s big as in vast, with a surface area equal to Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Vermont and New Hampshire combined.
It’s bad as in lethal, able to swallow ore boats or pulverize them against the hard volcanic rock that lines its shore. And it’s treacherous — like an enraged bull, its crushing waves can turn on a dime.