Showing posts with label hiking. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hiking. Show all posts

Saturday, May 23, 2009

Afton hiking

afton state park

Went out hiking in Afton State Park this weekend, which has always been one of my favorite places to go. After a pretty uninspiring attempt at some trail running (drinking tasty beer the night before apparently doesn't count as carbo-loading) we did a quick little hike before taking this shot of my favorite ecosystem, the prairie.

Thursday, May 21, 2009

BWCA 2008 027

This is a photoblog. From time to time, I will add photos upon it.

This was shot in the Superior National Forest on the Bass Lake Trail. When I was living in Ely, I never got sick of hiking this trail, and about a mile into it you run into this fella.

Bass Lake is really cool, because it used to be a waterway used by loggers in the early 1900's. There was a canal connecting it to a nearby lake, so loggers could float lumber from Bass Lake downstream. This canal was poorly made (as is the lumberjack wont) which caused the sluice way to break causing Bass Lake to drain 55 feet or so. This also prompted a headline in the local paper declaring (I kid you not) "Bass Lake disappears, as if by magic!" edging out the popular theory that the water was stolen by immigrants.

The result of this is a trail that exists in an area that was formerly underwater, and a lot of the Bass Lake trail follows the former shore line. White cedars, like the one pictured here, have a tendency to grow out over the water several feet when they live near the shore, leaving these bent cedars as a reminder of how the lake used to be