Trip to Grand Marais
Played hooky yesterday and convinced She Who Puts Up With Me to put up with all three kids for the day instead. Fired up the plane, and flew up to Grand Marais, MN, with the intent of visiting our place on Bogus Lake.
It has been over a year since my last trip to Grand Marais (twins will do that to you), and unfortunately, when I arrived, the battery in the pickup was compete toast. Fortunately, it got me far enough so I could coast into town (I coasted about three miles--fortunately, it was downhill), then waited several hours before someone could take a look at it and make sure the problem really was the battery and not something far worse.
After all, I don't want Far Worse to happen when I'm ten miles from town in the middle of the woods, instead of at the top of a big hill with the only town for 30 miles at the bottom.
The upshot was that, while I only got to spend an hour or so at Bogus Lake before it got dark, I did get to take some nice pictures in Grand Marais.
This is the view from 9,000 feet of an unknown lake somewhere north of Minneapolis. I love the way the patterns of ice and snow are visible on the surface of the lake. In another month, this will just be an expanse of white.
Ice clinging to the rocks at Artist's Point in Grand Marais (looking northeast). These rocky shorelines are very typical of the North Shore of Lake Superior. These are all ancient lava flows (some of the oldest on the planet), which break off vertically when they erode, leaving gently rounded outcroppings of bedrock with vertical edges. We have a 30-40 foot cliff at one point on our property, and there are places along the North Shore with cliff faces hundreds of feet high.
Taken from the same spot, looking the other direction (southwest). The hills sloping up from the lake are 800-1200 feet high, and are called the Sawtooth Mountains (for obvious reasons). This is one of the oldest mountain ranges on the planet (or so I'm told), which is why they're so puny compared to, say, the Rockies.
Despite the problems with the pickup, it was a great day to be Up North. From the air, there was at least 100 miles visibility: I could clearly see the Upper Peninsula of Michigan from over Duluth. Let's hope it's much less than a year before I get to go back.