Superior Hiking Trail Southern Terminus

Someday I will connect to WI        6.2 miles to the Grand Portage Trailhead         Next blog

Camping at mile 0 and in Jay Cooke Park

A few steep steps. Mostly freshly created trails. Awesome views.

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/mnwi-border-to-duluth/

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/mnwi-border-to-duluth/#section_1

This isn’t exactly about religion, but I’ll include some Ursula Goodenough quotes to add that flavor to it. Mostly, I’ll be talking about the first 14 miles on the southern end of the Superior Hiking Trail. The first 5 are new within the last few years and then they connect in Jay Cooke State Park where existing trails are now designated as SHT. Much reconstruction has been done since the 2012 flooding. Old guide books will need to be rewritten, but the signage is up and the parking well marked now, so get out there. We live near this park, so we used two cars to make our hikes one way. We split it into two days, but kept a pace of 2 miles per hour, so it could be done in one.

We started at the northeast corner of Jay Cooke State Park and worked back to the Wisconsin border, so I’ll be taking it in that order. The Grand Portage Trail can be done as a loop in this section. It’s part of a much larger historic route used by Natives, then by Voyageurs to get between Lake Superior waters and the Mississippi. Stop at the Visitor Center for your parking sticker or whatever else you’ll need, then head east. On 210 on the park maps, it’s trail point 25. Look for the well marked big lot, skip the little pull offs. From there, walk back to the road, across the embankment and look for the signs. We wanted to take the actual SHT, but you could take the other part of this loop and end up in the same place. Apparently that is also a more challenging hike.

It gets beautiful right away, and you see the river along this section. It’s down river from all the rapids, just calm and peaceful. Cross the highway and start heading up hill. It gets a bit more challenging but it is well maintained. You get the sense of being well out into the wilderness even though you are not far from Duluth. There is a parking lot to the north that locals use to access this and the other loops in this area, so you might see a trail runner and possibly horses, but you won’t likely find the family campers from the State Park. You will hook in to Oak Trail, probably without noticing, but watch for Gill Creek Trail, it is a connector between loops.

"And so I once again revert to my covenant with Mystery, and respond to the emergence of Life not with a search for its Design or Purpose but instead with outrageous celebration that it occurred at all. I take the concept of miracle and use it not as a manifestation of divine intervention but as the astonishing property of emergence. Life does generate something-more-from-nothing-but, over and over again, and each emergence, even though fully explainable by chemistry, is nonetheless miraculous."

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature 

Remnants flooding in Gill Creek

You’ll get to give back some the elevation you gained as you get through the creek valley and then you get to gain it again. The creek is a raging river in spring time so watch the weather reports, even into June. We went in late August and I would say it was dicey for pumping drinking water. There is a small bridge, but I doubt it is much use in the spring. When you come up from there, you’ll meet up with the Triangle Trail and start to feel like you are in a State Park. From there, you connect for a short time to the paved Willard Munger Trail, then Greely Creek Trail which will take you by the power station dam and finally White Pine Trail. White Pine is nothing spectacular, but it takes you right to the campground. According to my GPS tracker, everything up to here was 6.2 miles.

Yep, we could text from the Park.

The camp sites at Jay Cooke are excellent. Sometimes you have quite a bit of trees between you and your neighbors. It’s all pit toilets, but when the buildings are open in the daytime, they are flush. There is a fire handle type water spigot always available near the Visitor Center. They are working on a shower building, which will probably make the place more popular for campers. It’s already one of the most visited parks in the state.

"Mystery generates wonder, and wonder generates awe. The gasp can terrify or the gasp can emancipate. As I allow myself to experience cosmic and quantum Mystery, I join the saints and the visionaries in their experience of what they called the Divine,..."

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature. 

Heading out from the park’s main attraction, cross the swinging bridge headed south and take your first left. The official trail for the SHT is the River Trail where you get eye to eye with some of the big rocks that form the rapids. This is a rocky trail, so it’s not groomed in winter and it’s underwater in spring. You’ll get back up on the Silver Creek Trail pretty quick and get the views from higher up. It’s wide and smooth, made for skiing in both directions. It connects to the Lost Lake Trail and the Bear Chase Trails, where the difficulty factor slowly increases. Park maps show where Lost Lake Trail crosses a stream coming off the St Louis River. It’s the best water source besides the river itself and, well, the plumbing, and has this awesome bridge.

There is a park map at intersection 40, but it’s for winter and the trail you want is not a winter trail so it is in gray. It might not be mowed as well and you’ll feel like you are leaving the park, but that’s the one you want. You’ll come to a sharp corner on the southern end of it and there will be a SHT arrow pointing up a hill back into the narrow single path trail like most of the SHT. This is an excellent section of the trail, with great vistas across a wide valley, great for fall colors. If you do this hike coming from Highway 23, it is about 3 and a half miles to this point. There is a scenic overlook about 3 miles from the highway. You’ll gain over 400 feet of elevation over those miles (going south) and have to pay for them with some trips down to creek beds. 

When you’re through all that, you’ll pop out onto Highway 23. Look to the south for Wild Valley Rd. When you are driving to this trail head you probably won’t see the tiny SHT signs, but the road has a sign for it. It turns into a minimum maintenance road, again, no SHT signs, at least not when I was there. The parking however does have the familiar trail head. As you can see, it’s a half mile from the highway and 5.9 miles to the park visitor center. The road continues on to hunting land, so wear your orange in season if you're going that direction. The 1.9 miles to Wisconsin is a nice rolling hike, with more creek bed valleys (usually dry). It’s a young forest with a few old trees, which is something you don’t see much of on the SHT.

The campsite is great. There is one tent site that is as nice as a State park and a few others if more people join you. There is a nice view down a steep drop off of a stream and no way to get down to it. Get back on the trail and hike a short hike towards Wisconsin to get to it. It’s big enough to deserve a bridge and was a couple feet deep in August, so pretty reliable. It’s a perfect place to begin your exploration of the entire Superior Hiking Trail.

Life, we can now say, is getting something to happen against the odds and remembering how to do it. The something that happens is biochemistry and biophysics, the odds are beat by intricate concatenations of shape fits and shape changes, and the memory is encoded in genes and their promoters. We read the notes, we hear the emergent chords and harmonies, and we marvel at the emergent musical experience.

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature.

 Oren Lyons, Faithkeeper of the Onondaga Nation, conveyed this concept to an assembly at the United Nations:

I do not see a delegation for the four-footed. I see no seat for the eagles. We forget and we consider ourselves superior, but we are after all a mere part of the Creation. And we must continue to understand where we are. And we stand between the mountain and the ant, somewhere and there only, as part and parcel of the Creation. It is our responsibility, since we have been given the minds to take care of these things.

Goodenough, Ursula. The Sacred Depths of Nature