Superior Hiking Trail Lismore Rd

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Two campsites not far from the Lismore.
Rural area with some housing nearby
Mild hills

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/duluth-to-two-harbors/#section_0 

Lots of warnings and notices that this is no longer a trailhead with overnight parking. We parked on the edge of the road near the driveway and felt safe. The landowner is making improvements, including a house. You walk right through his yard for the first hundred feet or so, south of Lismore Rd. This is timber country. It's easy to stay on the trail but you will cross a lot of four-wheeler trails. You will also see signs about the timber section you are in. It's kind of interesting because the signs tell you when it was last logged. So, lots of young forest. 

Water looked good near the campsites. Mud wasn't bad on a warm mid-October afternoon. One of the best sites was a few hundred tamaracks growing just north of the Bald Eagle campsite. You don't often get to walk right up to those. 

As I mentioned in the previous section, this trail splits with SHT on the west and a snowmobile trail on the east. At the northern end, the snowmobile trail was wide and looked inviting. At the southern, 4 miles later, it's full of weeds and branches on the ground. I don't know where the maintenance changes but the two trails are not close together, so you can't just change your mind later and switch. You would be trespassing if you tried that anyway. 

Superior Hiking Trail Traditional Start

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First campsite since Jay Cooke State Park, about 4 miles from Martin Rd.
Many road crossings, but no stores or parking.
Steady mild uphill climb north from the lake. 

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/duluth-to-two-harbors/#section_0 

Not much to say about the first 3.1 miles of this section. When we first set this goal of hiking every section of the SHT, there were 4 maps. The first one started in Two Harbors and included a note about future plans. We're now over 50 miles from the terminus and still a ways to go before connecting to this old map. 

At Martin Rd. it's snowmobile trail, so it's wide. The grass can get high, but we were hiking at the end of a drought so it wasn't a problem. There was always at least a single path that was smooth with the occasional rock or tree root. 

There are many businesses and houses. The University farm has a tall barb-wired fence for a while. There was the most specific directions I've ever seen on the trail at the crossing of Martin Rd. The snowmobile parallels the road through what looked like a ditch. We took the pavement.

On my Cairn app, it showed the trail splitting, then coming back together at the Lismore trailhead. It also called the SHT option a "spur". But at that split, it was clear that one way was foot travel and the other was for snowmobiles. We did this out and back, and we'll cover the Lismore section next. The Martin Rd trailhead is listed as a shuttle pick-up point, but all the road crossings are odd locations, even the Lismore Rd trailhead, with possibly difficult addresses to explain to a driver. 

Lismore is not an "official" trailhead. Overnight parking is NOT recommended. 

Superior Hiking Trail Up the Hill

 Up the hill

Back to the Zoo                 3.2 miles to Haines         Forward to the Silos 

https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/mnwi-border-to-duluth/#section_8
https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/mnwi-border-to-duluth/#section_9

Non-SHT lodging is available right on Westgate Blvd.
This is a steep climb, rising a few hundred feet, and many gorges going back down so you end up climbing nearly 1,500 ft. Rocky, with many stream crossings. Duluth closes these trails sometimes during rainy periods.
Lots of quaking aspens of all ages. Scattered cedar and maple and occasional oak. Some city noise.

2021 in the middle of a drought turned out to be not such a bad time to take a hike. We picked up where we left off at the end of Greene St. after it crosses N. 64^th Av W. Take the path north following Interstate 35, avoiding any of the turns to the left. You will have to cross Cody St, which has some high-speed traffic, and walk along Westgate Blvd. for two blocks. Signage is very good throughout this hike. When we came to the loop near Haines Rd we could not miss the intersection. You will be constantly reminded of a bike trail that parallels you, it is not intrusive or confusing.

After a few blocks in the neighborhood near the highway, you are back into the woods and join up with Keene Creek where you start climbing. Rocks in the creek were easy to find as we crisscrossed, but we were in a dry period.  A trailhead with a nicer parking lot than Greene Street is not far up, on W Skyline Pkwy. This is the Highland St trailhead on SHT maps.

Follow the creek a little longer and you’ll see steps and even wires to help you climb the steep section that lies between a switchback in Skyline Pkwy. You will cross the Pkwy, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. There is no way to safely park here and start a hike! Things flatten out a little at this point. If you have the Duluth Trails Map, you will see quite a few rock-climbing icons around this area. You stay above them, which lends the one nice scenic vista on this hike. It is on the official SHT part of Brewer’s Loop. The north part of that loop is still nice and it’s shorter if you want to get to Haines Rd trailhead.

Lots to offer on this little section.

Understanding CRT

 I'm seeing many articles that make some pretty nasty claims about Critical Race Theory. It's a legal theory, stating that people are not inherently more criminal or less intelligent based on their skin color or any other biological factor. However, we see a disparity of incarceration and educational achievement correlated to those factors. The theory then, is that there is something in our laws and our culture that is causing these disparities. I find this non-controversial. Many do not. 

Here is a recent article that was linked to me to make the anti-CRT case. 

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/should-public-schools-ban-critical?fbclid=IwAR2-hejN6gyQXvCFZKYFDQLFnjq75n5cxNR9JJHfgjRmgtOY2tKENH-tqc0

I could take it on face value, accepting the half dozen or so anecdotes as evidence. My experience is that information presented like this usually misses much of the data behind it. I'll drill down on one of them to demonstrate this.

This article gave examples, claiming they made up a case against CRT. Here’s one:

·  California’s Department of Education is proposing to eliminate opportunities for accelerated math in the name of “equity.” That means discouraging algebra for eighth graders and calculus for high schoolers. 

 The "eliminate opportunities" goes to Reason magazine. I would call this a "polemic". If I accepted the opinion of the author, I could have stopped there. This research was fairly easy because it had the report in this article. Although, it is long. I haven't read the whole thing, but if anyone would like to point out something in it, I'd be glad to respond. I'll respond to one of the quotes in Reason magazine below.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/ma/cf/

https://reason.com/2021/05/04/california-math-framework-woke-equity-calculus/

This one reminded me of The National Enquirer, repeating the words in the title in a subheading, then again in the first paragraph. It quoted a report, and picked out some of the evidence for how it made it’s case. I’ll give them credit that they linked to the full report. It claimed the “entire second chapter is about connecting math to social justice concepts”. I downloaded that chapter and could not confirm that. I was hard pressed to find mention of social justice, let alone a theme.

The Reason article quotes the report, "To encourage truly equitable and engaging mathematics classrooms we need to broaden perceptions of mathematics beyond methods and answers so that students come to view mathematics as a connected, multi-dimensional subject that is about sense making and reasoning, to which they can contribute and belong."

Robby Soave, the Reason author, follows up with the comment, “This approach is very bad.” He makes some general statements about people having natural abilities to excel at math and how we should encourage them. He cites no data, no studies. In the next paragraph, he says, “young people who aren't particularly adept at any academic discipline might pick up art, music, computers, or even trade skills.” I have a computer degree. Calculus was required because of the way it teaches you to think about problem solving. I have trouble trusting Robby after this comment.

There is still a lot of that report to read, but so far, I’m seeing how it encourages a method of engaging young people in reasons for using math and working with others to solve a problem. The “discouraging” that is mentioned in the Bariweiss article is probably one of many possible recommendations to consider, not a main theme.

 

Here's one of the vignettes in Chapter 2 of the report. Not sure how farming is a social justice issue.

Vignette–36 Fences

Lori, a high school geometry teacher, introduces a problem to students. Lori explains that a farmer has 36 individual fences, each measuring one meter in length, and that the farmer wants to put them together to make the biggest possible area. Lori takes time to ask her students about their knowledge of farming, making reference to California’s role in the production of fruit, vegetables, and livestock. The students engage in an animated discussion about farms and the reasons a farmer may want a fenced area. While some of Lori’s long-term English learners show fluency with social/conversational English, she knows some will be challenged by forthcoming disciplinary literacy tasks. To support meaningful engagement in increasingly rigorous course work, she ensures images of all regular and irregular shapes are posted and labeled on the board, along with an optional sentence frame, “The fence should be arranged in a [blank] shape because [blank].” These support instruction when Lori asks students what shapes they think the fences could be arranged to form. Students suggest a rectangle, triangle, or square. With each response, Lori reinforces the word with the shape by pointing at the image of the shapes. When she asks, “How about a pentagon?” she reminds students of the optional sentence frame as they craft their response. Lori asks, the students think about this and talk about it as mathematicians. Lori asked them whether they want to make irregular shapes allowable or not.

After some discussion, Lori asks the students to think about the biggest possible area that the fences can make. Some students begin by investigating different sizes of rectangles and squares, some plot graphs to investigate how areas change with different side lengths.

Susan works alone, investigating hexagons––she works out the area of a regular hexagon by dividing it into six triangles and she has drawn one of the triangles separately. She tells Lori that she knew that the angle at the top of each triangle must be 60 degrees, so she could draw the triangles exactly to scale using compasses and find the area by measuring the height.

Niko has found that the biggest area for a rectangle with perimeter 36 is a 9 x 9 square—which gave him the idea that shapes with equal sides may give bigger areas and he started to think about equilateral triangles. Niko was about to draw an equilateral triangle when he was distracted by Jaden who told him to forget triangles, he had found that the shape with the largest area made of 36 fences was a 36-sided shape. Jaden suggested to Niko that he find the area of a 36-sided shape too and he leant across the table excitedly, explaining how to do this. He explained that you divide the 36-sided shape into triangles and all of the triangles must have a one-meter base, Niko joined in saying, “Yes, and their angles must be 10 degrees!” Jaden said, “Yes, and to work it out we need tangent ratios which Lori has just explained to me.”

Jaden and Niko move closer together, incorporating ideas from trigonometry, to calculate the area.

As the class progressed many students started using trigonometry, some students were shown the ideas by Lori, some by other students. The students were excited to learn about trig ratios as they enabled them to go further in their investigations, they made sense to them in the context of a real problem, and the methods were useful to them. In later activities the students revisited their knowledge of trigonometry and used them to solve other problems.

 

 

Personal Responsibility

 A friend of mine who has one of those larger than life personalities once lamented on his wife's interest in genealogy. "They're dead. These are dead people. Why would you want to look up uninteresting facts about when people died or were born or when they moved?", he said with his hands waving. It's hard to argue with logic like that. But I'm going to do it anyway. 

One hundred and fifty years ago or so, some people who are now dead were creating the luckiest moments of my life. My grandparents, and their parents were forsaking their family histories because the world was changing and because those families were not including them in their plans for their legacy. Half of them were coming from Europe and half from south of the Mason-Dixon line. They came to Flint, Michigan where my parents and most of my cousins were born.

My great grandparents were born in a time when being born first still meant something. The first male traditionally received more of the family fortune and was treated as more important than his siblings. It was a time when fewer resources meant more competition. As one of my ancestors found out, even if you asked for help from your own brother, you might be met with an illogical response such as, "God helps those who help themselves."

Sometime around my late teens, I had to make my own decisions and decide how I could find my own fortunes and choose my own legacy. My heritage was helping with that, but sometimes it was a barrier. The illogical phrase that I have come up against was; I am "personally responsible" for my fate. 

It's true to a point, I had choices about my education, including how hard to study. I could have worked out harder and done better in sports or practiced more and improved by ability to play an instrument or just read more books and paid more attention to the adults who were deciding to send people my age off to fight in some place on the other side of the globe. No matter what I did though, decisions about my fate were being made that were just as much out of my control as the ones made by people before I was ever born. 

My dad's grandfather was cut out of any inheritance so he left Germany and eventually came to America through Canada to Flint. My mom's grandfather was born just as slave's were being freed. His father could no longer keep the people he had inherited so he moved west. I know very little about why made his decisions, but I'm guessing the economy of Tennessee was suffering in the post Civil War era. For my mom's dad, there was a falling out with his brother, and he packed up his young family and drove from Arkansas to Flint to get work. 

Both of those grandfathers of mine took advantage of the growing economy of the auto industry. The next generation took advantage of unions and the low cost of higher education in the war years and after. They were not rich. The rich were being taxed to build the infrastructure that made America the most powerful country in the world and kept the USSR in check including beating them in the so-called "space race". All of that had positive and negative consequences. 

I only know of those good and bad effects because of the advantages they gave me. To continue to keep up with the evil in the world, we need higher education and a healthy defense system. You may not like the Liberal professors that are created by that, or the crimes we commit in foreign countries, but I know I would not be able to understand all of it without the advantages that they created and keep creating. It's not a perfect world. 

If I could overcome the culture created by 10,000 years of human history, and live in a world that matches my vision of loving, caring, good neighbors, who work hard, I would do it. I may not know what to do, but I know tearing down everything from the past is not the place to start. Breaking a tradition, questioning an authority, opening a dialogue, those are things that my great grandparents did and I honor them by thinking for myself. 

I know that they knew that they could not know what I know. They were muddling through life just like the rest of us. Powerful forces altered their futures. Random events that may have seemed small changed their future. They kept on. I wouldn't be here if they didn't. 

Bruce Springsteen put it more poetically. As Bruce was about to  become a father, his own father visited him and made a sort of apology for the father that he had been. It was more than that. It was a warning of the mistakes he had made. Telling his son not to make them with his own children. In Bruce's words, "To release them of the chains of our sins, my father's and mine and our father's before. That they may be free to make their own choices and to live their own lives. We are ghosts or we are ancestors in our children's lives. We either lay our mistakes, our burdens upon them and we haunt them. Or we assist them laying those old burdens down and we free them from the chain of our own flawed behavior. And as ancestors we walk alongside of them, and we assist them in finding their own way and some transcendence." 

A most excellent New Year

There was a new Bill and Ted excellent Adventure movie this year, gotta give a nod to that. It was about the fulfillment of their original mission, to bring the whole world together with their music, which keeps seeming to happen and then not happen in each of the movies. I've followed a similar pattern through the years. You could review last year's New Year's post for example.

In February, I almost got a local chapter of Braver Angels off the ground, then, that thing that 2020 will be most remembered for happened. Braver Angels has continued online, so that's good, but getting people together in living rooms has not been happening so much. 

I'm sliding toward a "year in review" blog here. That's not I want but I did come across an excellent review of the last 100 years of the Conservative vs. Liberal battle. It's a short summary but covers a lot. If you haven't read any Heather Cox Richardson, this is a good start. 

The article marks this year as the year that we will probably stop referencing the "Reagan legacy" and start using "Trump legacy". Before Reagan, we were very much under the influence of the "Roosevelt legacy", The New Deal. Today, we have people who are confused about all of this, who are afraid of "socialism" but don't want "the government" to take away Medicare or Social Security. The details of this battle between the social safety net and big business are in the article. 

Photo: Race and Reagan

It also describes how racism has been used as a weapon in this battle. That legacy goes back to the Civil War and the years that followed; Reconstruction. It mixes our identity as strong individuals who have high morals and ethics with a focus on vague enemies, like "communism" or "terrorists". It leverages these tools and uses legal maneuvers to selectively apply votes so it appears to be democratic and patriotic. It draws lines, and sets up each side to believe they are the "real" America. I'm using tons of scare quotes because all of these definitions are in flux.       Photo: Deconstructing Reconstruction

Many genies have been released from their bottles lately and they don't like being put back in. They will continue to impress us with their magic tricks. But as everyone knows, you have to be very careful what you wish for because genies can be so literal in their interpretations of your words and the trick is then played on you. 

As the article notes, we are at a point where millions of people are openly asking for votes to not be counted and questioning the entire system and willing to overturn the results of our duly run democratic process. It is not logical, but it is the inevitable result of playing on people's righteous belief in their ideology. 

The tendency to be blinded by ideology and forget that the person in front of you is a loving human being is not limited to Republicans. Righteousness can bind us and it can blind us. Moral indignation can override our reasoning skills. 

https://righteousmind.com/

There are scenarios where the same righteousness could have resulted in a Left Wing disaster. But don't confuse the danger of government that is too liberal with the reality of one that was captured by and run by conservative big business. Both can lead to oligarchy; rule by a rich elite. The "liberal" and "conservative" labels lose their meaning when you look at who makes the rules, that is, the ones with the gold.