Superior Hiking Trail End of Section One

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Mix of roads, dirt roads, sidewalks, parks, urban and nature. 

Section as it appears SHT 

It was only 35 degrees Fahrenheit, so we kept this hike short. It felt good to finally finish Section 1. Not that long ago, we would not have even been on the Superior Hiking Trail yet, it was just another short section of trail somewhere in the Duluth area. Now, some of these hikes between here and the beginning of the trail are my favorites. 

We used Uber this time. Parking our car at the Hartley Nature Center and using it to get to the Martin Road Trailhead. This did not work out ideally. Google maps takes you to the wrong side of Woodland Ave. and Uber drivers use Google maps. We wandered around this busy road for a few minutes. After checking two trail apps and finally the SHT trail sections website, we figured out we needed

to be east of Woodland, not west. If I had used the Duluth trails map I would have figured this out immediately. That map has been great, but we've reached it's eastern edge with this hike. 

From Martin Road, the sign for the parking lot for the trailhead read “C.J. Ramstad North Shore Trail”. This is also used by snowmobilers but luckily it was a little too early for that. It splits after a few hundred feet and the snowmobilers go one way foot travel the other. The scenery improves too. You follow Amity Creek, a steep gorge and after a mile and half you come to a dirt road at Downer Park. It’s road hiking from there on out, but the park provides nice scenery. Then you go through Forest Hills Cemetery, which is also somewhat scenic.

Navigation is easy on roads with no houses and no turns. In residential areas we saw blue markers on telephone polls. When you get to the residential areas, homes are wooded lots so it's an enjoyable walk.  Near the end of this stretch, you will come back to Woodland Ave, and which is a wide multilane road. Plenty of sidewalk though, so no problem. It’s a short hike up to Hartley Nature Center. 

Sometimes nature isn't so pretty. We came around a bend and apparently we interrupted an owl in the middle of mealtime. 

Superior Hiking Trail Skyline to Silos Restaurant

Skyline down to I-35     5 miles to the edge of downtown     East side of Duluth

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No camping in the city.
Trail is well maintained with a variety of sites. 

On a record warm day in November for Duluth, we set out to conquer “the hill”. If you have so much as driven through Duluth on the highway, you can’t miss that it sits on a hill. The lake is at 600 ft above sea level and the top of the hill that holds iconic images like Enger Tower is over 1,300 feet. So, forgive us if we decided to start at a higher elevation for this 5 mile stretch. We also skipped a few miles from Highway 35 and Grand Ave, but we’ll circle back to that. 

If you know anything about the last decade or so of Duluth history, you know that they have been working on these woods that are too steep to build on, improving them with hiking and biking and other sporting activities. They are a major attraction. If you look on the Duluth trail map you will see a variety of trails. It can be hard to pick out the Superior Hiking Trail. But, while walking from Haines Road down to the Bayfront, we never made one wrong turn. The signage was great, and the design of the area keeps everyone happy. You can see the mountain bike trails, and every now and then a biker flashes by, but you only cross the trails a couple times. There is some cliff climbing in here somewhere too, but we never noticed it.

We did notice the ups and downs. We started at 1,040 ft and peaked at Enger Park at 1,150. Throughout the hike we gained 900 ft and lost 1,500. A couple short sections were city parks with paved or gravel trails or boardwalks, but most of it was just dirt and on a bad day could be mud, so don’t be fooled by the fact you are in a city. There are a couple creek crossings and the larger ones have well built bridges. Only in extreme conditions would these be a problem.

As soon as you step off of Haines Rd, the city sounds will fade and you won’t believe you are surrounded by 80,000 people. On the other end, just before we reached W Michigan St, we were very much reminded of where we were when we spotted a homeless encampment. We didn’t see anyone, but that doesn’t mean you should not be vigilante. More on that later.

Haines Rd is N 40th Ave from Highway 35. Just climb straight up, past the big switchback and you can’t miss the parking lot, the signs, and the trail. If you’re going back toward Spirit Mt. the sign over the tunnel tells you that you are on the trail. You’ll immediately notice the variety of trees and that the area is obviously managed, but still quite wild. After a mile or two you will start to get vistas of the city and the lake and the harbor and the noise is not quite as filtered out. 

Lincoln Park

You’ll come down a bit and then level off and pick up W 10th St., a quiet neighborhood with a great view. There is some street parking that you could use to access the trail but you would probably be better off going up to N 24th and Piedmont Ave. if this is where you want to start your hike. There is official parking there with an official SHT sign. Piedmont is also called highway 53 but you can’t park on that. If you come up that way, get off and find the residential part of Piedmont. If you are hiking through, take the big bridge over 53. 

It’s a little brushy through here, just south of the Enger Park Golf Course, but then it breaks into Enger Park with a tranquil Japanese garden, and of course, Enger Tower. Stay on the high side of the park unless you want to go over and see the view from the Tower. It’s all downhill from here. You might not notice when you get into Central Park. It is much smaller than its New York namesake. West 3rd St. goes through that, but there is no parking. On the edge of that park, you will use a short section of N 14th Ave W with a possibility of on street parking. Pick up the trail again and you will be along a steep cliff above W Michigan.

I have driven by this spot on W Michigan St. many times and noticed people on the sidewalk with camping equipment, but not the expensive long range hiking variety. More like the ‘carry your home on your back’ variety. What I never noticed is the little SHT sign at the intersection of Glen Pl Dr. You are within view of some housing and W Michigan is very busy but you are also under the cover of woods. Safety is an issue here. My hope was that anyone there would not want to create a reason for anyone to bother them, so they would be motivated to not bother us. But there could be people there who weren’t that good at making decisions like that too.

When you get to W Michigan St. the trail is a city paved walkway for the next few miles. The pedestrian bridge over 35 is the trail. Use the handicap ramp going down and either stay on it and cross back under the highway then up to Bob Dylan Way and downtown Duluth, or stay near the railroad tracks and visit Bentleyville or Bayfront Park. Keep walking right along the lake and past the William A Irvin freight ship to get to the Duluth Lakewalk. Officially, the route is past Amazing Grace Café and along the Lake City Parking Lot. Follow the walk to the Duluth Rose Garden to get to the next section. 

Superior Hiking Trail into Duluth City Limits

To the Zoo     2.3 miles to Duluth     Up to Skyline Parkway

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Spirit Mt. campground or Duluth accommodations.
Steep climb near the zoo, followed by a smooth descent. 
Trail can be wet and slippery in places. Great views of West Duluth.

After the strenuous section from Magney-Snively to the Zoo, we decided to set our sights a little lower and do a 2.3 mile long section from the Zoo to the bottom of “the hill”. If you drive into Duluth, you will know what they are referring to as “the hill”. On the highway, you pass Spirit Mountain and get a spectacular vista of Lake Superior then descend that mountain and see the industry that built up along the port. If you keep driving into downtown, you’ll see how they put that highway underneath street level and integrated the city into the lake shore. But let’s get back to hiking.

We got off the highway at Central Ave just before that tight turn at the bottom of the hill. Find the trail-head at Greene St and N 63rd Ave W by snaking around in the residential neighborhood north of the businesses and staying close to the highway but on the Duluth city side of it. The trail goes

underneath the highway back to the Zoo, or go past the spooky looking house to go north up the hill then eventually east. Look for the cement barrier to find a section that leads back to the paved trail if you want to technically cover every inch of the SHT. Otherwise, use the paved trail to go under the highway and look for the trail veering north almost immediately. But don't back under the highway or you're just back to the trail-head again.

We drove back to the Zoo to start our day hike, see the previous section for the Waseca St trailhead. 

By starting at the Zoo, we climbed most of the altitude for this day in about 20 minutes then had a nice slope down from there to the highway. As you go, you’ll see more and more city and less and less nature. But they are still great views. The fauna is mostly aspen and mostly young growth, nothing like the well preserved section of Kingsbury creek. You are closer to population and likely to see more runners too, although on this beautiful day on a weekend, we saw no one until the very end.

Because of the bridge that is out at the north end of Kingsbury creek, be sure to stay to the east side. There are two bridges at the start of the trail. The first one, right off the trail-head, will say that the SHT is on the west side. Your choice to follow that or not. You’ll have one more that crosses back over the creek. The trail looks a bit like a forest road on the east side at times, but just use the creek to navigate and you can’t go wrong.

You will transition from the meandering St Louis River areas that have changed little in thousands of years to the busy port towns of Duluth and Superior over the course of this section.

There are very few spurs or intersecting trails here and unless you are fogged in, you’ll always know where you are even if you forgot your compass.

Last best section of Superior Hiking Trail in Duluth

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Parks and trails in the city. Views of the lake and the skylines.
This blog does not cover the paved Duluth Lakewalk.

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We had some friends who wanted to join us this time, so we skipped over the sections in the middle of Duluth and picked the eastern end of town for some of the best places to visit. If you’re going in order, this is a great way to finish Duluth. Also, you’ll be going up over 1,000 feet, and back down 300 feet, most of the down coming after the peak in Bagley Nature Center. You’ll get a great view of the University of MN Duluth from there. You’ll also pass near Chester Bowl ski hill (very small compared to the earlier Spirit Mt.). Also, Hartley Nature Center, so, quite the tour. We cheated and drove over to Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve to observe some birds, but you’ll hike through that if you are going to the next section.

We also cheated and started at the top, so we could go mostly downhill. Parking is ample at Hartley Nature Center. The trail goes south out of there, along the road you came in on, or go past the Nature Center building to the northwest and it will wind back to the south toward Lake Superior. This is one of the best sections on the entire SHT for Lake Superior views.

The trail is rocky and there are cliffs. At one of the lookout points we saw a memorial plaque, but I

couldn’t find any information on it. I know people have jumped into Chester creek when the water is high and that has not ended well for them.

A couple of turns to watch out for; Linking Chester Bowl and Bagley Nature Area, you’ll do some road walking along the north edge of the UMD  campus. There’s a bike trail into campus at Bagley and we just crossed the road and went into that, then realized we were wrong. From Chester Bowl going north, it’s W Kent Rd then north on N 19^th Ave, but the signage got us through that just fine. There are 2 inch stickers on the backs of existing road signs.

Trails are on both sides of Chester Creek and plenty of bridges so don’t worry if you get on the side that is not officially designated as SHT. There is another road hike between the parking lot for the Rose Garden and Lower Chester Creek at E 4^th St. That one is along N 14^th Ave for about 7 blocks. Grab something at Burrito Union or the nearby Co-op or Chester Creek café or many other options in the area.

The Duluth Lake Walk is designated SHT from Bayfront Festival Park to the Rose Garden and Leif Erikson Park, but this so easy to hike, I’m not going to cover it. Duluth is famous for Canal Park, the Lift Bridge, the old fashioned train stations and many other sites along this section, and I could never do them justice on this blog.

Superior Hiking Trail Zoo to Magney (South bound)

Back to Magney then Ely's Peak    About 5 miles     On to Duluth

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Camping at Spirit Mt. I haven't checked it out. Motels in Duluth.
Nice wide trails.

Another perfect Duluth day for taking on a

nother section of the Superior Hiking Trail. We saw two leaves with color on the ground, so let’s call it early Fall. This was a challenging 4.6 miles. That distance is according to the markers and online maps, but the Fitbit registered 7.9. We went to Menards and the Co-op, but we didn’t walk 3 miles while there. It could have been that the altitude changes aren’t registered on those maps. They were quite extensive. 

This thru hiker has more pictures, but a lot less detail about the hike sections than I do. 

But this was one of the most feature rich hikes I’ve ever done.  There is too much to list and too many for pictures. There were plenty of streams and interesting bridges. There were a few ditch crossings, so be water aware in the Spring or whenever floods might occur. Also, rock formations, a variety of trees, thimble berries, building foundations, cascading falls coming down streams and more. It was a photographer’s paradise. Missing, as is often on the SHT, were vistas. The nearby highway sounds and occasional dirt road did not detract from all of this. The proximity to civilization means the trail is well maintained, and apparently the people who go there care about it because I did not see garbage. 

There is even camping on Spirit Mt. We did not check it out.

We started by the Zoo. Take Grand Ave to Waseca St. and go to the end of it. Pay close attention to the signs and tree markers because you will be crossing every type of trail there is over and over. We probably added a half mile from all the times we circled back. The worst one was when we took a short gravel road around a ski lift. I saw a bridge and thought that was the trail. The bike tire marks on it gave us a clue it

was not the foot trail. Although you cross other trails, you never share the foot path with other means of travel. We saw a few runners, but this is pretty challenging so I suspect few come here. 

For Magney-Snively parking see the previous section.

At about the middle, you pass through a large open area at the bottom of one of the two ski lifts on this route. There is a chalet restaurant and bar. It’s an option of parking and keeping your hike shorter. I don’t think they are open in the summer. If you are going from there toward Magney-Snively, there are steady uphills and plenty of level and the ravines for streams are small. Going from the chalet to the zoo, you go north for a mile, and it’s a workout. At the end of that mile, you go up 300 meters of steps built with 4x4s. We were going the other direction, but it still is hard on the knees. 

There is a spur trail that goes across the top/north side of Spirit Mt. downhill skiing and then down the west side. It passes through an area with a lot of cross country ski trails. There was a sign that said this was used by the ski teams for training, so I had the sense that it was very hilly. Either way you go, you are on a mountain, you can't avoid it.

If all of this is sounding like too much, the Kingsbury Woods area, off the Waseca St trailhead is something you should do anyway. 

The trail is wider and less rocky there and there’s plenty to see. If it doesn’t give you some inspiration for more hiking, then you are a lost cause. 

The next stretch ends by passing under the interstate and we’ll go from wilderness that is near roads to hiking within a city proper.

This picture looks a little funny because I was standing above her a bit. This bridge is at the north end of the Kingsbury Creek section, and it's very much "out". You have to go down closer to the trailhead at Waseca St. to cross the creek. That's what the sign says anyway. The creek is full of boulders and the water was low in later summer.

Superior Hiking Trail Magney/Snively

Back to Fond du Lac     5 miles to Magney/Snively    Going to the Zoo

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Lodging is available along Grand Ave in West Duluth.

After the summit, pretty easygoing.

Scenery includes St. Louis River and surrounding trains and buildings.

Well, the “shelter in place” orders have given me plenty of time to do things like take an afternoon hike.  It was a beautiful June day in Duluth, with a good breeze to keep the bugs down, perfect for this section of the Superior Hiking Trail. We again did the two car system and although this is near a busy area with factories and trains, there are no roads crossing this 4 or 5 mile stretch. Well, there is one, but it is normally closed from November to May, and this year, it has stayed closed. I think they were planning to do some work on it, but that has been delayed.

So, getting there is the first challenge. You can see this wilderness area from the interstate or from the less travelled, but scenic, highway 23. If you look back to the last section, we ended at Becks Rd. Becks continues south from Midway Rd, which is an exit off the interstate. We’ll start there, but first, getting that car to the ending trailhead. It’s in the middle of Magney/Snively State Park. This park has hiking, XC skiing and one parking lot and not much else. To get to it, follow the signs to Spirit Mountain Ski Area and then keep going. You’ll pass some really nice houses, then the road gets kind of rough, then there is a really cool bridge, then you’re there.

Alright, back to Beck’s road. For a half mile or so, you get a paved path. This is to get you over the train tracks safely. Watch for signs and start heading uphill. Get used to the rock climbing. It smoothes out and there is a path to the left. If you want to see an old railroad tunnel, take it, then a right when it forks. It’s a 5 minute diversion that’s worth it. Back on the main trail, more rock climbing. There were signs this year, but don’t count on them. There are many spur trails if you want to go up Ely’s peak. If you don’t like one of them, turn around and there will be another. Otherwise, watch for the blue markers on trees and on the rocks to stay on the main trail.

When you pass all of those spur trails up the peak, the vista will open up. To the south, St. Louis River, factories, forest, bridges, Lake Superior off in the distance. To the north; a ridge that is about as high as Ely’s peak. There is a way to do this as a loop, so you’ll pass that on your left. After that, you’ll see a lot less people for a while.

Map on the trail

The forest gets fairly dense, but not brushy. It’s a good single lane trail. There are several scenic overlooks but the signs can be small. There are only a few times that the trail opens up for a view. This is pretty typical of the Superior Hiking Trail. The forest is maple, ash, aspen, occasional birch, a wide variety flowers and berries. The best is when you are on the elevated parts and you go out to a vista and realize you up where the birds are soaring.

When you’re in to Magney/Snively there will be even more crossing trails, some for cross country skiing, some for horses. We took a couple wrong turns. So even though you are close to civilization, keep your navigation skills sharp. You could easily end up down a ravine where no one goes. As you near the trailhead, it will begin to look like a Disney theme park. The trail is wide and clean, the signs are nice, the hills have steps built in and the bridges are decent. The forest canopy gets a lot higher and fewer trees are growing underneath. It’s kind of magical.

You can’t see the parking lot from the trail, but that sign is solid and should be maintained as long as we have some form of government that is still functioning.

Magney/Snively trailhead w/sign: "There is no such thing as the poop fairy. Pick up after your dog."

Superior Hiking Trail Ely's Peak

Skip Section 2, back to start   6.5 miles to Ely's Peak, plus the Peak     On to Magney/Snively

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https://superiorhiking.org/trail-section/mnwi-border-to-duluth/#section_4

This map is available online and in paper format at visitor centers and other locations. 

PDF version

No camping for a while but you're getting near Duluth.

Smooth trails, up and down hills, ending with a midwestern mountain climb.

This is a great little section that is in between two well-travelled sections but feels pretty much in the middle of nowhere. The signage is good and the bridges are maintained. In August, the streams can be nearly dry but water will be trickling through. Most of these are just ditches that can be stepped over but the bridges are abundant because in the spring, they can be torrential. Check the weather and be aware of the conditions of the ground. If it is saturated, flooding can pop up quickly and be very dangerous. We crossed one bridge that had the remnants of hand rails that had been torn off and
another that was twisted. 

In the town of Fond du Lac, find 131st Av W off of Highway 23. Go a few blocks to the trailhead. Follow the creek to connect to the trail. This picture is from the Duluth Outdoor Recreation Map. An awesome resource for hiking in Duluth. They should have them at the visitor's center at the top of the hill. 

If you are coming from the Grand Portage trail, just stay on it and make a left at the sign. If you are in Fond du Lac, use one of the spurs and hook up to the SHT. We went east, toward Ely’s Peak. You’ll get switchbacks, vistas, creek beds and all sorts of flora and fauna. We had a nice breeze so even the bugs weren’t bad. As you near Ely’s Peak, you start to hear some road noise, then you pop out of the woods and you’re on the very busy and high speed Beck’s Road.

You should see a sign for the Superior Hiking trailhead off of that road for people driving and looking for parking, but when hiking, just cross straight over and skirt around that lot using the paved Munger Trail part of the way. Plenty of signs here and probably plenty of people. That will get you over the train tracks then start looking for the trail again, to your left. You can’t miss Ely’s Peak from below. Once you start ascending though you lose that reference. You still have the St. Louis River and dots of civilization to the South, so pretty tough to get lost.

This is a pretty direct ascent but the rocks make good steps and it levels off once or twice. Once you get near the top, there are many spur trails to the peak, too many to try to describe. When you get to a place where there is a deep valley to your left/North and another peak, then you’ve passed Ely’s and you’re on your way to Brandon’s Peak and Spirit Mountain.

If you are looking for the other Ely’s Peak parking lot, north along Beck’s Road, that can also be a bit confusing from the trail. Google maps had trails that weren’t there and I’ve read other descriptions of this area that I have found difficult to follow. After the first steep section up from the Munger, there is a spur off to the left. This links up to the DWP trail right at the entrance to a tunnel. If you don’t see that after a few minutes, turn around and try a different spur.

On some maps, you’ll see the DWP Trail. This is a wide flat dirt trail. To the North, it goes through some businesses and all the way to the Interstate. In the other direction, it parallels the Munger Trail, but not close enough so you can see one from the other. Part of it is a tunnel, under the peak, so on a map you will see the dotted line, but you are walking above it. Google currently puts their pin for the tunnel on top of the rock, which seems kind of useless to me. Getting to the tunnel is pretty easy from the Ely’s Peak parking lot, just north of the railroad tracks that go under Beck’s Road. It has no markings, but you can’t miss it. Take the one path leading toward the peak, take a right when you hit the DWP trail and you’ll get to the tunnel. From there, take a very steep ascent trail to the peak, or a trail going down and to the right that links up to the SHT. If you are coming from the peak looking for the parking lot, do the reverse of the above find the DWP, the path to parking is good size, so just avoid the smaller options. If you get to a business, you went too far.

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.

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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

String Asymmetry

I’ve had one blog about TV, and that was Star Trek. The Big Bang Theory is a show about some sci-fi nerds who also happen to know a lot about actual science. But really, it’s a show about relationships and they tied it all together brilliantly in the season 11 finale with Sheldon and Amy’s wedding.

It takes a few scenes for it to be laid out. It starts with, well, it starts with years of developing the characters, but if you don’t know them, I think it still works. It starts with Sheldon attempting to tie his bow tie perfectly. His fiancé, Amy asks what he’s doing. She says maybe it’s not supposed to be perfect. Maybe it’s supposed to be a little uneven. No one can ever tell Sheldon he’s not doing something right, but he seems to relent a little this time.

Later he is getting dressed for the wedding with his best man and they have their moment, then Sheldon’s mother comes in and asks for privacy. They talk about his late father and the subject of the uneven tie comes up again. His mother waxes philosophic about how sometimes it’s the imperfect things that happen that cause a moment to be perfect. Sheldon notes that Amy said something similar, then gets that look on his face he sometimes does, the far off look towards a corner of the room that is focused somewhere further off into a distant galaxy. He says, “I gotta go.” His mother is left standing there alone, a perfect demonstration of something imperfect happening, and she says out loud to no one, “like that.”

Where he goes is to his bride’s dressing room. She is standing alone in her gown looking at a mirror. His first reaction is to be stunned by her beauty. This is unusual for Sheldon. Normally if he has something important on his mind, other people don’t matter. He does do what he normally does when he rambles and stumbles and goes on tangents as he explains why he’s there. Amy is one of the few people who can pull him back into focus and when she does he explains that the bow tie discussion has led him to a breakthrough in his ideas on String Theory. Instead of super-symmetry, it could be super-A-symmetry. The two begin writing out equations on the mirror, using lipstick. In an abnormal moment for Sheldon, he does not mention that he wants credit for this discovery. He says they will publish it together.

The show has science advisers who helped them come up with the super-asymmetry idea. They checked, and as mentioned in the show, no one has published something like this yet. The brilliance of the moment to me is that string theory is an attempt to find equations that unify all of our knowledge of the universe, to find symmetry in everything. Sheldon has believed he could do this since he was a little boy. He makes rules for everything, including relationships, and stresses the importance of sticking to them. The show has traced a long slow realization on his part that people don’t always function as a set of rules. To demonstrate that he is really finally getting this he is taking these lessons for life from his wife and his mother and applying them to his lifelong goal of understanding how the universe works through mathematical formulas. He is seeing the language of love in the language of the universe.

The equations of course are a metaphor. They are not suggesting that you can write a formula for the meaning of life. The science advisers make sure that the math that appears on the show is accurate in some sense, but accuracy is not the point. They know people will freeze the frames and scrutinize them. Sometimes they put math jokes on the white boards. I wouldn’t know. The metaphor is the search for meaning. Sheldon’s very Christian mother thinks she knows the answers and that it’s cute that her son is so smart. She also sees all the problems that it has caused for him. Sheldon sees nothing but problems coming out of his caricatured Texan family. The others on the show have their own approaches and philosophies that all get their time and place. What we saw at the wedding was that all of them are reaching for the same thing, and together, sometimes finding it.

You're own evil demon

I came across this rather interesting use of a very old thought experiment. Descartes was trying to figure out if he existed independently, or if something was controlling him, like an evil demon. He eventually concluded his ability to think proved his independence. This still left him with a somewhat circular argument but some people start this thought experiment, and can't passed the evil demon. I see people doing to themselves or trying to do to others. They try to make people into their own “Cartesian demons”.

You can do it to yourself by thinking you are a failure, then believing it. You can let others do it by allowing them to tell you that you are in some way flawed. You can let them convince you that they are smarter, or that all humans are incapable of understanding some fundamental truth or that none of us know the real way things work. Of course they have the answer, and if you believe them, you give yourself up to them to get it. Or, you just give up to the idea. Either way you’ve let an imaginary “demon” take control.

The extreme case is a cult, but less extreme cases can be seen every day with fake headlines or fake science and claims that reality is fake. Well established facts become a conspiracy of the elite. Extensive investigations into voter fraud are tossed aside because one paper ballot was counted twice. Always left unmentioned is that the problem was caught and corrected, otherwise, how would we know it ever happened?

People believe we can’t make a difference and that we are being controlled by invisible forces. They fear poison in the water, in our food and even in our medicines. We accept the status quo that there will always be poor despite centuries of solving social problems. There is always some disaster or someone being slighted to prove the point.

The good news, no special powers are required to escape this demon. Just think for yourself. If it’s a claim about science, then find all the research you can and learn how a scientific consensus if formed. If it’s government, get involved. The US just had two polar opposites in the presidency. I’m guessing no one is controlling this. If your evil demon says we can’t know everything and we’re just animals, then how do you know that? You would need to know everything to know that we can’t know it. There is nothing to do but learn more. You don’t know what your limits are.

Grain of Sand

You are as insignificant as a grain of sand. It takes so many grains of sand to make a desert, each grain is insignificant. Even if that grain is taken up by an oyster and makes a pearl, then the pearl is insignificant. It's merely a reaction to an irritation.  It doesn't matter to the desert. It doesn't matter to the ocean. It doesn't matter that the ocean gives life or that it is lined with beautiful coral reefs. Those reefs are just there to be eaten by the fish and excreted as sand to be washed up on a beach and blown back into the desert. 

All of that is part of something so large that it is beyond comprehension, rendering each part insignificant. It is a vast, incomprehensible collection of insignificant things, rendering the whole just as insignificant. It could be nothing else. There is nothing against which we can judge significance. 

Your statements, your thoughts about the "is" that it is, are meaningless to all the interactions of all the galaxies and all the waves on the all the shores. Your thoughts are just that, yours. You think them. You write them down.
You speak them. You live with them.

Season After Pentecost

Link to the the texts for this week

Explanation of this blog series

Proper 6 – June 12, 2016

Luke

Once when I was working with Kids Against Hunger, someone started a prayer with, “Thank you Jesus for breaking my heart. Thank you for showing me the brokenness in the world. By showing me that brokenness, I know what it is you want me to do.” That’s not how I would say it, but that’s what this gospel is about.

This is the message of the early gospels. Long before Jesus is on the cross. In the 1^st century, the Romans were nailing a lot of people to crosses all over. It’s how they kept the peace and kept commerce moving. As you transported your goods on Roman roads, you saw people strung up and you knew exactly how those roads were made safe.

In this gospel, Jesus is invited for dinner with the people he is speaking out against, the Pharisee’s. They are Jews, but Jesus thinks they are too rigid and that they are not doing what good Jews should be doing. The Pharisees just see sinners and want to punish people for breaking rules. They don’t see people who need help. Jesus, somehow, it’s not clear, sees that the sinner in this story has faith. It’s also not clear exactly what she has faith in, but let’s assume it’s the standard, faith in Jesus. And then we have a happy ending of Jesus gaining more followers.

This is a common theme for Jesus, or whomever wrote the early gospels. He speaks to the people in the servant class. These are people who had minimal rights to worship in the way their ancestors did and weren’t invited to dinners with the priests. They wouldn’t have liked their Roman masters and they weren’t especially happy with their puppet ruler King Herod or his priestly class.

Jesus looked at all this and realized the world was broken, but instead of fighting the powers of the day, he said the first thing to do is stop being angry at the world. Love your neighbor. Recognize them for their desire to remain part of the community, not their specific knowledge of arbitrary rules.

Realize that most of those people, privileged or not, are victims of the same screwed up education about what’s right and wrong that all of us are getting. He said, we’re all being told, slavery is okay and you’re a slave. The masters are being told, slavery is okay, and you’re a master. Even if they were not a slave owner, they were being told to support that system, work hard, and maybe one day, they would get to have a slave!

That’s how a system like that is kept in place. The important thing to note is, it’s the same narrative for both classes. Jesus spoke against the narrative. He said, look below you at the lepers that you won’t touch, touch them. Bring them into the community. If you don’t, what is this community for? What does it represent? If we aren’t washing the feet of the whores, who are we to say we are better than them? If we aren’t forgiving their sins, why should we expect our sins to be forgiven? There are limits to this of course. Intolerance of intolerance will be covered elsewhere. But, if you look to the people in power and seek to gain what they have, you are perpetuating the same narrative that enslaves you.

None of this precludes having goals. If you want to be Queen or King or CEO or head cheerleader or whatever you think will make a difference in the world, that’s great, find people to support you. But you can’t be all of those things, no one can be everything. We would admire the person with 4 PhD’s, but think of the hundreds of other degrees they don’t have, or the street knowledge they probably don’t have. There are rare people like Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who is successful due in part to his vast knowledge of the cosmos, and of movies and TV. He often relates an amazing fact about the stars to a super power of some cartoon character.

The goal is not watch more TV if you are PhD, or to go get a PhD if you like watching movies. The lesson is, on your quest to rule the world make some friends along the way, don’t forsake those friendships for the goal. The goal will evolve and might never be reached, but human contact is always available. When you get passed over for the Nobel Prize, again, it will be nice to have someone you can talk to. If you’re trying to decide to clear a forest so you can build the mega-hospital for cancer research, or to leave it there for the spotted owl, it would be nice to go for a walk in that forest with someone who gets you. Jesus didn’t build his following by successfully arguing theological points with the High Priests. He built it by showing compassion to the people in the street.

Galatians

This NT reading gives some context for fitting the gospel story into the larger Biblical story of the meaning of the messiah and how Jesus brought a new Covenant. It is a good passage if you are playing “theological football” and want to make an argument for “works”. It is also a passage that can be used to argue for any action because you are “justified in Christ”. Justification for actions requires reasons. Having good reasons comes from understanding the world as best we can.

If religion is a quest to determine the forces in the universe and to align yourself with them, and you have reasons for believing Jesus is a way to connect to the forces, then this passage gives you some useful information. If, on the other hand, you don’t have reasons for accepting Jesus as your path to a better life here and in the hereafter, this passage doesn’t offer much. We are left with the quest to understand the universe and figure out where we fit in.

OT – Kings 21

This is a story of retribution by God to a King who did not respect God’s claim on land. It has no real value in the modern world.

Definitions

For convenience, when I say “Jesus”, I mean “the early gospel writers whose names we don’t really know and we don’t how well the early messages were transcribed or if they have survived multiple translations and multiple copies.”

When I say “gospels” or “gospel writers”, I’m not talking about 4 people we know by first name. We don’t actually know who those people were. We have some idea of when each gospel written and the earliest one was 30 to 50 years after the events it claimed happened. These should be in the background of any sermon. You can choose to teach them from the pulpit or elsewhere, but the facts are not in dispute, at least not by most and not by much.

The oldest actual copies of the gospel are from around 250 AD. They are completely useless for confirming the truth of miraculous events. They give us some insight into lives of ordinary people and their thoughts from a long time ago. This makes them valuable as historical source documents. But source documents have to be evaluated in the context of everything else you know about that time and place.  

We are all related

Christmas is a time when generations come together. They get packed into one room and inevitably one of the older ones, perhaps the oldest one, has some story to tell or something they want to show one of the younger ones. This has all the potential for being a completely useless interaction, something that is suffered through, not just by the two who are actually participating in it but even those around them, those who have to hear it. There is a way to make this worthwhile, and, yes, I’m writing a story about how to save Christmas.

This year, my wife made ornaments. She learned how to do it with friends. It involved a Styrofoam ball and fabric and pins and it’s very intricate and she is very precise and she loves doing it and she loves doing it well. She sent them off to my aunts and uncles and to hers’ and more importantly to the children and grandchildren of some of those relations. Hopefully they see the significance of them, but odds are they won’t.  And hopefully we get that chance one day to visit them during the holidays and that ornament will be out and we’ll talk about it, rather than the weather or whatever horrible news is going on.

And somewhere in there, some tiny bit of wisdom will be shared. It will sound trite or canned at the time, but many Christmases later, that young person will be the old one, and they’ll be worried about that younger generation and how they don’t look things up on the internet anymore, or that they don’t know what it took to end poverty and how they don’t appreciate it and they’ll think “kids today…”, and they’ll try to figure out a story to tell and they won’t have one that is any better than the one about making Christmas ornaments.

It might be a different story about something else, about making soup and how all the ingredients mix to make it just right or something. It doesn’t matter because you can’t explain being old. You can’t explain what it means to earn your gray hair or your wrinkled skin. What matters is that those feelings, those intentions, were put into the project, the recipe or the story. You don’t need to know the whole story to see when that kind of care has gone into making something.

You’re going to get that gray hair and wrinkled skin either way, so you might as well earn it, but you’re not going to know what goes into getting them until you have them. Sorry, young people, your role in this is not that exciting. You get to do all those exciting things that young people do together, those things that would end up with a broken hip for us. Listening to grandma on Christmas is probably not on the top of your list. So, here’s the secret, that grandma had a whole bunch of Christmases before you were even born.

So, when she’s showing you something that doesn’t seem that interesting and telling that lame story, she’s looking at you and she doesn’t just see your nose and your hair. She sees your mother’s face and hears your uncle’s voice coming from you and she remembers a smell from some far off kitchen and hears an owl in the woods and she sees a long horizon across a windswept plain. It’s all related. We are all related. The only way to discover that is to live long enough and be conscious enough and to notice it while it’s happening. You can watch a movie, or sit there with your headphones on listening to music, but those are storytellers too and they are trying to get out the same kind of messages. For me, there is no better way to hear a story than from someone close to you.

Not so alone

Another thing that kept me away from blogging last month was that I spent half of it in Alaska. I wrote a two page epic hiking adventure in the journal at a yurt one night, visited a couple Russian churches, and took a few notes on my visit to a cabin in the wilderness that is on the National Registry of Historic Places. The cabin was built by Richard Proenneke and has been made semi-famous by a half-hour documentary featuring him.

He is known for his longevity, he spent 30 years in that cabin. He was also known for his craftsmanship, the handle mechanism on the door is ingenious. He is a little lesser known for his environmentalism.

In 1967 he was retired from the Navy and decided that building a cabin in Alaska would be a challenge he’d like to try. Challenging himself was a way of life. He had a friend who had a cabin on Upper Twin Lake, just north of Port Alsworth, so he spent that summer walking the area, finally settling on a spot right next to his friend.

There were no hardware stores in the area so whatever he needed, he had to bring or build. Space was saved by bringing only the metal parts of drills or chisels and fashioning the handles once he was there. This also led to one of my favorite lines from the documentary, “today I needed a spoon, so I made a spoon.”

His skills were excellent, and his hiking pace was legendary, but many people have accomplished such things in Alaska and elsewhere. Mr. Proenneke felt the lifestyle of accomplishing things on your own, not wasting anything and spending time reflecting on the wilderness, was worth sharing, so he also filmed himself as he built and stocked the cabin. Originally, he probably had no more in mind that simply making some instructional manuals so others could share the experience.

As he returned to that isolated wilderness year after year, he noted changes in people who came to the area. He saw people no longer caring about the values he cherished. Something you’ll see in his film or if you visit his cabin is a lot of gas cans. He fashioned many useful storage and carrying items by recycling old gas cans. But where did they come from? He didn’t have a chainsaw or gas stove. They came from the hunters. They would come out, shoot their moose and sometimes leave everything behind except the antlers.

He wrote not only about how to live in the woods but of the experience. Others, Sam Keith in particular, put those journals and film into production and he gained a little fame. This was not his goal, since of the gifts he said, “My cabin and cache have been full to overflowing for quite some time and each new load makes me wonder where I will stow it all. ... I do appreciate everything but wish they would consider the poor miserable brush rat more fortunate than they and spend their money to beat death and taxes.”

When you see him talking about himself, it’s easy to assume a level of conceit, but if wasn’t for his friends, we probably would have never heard of him. One of the park rangers at the cabin said he corresponded with Aldo Leopold and Willard Munger, but I haven’t been able to confirm that. She said Dick did not save his letters, something that comes from living a sparse lifestyle. So whatever he did, that’s lost to history.

Summing up my feelings about this pilgrimage has been more of a challenge than I expected. The man remains a bit of a mystery, and as with any public figure, he’s what each of us want him to be. What struck me most on this trip was that he did not harbor much anger. In any of the short descriptions of him, no one ever called him “crusty” or a curmudgeon. Instead they went out of their way to note how friendly he was despite his isolation. Even his hunting was kept to a minimum, apparently out of a kinship with the animals who shared his valley.

This is not to say that he withheld his opinion. Throughout his discussions about carving handles or constructing a food cache he scatters tidbits of the value of making something useful, and being able to make something with quality and craftsmanship. He ends his first book with a longer discussion on those philosophies and on the positive affects it would have on all of us if more people adopted them.

To try to give some sense of the man, here’s part of a note that was left on his table,

“You didn’t find a padlock on my door (maybe I should put one on) for I feel that a cabin in the wilderness should be open to those who need shelter. My charge for the use of it is reasonable, I think, although some no doubt will be unable to afford what I ask, and that is – take care of it as if you had carved it out with hand tools as I did. If when you leave your conscience is clear, then you have paid the full amount.

This is beautiful country. It is even more beautiful when the animals are left alive.

Thank you for your cooperation.”

R.L Proenneke

Somehow he managed to be “alone” yet engaged. While alone he was listening to the world. He saw the rise of polluters from the hunters to corporations. He also saw that just as no single person can solve our environmental problems, no single person caused them. Instead of loudly broadcasting anger over the changes in the world he did not care for, he quietly showed us how to live not just in nature, but with each other.

Read more about the man.