Day in the Life of an Idiot

Even though I’ve lived in Minnesota for twenty-odd years now, I’ve never been “up north” past the Iron Range. Well, I guess I went somewhere close to the BWCA once before with a friend from high school, because I have a very strong memory of flocks of seagulls in Grand Marais. But, like a lot of high school, that memory is utterly wiped from my mind. (Side note: if I knew you in high school, even if we were BFFs, I wouldn’t recognize you now if my life depended on it. Apparently, to make room for other things deemed more important like episodes of “Firefly,” my brain dumped high school in its entirety. Thank goodness I kept a daily diary. Of course, looking back on it is like trying to read code. Who? What? Wait, I dated _boys!?_)

Eh-hem, back to the story at hand.

As most of you already know, I will not be going to WisCON this year. Instead, we came here. Here is the Bearskin Lodge off the Gunflint Trail as you head into the BWCA. Not in the BWCA, but close. We could canoe there if we had to, but we don’t have to. You see, Shawn is not fond of the kind of camping that involves tents or bugs or sleeping bags or pooping in the woods. I will admit that while I enjoy the occasional waking-up-with-frost-on-your-hair kind of trips, there is something to be said for a hot shower and a flush toilet.

Because I don’t remember my last trip this far north, we decided to take it easy and sort of spend the day meandering toward the lodge. Shawn picked up a book called 61 GEMS ON HIGHWAY 61 by Kathryn & William Mayo at the History Center, and read to me on the long drive up 35. From it, we picked a couple of destinations. The first was Two Harbor’s Breakwall. It’s just what it purports to be – a big, old wall into the harbor that protects the docks from the waves of Lake Superior. You can walk out to the point, where there is a small, electric lighthouse. Mason was a little nervous because there’s only a railing on one side, and the lake looks like the ocean. You can only see blue-black water to the horizon line, and the day we were there it was overcast and windy. It was easy to pretend we were old sea hands coming to shore from one of the big ocean-going vessels we saw unloading at the huge docks.

The second place we stopped at was a favorite and has been earmarked for a second visit on the return home, Flood Bay. Flood Bay is supposed to be good agate hunting, but we didn’t find any -- at least not that we could easily identify. I did find the lake version of sea glass, which THE ROCK PICKER’S GUIDE TO LAKE SUPERIOR’S NORTH SHORE (by Mark Sparky Stensaas) calls fairy tears. I couldn’t really tell you what was so awesome about Flood Bay, but we spent a good hour there hanging out and combing the beach. Mason splashed about in the ice cold water of Lake Superior and chased the waves back and forth. I found a magical rock that had a hole all the way through, worn away naturally by time and water.

We got to the lodge at 5:00 pm, just in time to pack, check out the place, and make hot dogs for dinner. Staying here is less expensive per night than in the Governor’s Suite at the Concord, and we have our own private dock, a full kitchen, two bedrooms, and a fireplace (not to mention that indoor plumbing!) Because we came up at the end of the cheap season, we also got a free canoe rental with the lodge.

Bearskin Lake is huge. The lodge is at one corner of it, but Mason and I kayaked today for a good hour and didn’t even make very far on the map. What’s cool is that unlike most of the lakes we frequent, you get out for a bit and suddenly there’s no sign of human habitation. AT ALL. In fact, on our big trip today (Sunday), I accidentally freaked Mason out by noting how easy it would be to get lost and end up in Canada (you couldn’t really, not without an intentional portage or two, I believe.) At any rate, I suspect the reason he actually got worried is because landmarks are hard to come by up here. It’s just woods and more woods.

Anyway, on the drive in that first night, we saw a sign that said “Moose View Trail.” We noted that we should come back in the morning and look for moose. So, on Saturday morning, after waking up at dawn --(damn birds! I thought they were an alarm going off! Seriously!)-- and checking out the frost on the dock, we headed out. I know we’re city slickers, but we didn’t actually expect to see moose on Moose View Trail. But we thought it would be a fun short hike out to a lake. The Bearskin Lodge brochure said it also featured a “mysterious car.”

The mysterious car was cool, actually. It looks like it’s from the thirties or maybe forties, and it’s been there so long trees have grown up out of the trunk and what not. The mysterious part is that is has a rather large boulder on top of it. We thought long and hard about this, Mason postulated that perhaps the car was dumped from an airplane and a second airplane dropped the boulder. I thought it might have gone way off road, though I couldn’t come up with an even half-way plausible explanation for the boulder (space aliens?) Shawn thought the whole thing was a Rune Stone-esque prank and that a bunch of frat boys/girls carried in car parts and staged them and then dropped a big boulder on the car just to confuse and mystify people.

At the lake there was an observation platform and several moose/deer trails that lead to a swampy (or, as our lodge guy called it “moosey”) lake. Mason and I checked out the lake front, while Shawn settled in at the observation deck with her purse book (meaning, of course, the book she always has with her, in her purse.) Mason, as I have mentioned on this blog before, is easily amused in the woods. He will, as he did on Saturday, spend HOURS collecting rocks to sploosh into the lake. At one point we tossed in a bit of birch branch and used it as target practice. We left quite happy, though moose-less, sometime just before lunch. Shawn teased us though that if any moose had wanted to come along we scared them with all of our loud shouting and carrying on. We started laughing about how all the moose must be stampeding toward our cabin, freaked out by all the crazy noise those city folks made at Moose View Trail.

We were still laughing about this in the car on the drive back to the lodge when a moose came up out of the ditch. Luckily, I was not driving anywhere near speed limit; (I’m that driver you get stuck behind on all the scenic roads going ten miles under.) And, I spotted it’s massiveness in time. We stopped. It got half way into the road and stopped. We stared. S/he squinted. (Moose have notoriously bad eye-sight.) Shawn spent the entire time trying to find her camera, I kept talking nervously about how sometimes moose mistake cars for mates, and eventually the moose got bored with us and hoofed off into the underbrush. (Before, of course, Shawn could get its picture.)

We figured that was our moose view at Moose View Trail, though we decided it was fun enough just throwing rocks that we’d go back again today (Sunday). Shawn suggested that maybe if we were a bit more quiet we might actually spot moose (ho, ho.)

Except, we did. Two of them.

We came back to Moose View Trail a bit earlier today. Mason and I brought three gallon baggies full of rocks we collected around the lodge. Shawn had her book. We were ready to settle in for another morning of rock tossing and hiking. We got to the main spot, past the mysterious car again, and were half way through our second bag of rocks when I heard a splash. It was much bigger than the sound of the rocks Mason was tossing, so I looked up. Across the small lake, I saw two moose going into the water for a swim.

As the guy at the lodge said, “Moose on Moose View Trail. No way.”