The "Devil Track"
What a great name for a river! It's up on the north shore of Lake Superior, starting in the swampy headwaters of Minnesota's northeasternmost county,
flowing south and east until it reaches a choke point in the coastal hills near Sawtooth Bluff and backs up as Devil Track Lake. The next four miles downstream from
the lake, the river cuts a deep gorge through the Proterozoan rock and finally lets out into Lake Superior a few miles east of Grand Marais. In spring melt it
becomes a completely wild river, full of twists, bends, cascades, occasional waterfalls, and very few places to climb out of the gorge that's often filled wall to wall.
By late summer, however, the flow diminishes enough to expose much of the canyon floor, and the river becomes an attractive target for a little bit of "canyoneering".
A few days ago, I just so happened to be in Grand Marais, and took that opportunity on a cloudless Sunday morning.
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Anemone
I've been watching the condition at Wolsfeld Woods over the past couple of weeks - unfortunately, it looks like the dry sunny weather is resulting in a short
season for the spring wildflowers. The trees are starting to leaf out rapidly, but there's a few nice touches.
More pictures behind the link.
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A New Toy
So I'm now the happy owner of a new DSLR. Based on a combination of Internet research and some scuttlebutt from people "in the know", I
ended up getting a Canon Rebel T2i (also branded as the 550D). It's a brand-new camera model, just released in the last few weeks, and
it has essentially the same guts as the 7D. In fact, it's so new that neither Apple nor Adobe has released a RAW compatibility update yet -
I found this out the hard way because I automatically set the mode to RAW when I got it, but wasn't able to import the pictures when I got
home. Thankfully, the Canon software that came with the camera will export a TIFF and thus tide me over until the vendors catch up.
So a couple days later, I went out to capture the early spring.
Sharp-lobed hepatica at Standing Cedars.
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Why I Like Grand Marais
Posted Fri, October 16, 2009 - 11:25 PM
photography, minnesota
One of my favorite destinations on the North Shore is the town of Grand Marais. As well as being the gateway to the Gunflint Trail, it's filled with
great shops, restaurants, and galleries, and hosts a very progressive community of painters, sculptors, and other artists.
And true to reputation, Grand Marais has also been good to me for photography.
Watching the sunset.
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Ice on Lake Superior
A fitting post, for the middle of summer.
Looks like the Arctic Ocean!
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Art Along the Greenway
The Minneapolis Midtown Greenway is a fairly new bike trail that runs right through the middle of the city on an old railroad grade.
As you head towards the river in the Seward neighborhood, where the trail abuts a series of industrial/commercial buildings, you'll see this off to your left:
So you keep going for while, and there's more:
Nope, not done yet!
There has to be at least a hundred feet of wall, that's decorated up as high as a person can reach, and higher in some places. Click through to
see closeups of some creatures, a medium-sized version of the panorama, or even a very large version (28,000 by 1100 px) if you dare.
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Pete Meets Bear
Posted Thu, June 25, 2009 - 6:40 PM
minnesota, wildlife
Don't you want to just hug him?
I've been a little quiet on the online front lately. Annie was in town from Saturday through Thursday before her big move to Hawai'i,
and we spent Sunday and Monday canoeing
down the St. Croix from Rush City, camping at one of the canoe sites on Sunday night. On the way down, we surprised a large animal on the west
side of the river, and based on the noises it made back as it fled into the woods, it was probably a black bear. So I guess it's appropriate to
follow up on my previous post and talk about my bear encounters!
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First Storm of the Season
This has been a dry spring and early summer, as we all know. But this evening around 9:30 PM a line of thunderstorms formed over southern
Dakota county and then trained for about an hour and a half. I saw the lightning to the south on the way back home and headed over to
the bluff at Linwood Park with the camera. It turned out to be a great view, and more and more people started to arrive and watch the show.
A lightning show
Click through for the rest of the photos.
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Up the River... Again
Ahhh... A trip "up the river" on the long weekend.
Wild River State Park,
that is. The Trillium Trail certainly lived up to its name; this is a hillside in back of the B lane.
Along the Trillium Trail
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Anishinaabe - Part IV. A Bad Deal
Placard at Sandy Lake.
Along Highway 169 on the west side of Big Sandy Lake in north central Minnesota, there's a small road leading off to
a rest area -
administered, oddly, by the Army Corps of Engineers because of the dam at the edge of the lake protecting a short channel to the
Mississippi River. A few years ago I put my kayak in the channel just below the dam and paddled fifteen miles into the
Mississippi and down to the
town of Palisade
- a trip I will post about at some point.
But the rest area itself, beyond the small
visitor center and omnipresent pavement, held a surprise - a moderately sized, conical grassy hill surmounted by a circular
monument erected by several local Ojibwe bands, together with a bilingual display describing its significance.
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