See what I did there?
Things have certainly been… going. The first day was a whirlwind of events. Constant trail changes, meeting new people, the bear. The next three days have been less of that, and much more mud and rain.
I’m starting to find my rhythm, for sure. I wake up when the sun comes up, then ignore it and roll back over for another hour. Get up around 8. Put ramen on the stove to boil for hot breakfast. The ramen doesn’t take long to cook, but it takes surprisingly long to cool off so I get it going while I do my other camp chores.
While my breakfast cools, I refill my water and take down my tent. I cover myself in bug lotion, to mixed results.
Once the camp is all put together, I shove it into my bag and then walk until I can’t feel my legs. Then, I pitch the tent, eat cold dinner (I’m usually too tired to mess with the burner by this point), and go to sleep. Repeat.
I’ve come to the realization that I will be able to physically complete this trail, barring any freak accidents. The mental battle will be the real deciding factor.
Day 2: The Downpour
Everything can essentially be boiled down to morale, like an old timey army. Any event can be sorted into one of two camps: an event that makes me happy to keep hiking, or an event that makes me want to quit.
Cool waterfall? Good for morale, I hike faster. Clothing still wet from the previous day? Bad for morale, I hike slower. Giant open sore on my leg from chafing? Bad for morale, but it does actually make me hike faster because I don’t have any bandages on me and I need to make it to Silver Bay to buy some. You get the point.
Day 2 was really pushing that limit of quitting, which is not a good spot to be in on the second day of the hike. It rained for the first half of day, from 10:30 in the morning to around 3 in the afternoon. As a reminder, I have no waterproofing in my kitchen at all. The only thing that saved me last time was that the rain eventually let up before it could soak everything in my backpack. This time, it did not. Bad for morale.
That’s not even the worst part. When it rains, my glasses fog up. This isn’t terrible on its own; my vision is okish so I just take them off and clip them to my jacket.
In the middle of a thunderstorm, getting pelted with rain, I realize they’ve fallen off their clip. At this point I’ve been hiking for two hours with them off, so they could be anywhere along trail. Terrible for morale. Horrendous, even.
As I walked back along the trail, thunder booming, rain pouring, I was already brainstorming how I would tell my parents. I think I prayed the Hail Mary fifteen times.
What’s more, the thought crossed my mind that I might not be cut out for this. I mean, losing literally the second most expensive item I own (after the phone, I guess) on the second day? That definitely raises some doubts about my ability.
Luckily, I found them not even twenty minutes later. They had bounced off some of the ferns lining the path and were sitting dead center of the trail.
I cannot stress enough how much of a miracle this is. The trail was overgrown and flooded. Had they bounced anywhere else they would be buried under feet of foliage or submerged. I think the exact quote I said when I found them was “Holy sh*t no way.”
Overall good for morale, but it was still raining and I had just wasted almost half an hour backtracking. I was pretty sick and a little rattled at this point, so I decided I’d pitch my tent at the next camp and wait out the storm.
I did just that, but like my other gear my tent was soaked through. The bottom liner is waterproof, which is great for keeping water out but unfortunately also works to keep it in. I tried to get as dry as possible, putting down my sleeping pad (also pretty wet) and stripping off all my damp clothing.
The end result was me eating tortillas and cheese sticks (my new favorite food combo) in. my underwear as the rain kept going. Everything was damp at the minimum, and most of my gear was outright wet. Sitting in my tiny tent in the rain, my morale was broken.
I got homesick like I never have before in my life, looking at old photos of me and my family, missing the good times with them. They’re all fine present tense btw, that sentence sounded really morbid like something happened, but they’re dry and I miss them so I wanted nothing more than to be with them.
I seriously considered if I’d be able to make it to the northern terminus, or if I should just call quits at Twin Harbor (the nearest town). Morale at an all time low.
Luckily, the rain broke around mid afternoon. That left me with enough time to saddle back up and keep moving.
This is where things start to tie back to the title. Trail conditions were TERRIBLE. Even when I wasn’t getting wet from above, the flooded trail meant I was getting wet from below. There were numerous sections where I had to walk through shin deep water. Calling it the Superior “Hiking Trail” is generous, I’d say it was closer to the Superior “Military Amphibious Assault Training Course”. Lots of mud.
Let’s do a speed run of all my terrible trail condition photos:
At a certain point, though, you can only get so wet. I knew my sleeping bag would be soaked when I slept, and had made peace with that (admittedly miserable) fact. Literally nothing on my was dry, so I figured I was at rock bottom and nothing could get worse.
Wrong. Section B, as previously mentioned, is all snowmobile trails through bogs. It is INCREDIBLY lowland, which means you get a lot of bugs. Rain makes the bugs 10 times worse.
In the hour it took me to set up camp that night, I got bit at least times by mosquitos. They harassed me all day, never letting me slow down. The only time I wasn’t getting bit or downpours on was when I was in my tent, at which point I immediately passed out from exhaustion.
So yeah, not a great day to be a hiker or even a human being in the woods in general. I’m starting to understand why American colonists cut down so many old growth forests. If I had to live outside all the time before the invention of bug spray or mosquito nets, I’d be inclined to slash and burn everything too.
It’s also worth noting that, by the point I went to sleep, I hand not interacted with another human since the previous afternoon. Not enough to make me go crazy (yet) but I was getting bored.
At least I found mushrooms.
Day 3: Walking WAY Too Far
Day 3 was a lot more of the same. I woke up, boiled myself some ramen, did a shot of my electrolyte caffeine mix, and packed up my tent.
On a side note, the electrolyte caffeine mix (Meijer branded, ofc) has become one of my favorite parts of the day. It’s a concentrate that your supposed to add into water, but since I have no bottles of clean water (I fill my bottles dirty and filter as I drink) I have nothing to mix it with. I’ve started just doing it like a shot every morning. It is INCREDIBLY sour (bc it’s concentrate) and makes my tongue tingle whenever I drink it. It’s a 10/10 experience and I’m half considering adding it to my non hike daily routine.
The trails were, for the most part, the same as before. There was a lot of standing water and mud, which slowed my progress. Fortunately there did seem to be at least a couple bits of really nice, well groomed dirt trail. Not enough to satisfy me really, but enough to give me hope that things would get better later.
My first stop was at McCarthy creek, where I got accused of being a communist and was able to take my boots off and soak my feet in the water. For whatever reason there were no mosquitos there, so I spent a LONG time just enjoying that. My feet didn’t need this, as my boots were still wet from the day before and so they’d kind of been soaking all day, but the cold water felt nice. I signed the SHT logbook there, ate lunch, and then pushed on.
I met a guy and didn’t catch his name, but he looked like a Bob, so we’ll call him Bob. He was the first person I’d seen in around 36 hours, but talking to him didn’t make me feel much better about the hike. He said that the trail was muddy and overgrown basically all the way to the northern terminus, which is where he’d started. He blamed it on all the rain, saying Minnesota had apparently been having a more rainy than average summer. From what I’d seen, I certainly believed him.
The trail eventually flattened out into a long gravel road walk section, which was cool because flatter, more consistent trail surface allowed me to really get my miles in. Also, three miles per hour seems to be the magic limit where most of the mosquitos can’t keep up. They’re motivating me to get my miles in more than I could ever motivate myself.
The road walk got further extended by a trail closure, causing me to push even further at this fast pace. I passed a camp site, but I figured I could get to the next one by the end of the day. By this point it was already 6, and the nearest camp site (big bend) was 6 miles away. The sun has been setting at 8:30, so it meant 6 miles in two and a bit hours. Doable.
The problem was, I hadn’t stopped to eat since McCarthy creek. I kind of forgot about this when I decided to push for big bend, but I sure felt it about two miles later. Also, the trail returned to its regular old self: mud and overgrown grass patches. This slowed my progress significantly.
I kept pushing. My legs started to tingle. The trail started following a river, and the river kept bending, but none of them were the big bend. The sun was starting to dip, and I still want at camp.
Part of the problem is that when I really hungry I get really dumb. This means worse decision making, but also just that I trip and stumble more. This slows me down, adding to the problems of pushing to camp while I’m on the clock. Should I have just stopped and eaten a cliff bar or something? Totally. That would have solved everything. But did I? No.
By the time I got into camp at 9 the light was already fading into dusk. I literally couldn’t feel my legs, and had to sit on the bench for a minute before I was ready to pitch camp. I I definitely, definitely overdid it, but oh well. My shoulder also felt like I’d pulled something, which was probably from catching myself with my poles while stumbling (literally stumbling) into camp.
I ended the day by eating 1000 calories of ramen and jerky and then crashed HARD.
Day 4: Oh Wait Hiking is Actually Fun
Luckily, this saga has a happy ending.
I woke up early like usual, then went back to sleep. I don’t think I got out of bed until 9, and slowly rolled into gear. I knew I’d pushed too hard the previous day, and was completely fine with chilling out a bit.
The good news was that my shoulder, which i’d been really worried about before going to bed, had turned out ok. Apparently 10 hours of sleeping on the ground is the best cure for aches and pains.
The bad news was my boots were still wet, and so my feet were starting to hurt a little bit. Not debilitatingly, but they were definitely tender. Also, the days of walking in the rain had made the chafing so bad on my legs that I made the executive decision to hike in my thermal layer instead. They’re tights, and although they’re a little hot for my liking they don’t rub nearly as badly as my actual hiking pants.
I braced for another day of mud and flooded our trails, but fortunately it only took around four miles before I passed the end of section B and into section C.
All of the other hikers I’d met weren’t lying. Within 300 meters of passing the section C trailhead I had to climb up almost 500 feet of switchbacks. It was like someone had heard me complaining about lowland mud hiking and curled the monkeys paw. It was tough trekking.
The top made it all worth it, though. I got my first of the promised “stunning views of Lake Superior and inland Minnesota” that I was beginning to think were a myth. The trail also cleaned up a lot, becoming much more of a mountaintop dirt path. This made it a lot easier to keep moving fast, which almost made up for the time I’d lost lugging my pack up the face of a cliff.
Almost immediately I bumped into another southbound thru hiker, a woman named Maddie. She was drying her gear in the sun while eating lunch. She supported the “trail gets better up north” narrative by saying that basically all the way to Grand Marais is similarly cool mountain trails, which was good to hear. She also told me that it flattened out for a bit after Crow Creek, which was nice because my legs were burning.
The trail quickly dipped back down, heading into one of the coolest rocky gorges I’ve ever hiked through. It reminded me a lot of out west. I ended up stopping there to eat take a breather before pushing on once more.
Maddie wasn’t lying, and the trail really did get flatter after that. I was able to go fast, as it was still relatively good quality with mud in a few spots. The weather was sunny and hot, but I didn’t mind it when the alternative seemed to be pouring rain.
As I neared my campsite, I kept seeing bear tracks in the mud. It was a good reminder that, even though I wasn’t seeing them like I did on day one, there were still bears in the area.
The best part of the day had to be the views, but the next best was the lack of bugs. I don’t know if it was the heat, the higher elevation, the dryer ground or some kind of divine intervention. There just weren’t as many bugs as there were one previous days.
I camped at a place called blueberry hills. It had no blueberries and only a passable amount of hill, but the ground was soft and I slept well.
Tomorrow I’ll be in stringing distance of Silver Bay for my first restock. I don’t technically need it; I’ve been hiking faster than I expected and started out carrying WAY too much food. Still, town will be good for drying out gear and buying some medical supplies to handle my blisters before they get too bad. Hopefully my chafing gets better too. It’s currently too graphic to even describe in a PG way, so the only way to go is up hopefully.
Also, I’ve decided that I’m going skinny dipping before the end of the trail. That’s always been a dream of mine, and I want to achieve it. It’ll have to be in an alpine lake to avoid leeches, on a weekday to avoid other hikers. In hoping for it to be cold and refreshing and life changing. And to not get a bacterial infection, I guess.
Stick around to see if I get there!
Happy hiking, y’all.
