Superior Hiking Trail from June 2010

I think it would be pretty safe to say that the Superior Hiking Trail (SHT) that runs along Lake Superior is by far the best backpacking in Minnesota. In a single day you can hike through fir trees and hardwoods, scramble up and down steep, rocky sections past waterfalls and lakes in the closest things we have to mountains in Minnesota (if you look on the map there is an actual mountain range that the trail runs through called the Sawtooth Mountains)
This last summer I managed to get a few days off from work and needing a break from people (I had just started a job running a cash register at a gas station) I thought it would be cool to head over to the SHT for four days. It had also been raining for about a week straight so I was jonesing to get outdoors. I got a bit of a late start the day I left, making it to the trail head at about 3pm leaving me about 5 hours to make it the 8 miles to the campsite that I wanted. I thought it would be an easy task even stopping to take photos. Everything started off great too, I was close enough to this deer to get a shot with the 16-85mm lens that I had with me.

I tend to go really light on the camera gear when I do trips like this, not just backpacking but times when photography isn't the primary objective of the trip. This trip all I brought with was a Nikon D60 with a Nikon 16-85mm lens (will be reviewing this lens in a future post)

Then things started going a little sideways, mutant two headed flowers,

leading to skull shaped lichens.

This was one of the last dry spots on the trail for the next few miles. It had been kind of muddy up to this point but it started to get a lot worse really quick.

This is what the rest of the day looked like for me, slogging through ankle deep mud and standing water. I tried to carefully pick my way through this stuff but in most places it was too brushy to get off trail and even when you could it was just about as bad as staying on the trail.

Or there were the places like this section of trail that was a solid wall of poison ivy on either side of the trail.

By the time I made it to the site that I wanted to spend the night at it was already taken leaving me 3 more miles to go before the next site in the rapidly setting sun. It took almost two hours to make it there, finally arriving after it had gotten dark. I was stumbling the whole way there because the light was making it tough to see the contour of the muck, that is one area LED headlamps kind of suck, they cast such a flat light that it seems to throw off my depth perception.

I did get to try out a new piece of gear on this trip though, I had just gotten a GoLite Shangri-La tarp tent and thought this would be a good trip to test it on. And for the most part it was great, cut my pack weight down a lot and didn't take up a lot of space but since everything was so muddy and this didn't have a floor my sleeping pad ended up getting really dirty (not a huge deal breaker, just kind of hard on it) The biggest issue I had is that this sets up with trekking poles, which I have but rarely use so I would have been better off with a dedicated set of poles for it, which I am looking into DIY options.
Since the trail wasn't getting any better I decided the next morning to just head back to the car the way I came in and use the extra time to work on projects at home rather then punishing myself for a couple more days. On my way out I ran into a group of young guys that told me they were going to try doing the whole trail (200+ miles) in six days. I told them about the conditions ahead and wished them luck, I would have liked to know how for they made it in those six days.

Watching the sunset after another long day on the Superior Hiking Trail but that is a story for another time.