TR: 5/2022 [Windigo to RH via Minong and GRT]
Posted: Wed May 25, 2022 7:24 pm
This is going to come in installments. Tl, dr: a super-duper fun early season trip, just on (or over!) the verge of what I could handle. The more time I spent on the island, the happier I got. I am not going to claim that I was always warm. Intersecting with fonixmunkee and his crew (including someone who's been frequenting IR since a boy scout trip in 1963!) decidedly enhanced the experience.
May 18: Grand Portage to Washington Creek via Voyageur and Huginnin Loop.
The Voyageur’s second outbound voyage of 2022 was nearly full. I spent most of the passage in the bow. This gave me a chance to consult Captain Ben about contingency plans, in case it looked like I wasn’t going to make it to Rock Harbor in time to catch my ride back. I think it also gave me mild hypothermia. And I think that predisposed me to be unduly grumpy when the ranger conducting the orientation used the dippy “HOW WILD IS IT?” script that debuted in 2021. It didn’t help that this ranger was one with whom I have a history of monumental miscommunication. When she permitted me last year, there was nothing I could do to get her to list the campsites I intended to visit, in the order I intended to visit them. The itinerary she wrote up, in addition to omitting two dates entirely and listing another twice, had me ricocheting erratically around the island like an inflated balloon that escapes before you can tie it off. At the time I figured that she was new or nervous. After interacting with her this year, I think it’s more likely that something about how I talk trips a switch in her head that makes me sound to her like the teacher sounds to Linus and Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoons.
I walked to Washington Creek and back to calm down and warm up, got a permit accurately reflecting my intentions from the backup ranger, and moved into Shelter #8. Then I headed out to day hike the Hugginin Loop before the predicted rains began.
Unlike the Superior shore, the loop itself was snow-free. It was also easy enough to follow, despite some deadfall and insufficient foot traffic so far this year to carve a stark path through the leaves blanketing the forest floor. There was an attention-getting amount of wolf scat--- at least 6 instances that I noticed, and I wasn’t looking for wolf scat.
I wasn’t looking for a guy walking down a trail waving an antenna either, but I saw one. “Are you searching for cell phone reception?” I asked. He was not. Instead, he constituted a one person Hare Watch team. Moose Watch teams scour the hinterland for carcasses of moose, and bring back their most telling bits for biologists to analyze for information about age, diet, cause of death, and so on. This fellow had radio-collared 17 snowshoe hares in February, and was now scouting the hinterland for 5 presumptively deceased (because persistently unmoving) hares, so that he might reclaim their radio collars. Under cross examination, he admitted that he was curious whether Isle Royale hares suffered lower predation rates than mainland hares, due to there being fewer kinds of predators (mainly owls and foxes --- wolves, he reported, hare-hunted only opportunistically) on IR than on the mainland. Ruing my failure to ever see an owl on IR, I left him to his hare corpse treasure hunt and carried on---but spent the rest of the trip thinking of other questions I should have asked him.
My typical IR baseline mood of ridiculous giddiness was restored by the time I strolled back into Washington Creek. And it got even better when I met a gentle lady moose making her way into the group campground.
Water wasn’t yet flowing from the taps at Windigo /Washington Creek. This made it vivid that there aren’t many unmucky places to get water from Washington Creek. As I headed toward Windigo in search of a Washington Harbor watering spot without so much aviation fuel in it, I encountered an octet of beaming senior citizens laden with moose bones. The ones carrying skulls were grinning widest of all. “This looks like a Moose Watch team!” I exclaimed. “What gave us away?” one replied. About 36 hours later, I realized what I should have said instead: “It’s a skeleton crew!” (It was considerable solace to get to use the line on fonixmunkee and his crew as the Voyageur pulled into the Hat Point Marina 4 days later.)
May 19: Washington Creek to Little Todd via the Minong
It rained all night. Also it seemed like gangs of sandhill cranes and Canadian geese were having rumbles. During several of the rare moments of silence, a seiche (a concept I first encountered on these forums but which one of fonixmunkee’s crew helped fix for me) would surge up Washington Creek from the harbor. The first n times I interpreted the subsequent sloshing as moose cavorting in the creek outside my shelter---and bolted into the rainy night only to see the aftermath of an astonishing wave.
I repurposed my soggy socks from yesterday, rather than putting on precious clean, dry socks that would within minutes be saturated with greasy trail muck. Leaving the campground, I greeted another denizen tending her stove in front of her shelter. The next person I’d see would be in Todd Harbor, at lunchtime tomorrow.
The Windigo end of the Minong traverses open deciduous forest. The trees making up the forest had, without prejudice to the distinction (decidedly salient to me) between trail and not-trail, dropped leaves everywhere. While this didn’t make the trail impossible to follow, it did mean that, often, I couldn’t articulate how---what cues I was tracking or how I noticed them --- I was following it.
Interestingly, negotiating deadfall (of which there was some, not all of it trivial but none of it profoundly daunting) seemed to derail my tracking mechanisms, whatever they were. It would take me awhile to re-identify, and resume following, the trail. Twice, I flat out lost it, long enough to worry whether I’d find it again. Both times I did, within a few minutes, and without activating navigational aids.
A very disgruntled sandhill crane occupied---then vociferously departed--- the very first open ridgy knob I came to. I saw two moose, and crossed two beaver dams---in each case, dry-footed in the sense that if my feet had been dry when I embarked on the crossing (which they were not, due to tons of swampiness on other stretches of the trail), they’d have been dry when I exited the crossing. I wondered why I was bothering with the balancing act. For practice, I decided---the same reason I knock on privy doors before barging in, even in campgrounds I’m sure are deserted except for me.
I had lunch at a knob from which both Lake Desor and Superior were visible. Carrying on, I saw 2-3 more moose (two of them might have been the same moose twice), negotiated another beaver dam (teetering to keep my wet feet from getting wetter for practice), broke a strap of my hiking pole when the goop in which it was mired proved to be stronger than the fear-sweat compromised material of the strap itself, and had a pratfall, where having triumphantly rockhopped across a tricky creek, I got my feet tangled in roots on the dismount. Fortunately my violent crash to the ground was cushioned by a deep layer of mud.
(Concerning the beaver features, by which I mean stretches of the trail that have been disrupted by the admirable labors of those most psychotic rodents: for some of them, the NPS have tied tapes to trees to indicate how to breach the gap. For others of them, they have not. For the tapeless beaver features, a rule of thumb that worked for me was to find a safe place to cross downstream of---not over!---the dam causing the problem, then head slightly upstream and dramatically uphill looking for the trail.)
By the afternoon, I was travelling the ridgy section of the Minong ridge. With embarrassing frequency, I’d get off trail---either because the trail stuck to the ridge and I left it, or I stuck to the ridge when the trail left it. Most of the time, I’d recognize right away that I was off course, and backtrack a few steps to get on course. Each instance of getting on course rested on presuppositions about how I’d gotten off course---about, for instance, whether the actual trail was to my right or to my left. A few miles short of the Little Todd junction, I lost the trail for more than a few seconds. When I found it again, my presupposition about how I lost it dictated that I turn left---which I did. (In my defense, I’ll report that I couldn’t see water from the point where I regained the trail.) A while later, l was strutting orgulously along the trail I was so adeptly following, admiring Pie Island to my right … when I twigged that something was horribly wrong, and reversed course. (I honestly can’t reconstruct what went awry. My two leading hypotheses are (i) I am a total idiot, and (ii) some sort of Mobius strip anomaly befalls this bit of the Minong. I’m afraid that (i) is a leading contender.)
Trail floods and deadfall made Little Todd hard to reach. But it was worth reaching!
May 18: Grand Portage to Washington Creek via Voyageur and Huginnin Loop.
The Voyageur’s second outbound voyage of 2022 was nearly full. I spent most of the passage in the bow. This gave me a chance to consult Captain Ben about contingency plans, in case it looked like I wasn’t going to make it to Rock Harbor in time to catch my ride back. I think it also gave me mild hypothermia. And I think that predisposed me to be unduly grumpy when the ranger conducting the orientation used the dippy “HOW WILD IS IT?” script that debuted in 2021. It didn’t help that this ranger was one with whom I have a history of monumental miscommunication. When she permitted me last year, there was nothing I could do to get her to list the campsites I intended to visit, in the order I intended to visit them. The itinerary she wrote up, in addition to omitting two dates entirely and listing another twice, had me ricocheting erratically around the island like an inflated balloon that escapes before you can tie it off. At the time I figured that she was new or nervous. After interacting with her this year, I think it’s more likely that something about how I talk trips a switch in her head that makes me sound to her like the teacher sounds to Linus and Charlie Brown in the Peanuts cartoons.
I walked to Washington Creek and back to calm down and warm up, got a permit accurately reflecting my intentions from the backup ranger, and moved into Shelter #8. Then I headed out to day hike the Hugginin Loop before the predicted rains began.
Unlike the Superior shore, the loop itself was snow-free. It was also easy enough to follow, despite some deadfall and insufficient foot traffic so far this year to carve a stark path through the leaves blanketing the forest floor. There was an attention-getting amount of wolf scat--- at least 6 instances that I noticed, and I wasn’t looking for wolf scat.
I wasn’t looking for a guy walking down a trail waving an antenna either, but I saw one. “Are you searching for cell phone reception?” I asked. He was not. Instead, he constituted a one person Hare Watch team. Moose Watch teams scour the hinterland for carcasses of moose, and bring back their most telling bits for biologists to analyze for information about age, diet, cause of death, and so on. This fellow had radio-collared 17 snowshoe hares in February, and was now scouting the hinterland for 5 presumptively deceased (because persistently unmoving) hares, so that he might reclaim their radio collars. Under cross examination, he admitted that he was curious whether Isle Royale hares suffered lower predation rates than mainland hares, due to there being fewer kinds of predators (mainly owls and foxes --- wolves, he reported, hare-hunted only opportunistically) on IR than on the mainland. Ruing my failure to ever see an owl on IR, I left him to his hare corpse treasure hunt and carried on---but spent the rest of the trip thinking of other questions I should have asked him.
My typical IR baseline mood of ridiculous giddiness was restored by the time I strolled back into Washington Creek. And it got even better when I met a gentle lady moose making her way into the group campground.
Water wasn’t yet flowing from the taps at Windigo /Washington Creek. This made it vivid that there aren’t many unmucky places to get water from Washington Creek. As I headed toward Windigo in search of a Washington Harbor watering spot without so much aviation fuel in it, I encountered an octet of beaming senior citizens laden with moose bones. The ones carrying skulls were grinning widest of all. “This looks like a Moose Watch team!” I exclaimed. “What gave us away?” one replied. About 36 hours later, I realized what I should have said instead: “It’s a skeleton crew!” (It was considerable solace to get to use the line on fonixmunkee and his crew as the Voyageur pulled into the Hat Point Marina 4 days later.)
May 19: Washington Creek to Little Todd via the Minong
It rained all night. Also it seemed like gangs of sandhill cranes and Canadian geese were having rumbles. During several of the rare moments of silence, a seiche (a concept I first encountered on these forums but which one of fonixmunkee’s crew helped fix for me) would surge up Washington Creek from the harbor. The first n times I interpreted the subsequent sloshing as moose cavorting in the creek outside my shelter---and bolted into the rainy night only to see the aftermath of an astonishing wave.
I repurposed my soggy socks from yesterday, rather than putting on precious clean, dry socks that would within minutes be saturated with greasy trail muck. Leaving the campground, I greeted another denizen tending her stove in front of her shelter. The next person I’d see would be in Todd Harbor, at lunchtime tomorrow.
The Windigo end of the Minong traverses open deciduous forest. The trees making up the forest had, without prejudice to the distinction (decidedly salient to me) between trail and not-trail, dropped leaves everywhere. While this didn’t make the trail impossible to follow, it did mean that, often, I couldn’t articulate how---what cues I was tracking or how I noticed them --- I was following it.
Interestingly, negotiating deadfall (of which there was some, not all of it trivial but none of it profoundly daunting) seemed to derail my tracking mechanisms, whatever they were. It would take me awhile to re-identify, and resume following, the trail. Twice, I flat out lost it, long enough to worry whether I’d find it again. Both times I did, within a few minutes, and without activating navigational aids.
A very disgruntled sandhill crane occupied---then vociferously departed--- the very first open ridgy knob I came to. I saw two moose, and crossed two beaver dams---in each case, dry-footed in the sense that if my feet had been dry when I embarked on the crossing (which they were not, due to tons of swampiness on other stretches of the trail), they’d have been dry when I exited the crossing. I wondered why I was bothering with the balancing act. For practice, I decided---the same reason I knock on privy doors before barging in, even in campgrounds I’m sure are deserted except for me.
I had lunch at a knob from which both Lake Desor and Superior were visible. Carrying on, I saw 2-3 more moose (two of them might have been the same moose twice), negotiated another beaver dam (teetering to keep my wet feet from getting wetter for practice), broke a strap of my hiking pole when the goop in which it was mired proved to be stronger than the fear-sweat compromised material of the strap itself, and had a pratfall, where having triumphantly rockhopped across a tricky creek, I got my feet tangled in roots on the dismount. Fortunately my violent crash to the ground was cushioned by a deep layer of mud.
(Concerning the beaver features, by which I mean stretches of the trail that have been disrupted by the admirable labors of those most psychotic rodents: for some of them, the NPS have tied tapes to trees to indicate how to breach the gap. For others of them, they have not. For the tapeless beaver features, a rule of thumb that worked for me was to find a safe place to cross downstream of---not over!---the dam causing the problem, then head slightly upstream and dramatically uphill looking for the trail.)
By the afternoon, I was travelling the ridgy section of the Minong ridge. With embarrassing frequency, I’d get off trail---either because the trail stuck to the ridge and I left it, or I stuck to the ridge when the trail left it. Most of the time, I’d recognize right away that I was off course, and backtrack a few steps to get on course. Each instance of getting on course rested on presuppositions about how I’d gotten off course---about, for instance, whether the actual trail was to my right or to my left. A few miles short of the Little Todd junction, I lost the trail for more than a few seconds. When I found it again, my presupposition about how I lost it dictated that I turn left---which I did. (In my defense, I’ll report that I couldn’t see water from the point where I regained the trail.) A while later, l was strutting orgulously along the trail I was so adeptly following, admiring Pie Island to my right … when I twigged that something was horribly wrong, and reversed course. (I honestly can’t reconstruct what went awry. My two leading hypotheses are (i) I am a total idiot, and (ii) some sort of Mobius strip anomaly befalls this bit of the Minong. I’m afraid that (i) is a leading contender.)
Trail floods and deadfall made Little Todd hard to reach. But it was worth reaching!