Lake Superior Gator Attack
Many people don’t realize Lake Superior is infested with fearsome man-eating alligators.
Many people don’t realize Lake Superior is infested with fearsome man-eating alligators.
There’s a small boat wrecked off the 2600 block of Park Point, nicknamed Sophie’s Wreck after the girl who first spotted it through the clear ice of a few years ago. I tried to find it the other day and wound up meeting and talking with Sophie’s mom who said the shifting sands had covered it for a year or so now. I looked for it anyway and, failing that, goofed around in a few feet of water. It was an odd feeling knowing there was a shipwreck close by, perhaps right under me, expectantly prepared to see it at any time.
“Head up to Duluth along North Shore Scenic Drive which runs along Lake Superior. It’s Godforsaken country in the best sense of the term. I didn’t know beauty like that existed until I saw it.”
There hasn’t been a lot of hype surrounding it, but as of June 1 the Superior Hiking Trail is complete from Duluth to Two Harbors. The missing link is no longer missing. You can now hike the trail from Jay Cooke State Park to the Canadian border … you know, if you feel like a nice 296-mile trek.
Above is the starting point of the Duluth to Two Harbors section, from the trailhead at Martin Road on the Duluth / Rice Lake Township border. The start of this section is cut on the old North Shore State Trail, and a sign there pays tribute to C. J. Ramstad, “Mr. Snowmobiling.”
Freediving the century-plus-old ruins of Duluth’s outer harbor. First the old breakwater wall (cribbing filled with rocks) that stretches 1000′ from the Vietnam Memorial to the red buoy. The buoy’s function is to mark this as a shipping hazard (at that distance from shore the buoy is in 30 feet of water). The destruction of the breakwater wall in a storm spurred the digging of the canal. Then the column or pillar of Uncle Harvey’s Mausoleum, essentially a bundle of timbers sheathed in concrete. Then Uncle Harvey’s itself, in 16 feet of water, also built on cribbing.
Gray skies hampered an already-low visibility today. Water was warm. “Come Get Me” by 14 Iced Bears.
Almost exactly a year after the historic flood, we found the timing to be refreshingly ironic as we set off on our annual tree planning exercise. Employees from Loll Designs, Epicurean, and Intectural all joined to plant trees in four areas around Duluth (Amity Creek, Hartley, Kingsbury Creek, and Featherstone Drive). As it is known, erosion from stream beds were hit hard from the flood and we saw that first-hand as we sought to plant and rehab those areas.
