A fall walk along the Gitchi Gami Trail

Fires, that as of this morning, might have been smoldering in the Boundary Waters have certainly been drowned today. We've got ourselves a November storm in September here on the North Shore. I'd almost forgotten that today was the last day of summer. Immense waves are pounding our ledge rock -- making we wonder, as I have so often, if our home is set far enough off the lake; and heavy rain thrust by strong winds wash our windows.

But yesterday was a different sort of a day entirely. A perfect fall day to take a late afternoon walk (okay, I know what you're thinking but I want to assure you that I had worked diligently until then. But there are only so many hours that one can spend in a writing shed, typing up notes for the sequence to a memoir that will be even more painful to put into words than The Scent of God (www.berylsingletonbissell.com ) was to write).

I donned a light jacket, headed up our long driveway and launched myself onto the Gitchi Gami ( http://www.ggta.org/ ) State Trail for biking/hiking/roller-blading -- another of the many outdoor opportunities that visitors and residents along the North Shore get to enjoy. With my old knees that sometimes force me to walk like a tin soldier down the steep inclines of the Superior Hiking Trail, I make great use of the flat paved surface of the Gitchi Gami. Although it runs fairly close to Highway 61, it provides nature viewing that I hadn't expected. In our town of Schroeder, I can take the trail from the east side of the Cross River through meadows filled with migrating warblers to the bridge over the Temperance River Gorge and on past the small town of Tofte for seven miles. The trail is being completed in sequences and will eventually run from Two Harbors to Grand Marais.

When the trail was being constructed I didn't think I'd enjoy it because of its proximity to traffic (although it loops off into some wondrous places and away from the highway) but instead I've enjoyed it tremendously. On this hike I noted the brilliant red ground cover that revealed the undulating hills on the north side of the trail. I hadn't noticed those hills during the summer when the canopy of birch and aspen conceal it from view. I tried to capture this beauty without much success. The photos look blurry but I'm posting them here anyway to give you an idea of what my hike was like.

My first glimpse of the hills

A bit further along the trail ... imagine missing this?

Even the swaths cut for electric lines look beautiful in the fall