Awesome Winter

Technically, this winter only started a few days ago, but we've already had a fantastic month of snow and ice. It is hard walking, though. Last week I went for what is usually an hour's preamble that took nearly three, thanks to the snow. The loop is a good one--into the woods at a seldom used chunk of public land, passing along cliffs looking through trees to the river, scrambling down a coulee with a spring coming from a tiny cave at its head, following a railroad grade to little Buttermilk Falls and finally returning a slightly different route. I'd wondered if the falls was frozen so that I could climb on it, but the spring water, that is bone-tinging cold all summer, shows no sign of freezing, so stubborn with its subterranean born temperature. Full Post»

It's all about the Saint Croix, from here on out

This is the redirect of Shutter and Scrawl. From now on, it will concentrate on the Saint Croix River watershed. For the next year or so, I hope to post fairly frequent images and written mentioning and experiences had along the river and its tributaries. Why? you ask. Because I’ve moved from Saint Paul to a house on a rotten sandstone cliff that falls to railroad tracks beyond which a seeping bank drops to a Saint Croix slough. Full Post»

Glacier Peak

Last month my friend Brian and I set out to climb Glacier Peak, in Washington state, which has the distinction of being the most remote of the major cascade mountains. A more direct route up used to exist, but a massive mudslide a few years back obliterated roads, bridges, trails and, sadly, Kennedy Hot Springs, where I had the pleasure of soaking in 2002 while hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. I’d reached the spring after a day of hiking through cold rain. Maybe someday it’ll find a new place from which to seep.

So Brian and I left the trailhead on a drizzly day carrying terrible heavy loads, including crampons, rope, harnesses and pickets. We weren’t in the best shape, so were slow in making nine miles to a fog-shrouded high pass. We set up camp, convinced the usual route started from yet another pass that we’d missed the turn for. After a marathon sleep, the weather still sucked. We went to scout the route without packs, finding steep snow traverses along the way on which we both fell and self arrested. When we reached camp a couple hours later, however, a group was descending through the fog directly above, informing us we were actually on the usual route. Alas, it was late afternoon and we were tired again, plus we’d told our womenfolk we’d be back by a time that’d be difficult to make at that point. Like softmen, we descended. The clouds started to break on the descent. By the time we reached the trailhead, blue skies reigned.

We went back a few days later. The weather was hot and sunny. Descending the summit pitch the snow was so soft I sunk in to my waist, necessitating a long butt slide down the upper mountain. Again, we lugged the rope and other climbing gear, this time nearly fifteen miles to the basecamp, where a few other climbers with featherlight packs mocked our freight. We succumbed to peer pressure and left most of the gear at camp on summit day. I hauled my crampons to the top without putting them on. That night we camped under massive cedars along a river raging with clear water from the rapid, hot weather caused snowmelt, or as Brian said, “there’s probably some of my piss from basecamp in my drinking water.”
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Pig's Eye

Willows and flotsam on one of the Pig's Eye Islands.

A couple weeks ago my buddy Aaron and I canoed into Pig’s Eye Lake, a backwater of the Mississippi River a little south of downtown Saint Paul.

It’s name comes from the one-eyed settler who set up a still in a riverside cave and sold booze to soldiers from Fort Snelling. As many know, Saint Paul was even called Pig’s Eye for a time, and his supposed likeness still graces the cans of a cheap and nasty eponymous beer. If such had become the city’s map-wearing name, something tells me the state capital would be elsewhere.

The lake hosts the mouth of Battle Creek, whose final banks once bisected the Saint Paul Landfill—a notorious and almost mythical place of local history, where tires and household trash smoldered next to industrial waste in an apocalyptic scene of discard. Toxic waste is still leaking into the creek and river. Some years ago, the governing municipality covered the site with heavy fill to curb the seepage, and now a strange field grows.

Aaron and I paddled across the lake and up the ten-foot wide Battle Creek channel until a beaver dam that we didn’t want to portage stopped us.

We got out to examine the shore and walked onto the field. It stretched vacant and odd because so much unbuilt upon open space surrounded by cities screams disease.

We made one more stop to the outlet of the Pig’s Eye sewer treatment plant, where much of the Twin Cities’ wastewater enters the water table anew. Now, less than 100 years ago communities dumped straight into the river, and when the river was low and the outflow high (I suppose during intermission of a great radio show) the waste to sewage ratio was six to one, so when newspaper articles say the water is better than it was they aren’t joking.

The outflow channel is not a seeper, as I’d expected, it’s the size of a midrange river, and flows for several hundred yards. Its clear outflow is a startling contrast to the chocolate milk Miss. Image from the fantastic Google Maps.
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Urban Backpacking the Course of Saint Anthony Falls

The Mississippi River between downtown Minneapolis and Fort Snelling in Saint Paul flows through a gorge formed by the retreat of Saint Anthony Falls, a retreat that took the falls 10,000 years to reach its current position, where it’s been entombed in concrete since the nineteenth century after some long dead idiot built a tunnel underneath it that—surprise surprise—collapsed. Next week, unless the rain is really dumping, I’m going to cover the same ground in two days, which, of course, is very impressive, though I don’t think I’ll have time to do additional gorge building.

There are paved trails skirting both bluff tops that you can pedal in a couple hours, but I’m going stay on foot and inside the gorge’s maw, as close to the water’s edge as possible. The gorge is in places surprisingly inaccessible and rugged--considering the many thousands of people living nearby--with small cliffs and steep banks. It’s a post-industrial landscape administered to by the National Park Service. The two greatest hazards of the hike are such: 1) falling off a bank into the river 2) being accosted by cantankerous homeless or drug addled individuals, most likely while camping.

I’m not too concerned about either, though, even considering the plenitude of crumbling shores and people making the gorge their summer home or chemical intake zone. I’ve hiked most all of it in pieces, but never continuously and never camping within. There are a handful of very fine camping spots, including a shallow sandstone cave perched over the muddy miss. Full Post»

Cave, I Like You

I’ve been a wannabe caver for a few years, mainly because there are a number of caves and tunnels in the Twin Cities. There are also hardcore and possessive urban cavers that do a thorough job of documenting their subterranean conquests, but I’m not one of them. What drew me toward the underground was the notion of a lingering wild place amongst a metropolis and because an environment beneath the topsoil is as distinct as a forest or prairie. So I went into a cave and crawled around. It was a manmade cave, dugout to brew beer. The brewery building disappeared over a century ago, but the cave remains. There were small bats and fine sand. There were two seeps that had formed tiny stalactites and floors slick with orange slime. I explored all the tunnels except for one, a crawl space lined with fine-spun formations like spikes of silk thread. I didn’t want to smash them or breathe their powdered wreckage set loose by the crushings of my knees. Maybe I’ll go back with a dust mask, or maybe I'll leave that tunnel alone to whatever it is the air has stitched upon its walls. Full Post»

Dreams of Flowing Rivers

The last couple mornings I wanted to stay in bed because I was having pleasant dreams of floating a calm narrow river through a verdant meadow. There were fish in the water and curly trees on the bank. I was in my red canoe wearing a straw hat looking down through the water at tan stones. Full Post»

Winter Hump

My big decision last December was whether I would take my free J-term and throw the canoe on the car and drive southeast till the snow disappeared and the rivers were flowing and the temp was warm enough to give my pasty skin some air. But I didn’t, I sat home and pushed a few short stories toward completion, made a few bucks on a freelance gig, ice climbed and skied a little. Perhaps it was a prudent decision, as we are a slightly broke, anyway, and thanks to the frustration of not going when I could have been going, I have planning impetus for the summer to come. Here’s a potential trip list:

--100 miles down the Saint Croix River in spring
--a couple weeks climbing volcanoes in the PacNW with my old pal Brian in early summer
--meeting my wife in Seattle and going to Vancouver Island to hike the West Coast Trail in midsummer
--hiking the Border Route and Kekekabic Trails through the Boundary Waters in August

I did take one overnight trip this season, to the Tettegouche Camp for Christmas with Lily and my parents. The camp was a lumber barons club back in the day and is now in the state park. We hauled our gear in sleds to the pictured cabin, then spent a day tromping through the heavy new snow. It was great until I got a vicious case of food poisoning, the details of which I’ll leave untold. Full Post»