Winter river

It’s the middle of winter, but the Baptism River still flows under the snow and ice.

We took a little weekend getaway up to Two Harbors and Tettegouche State Park, where I got acquainted with snowshoes. Minnesota has gotten a couple of cold blasts this season, including one in progress as I type this. But Lake Superior is almost completely unbound by ice, unlike last year, and the park’s positively gushing river still peaks through its shell here and there. A window still parts the icicle curtains around High Falls, one of the state’s tallest waterfalls.

Moving water is amazing. It and a couple of feet of snowpack created some beautiful scenes.

Thanks for a nice time, Two Harbors, and thank you for looking.

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To Voyageurs

We visited Voyageurs National Park the wrong way last weekend.

The park, right at the northern border of Minnesota, is more than one-third lake, and nearly all of the land is best accessed by boat — or by ice, once the lake gets there. We didn’t have a boat and had just a few hours, hardly enough to get introduced to a few hundred square miles. But it was my birthday week, and the fall colors were still hanging on, and we won’t be in Minnesota forever, and we had a beautiful Saturday to spend, so we went for it. It’s the wrong approach to truly see this place. But it was beautiful nonetheless.

We hiked the Blind Ash Bay Trail, a nice little loop near a park entrance. Golden aspen and birch leaves, long pine needles and green mosses carpeted the often waterlogged forest floor. There’s still growing to do even in October, including for spiky little plants, like miniature Christmas trees and cacti, that I’d never seen before.

Hopefully we’ll have the chance to get more thoroughly acquainted.

Thanks for looking!

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Fairy Falls close-up

It’s time for another photographic sermon on the worth and beauty of the small, this time delivered in the steep, lush Silver Creek valley below Fairy Falls. The falls anchor a nice little hiking spot just on this side of the Minnesota-Wisconsin border. The forest there is in full swing, and so are the small-scale inhabitants of the forest floor.

I haven’t been able to identify these little green starfish-looking plants, which unfurl just a few millimeters wide. If anyone can help me out, just let me know. I do know the next photo is a crown-tipped coral fungus — an old acquaintance from down South.

Observe the little nodules that sit in the middle of each segment of these liverworts like a nucleus in a cell. They’re so small that I didn’t notice them when I was taking this photo, only after. Now that’s the good stuff.

Take a hike in all of this good weather.

Thanks for looking!

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Sidewalk art

Now that we’re getting above freezing during the day and dropping below freezing most nights, it’s starting to feel like a normal Arkansas winter up here. You all might recall my being dazzled by the delicate and varied forms ice took down south; something I didn’t appreciate fully there is that many of those forms depended on this cycle. When weeks go by below freezing, ice becomes monolithic — sheets of ice and blankets of snow. But when the process can start fresh each night, its results are more fleeting and more interesting.

For whatever reason, I’ve had the easiest time finding beauties like these this season in the humblest of places, sidewalk puddles. So I like to call them sidewalk art, crafted not with chalk or spray paint but with bubbles and H₂O.