North Shore Grandness at Split Rock Lighthouse

No matter how much time you have or how much further you have to travel, one stop not to miss along the North Shore is Split Rock Lighthouse near Two Harbors.  It is the most popular Minnesota Historical Society site to visit in the state and a favorite stop in all seasons that my family never tires of visiting.

Split Rock is unique because of its refined, Italian-inspired architecture which is unlike any other lighthouse on the Great Lakes.  Taking time at the visitor center and watching a short film will help you understand the importance of the location of the lighthouse to help warn ships in the early 1900s of the rugged coastline, hidden rocks and untamed nature of Lake Superior.

The views from Split Rock Lighthouse are impressive and on a clear day you can see all the way up and down Lake Superior's coast, and often spot Wisconsin's Apostle Islands.  Take time to climb up the lighthouse to view the beautiful lens, and then explore the lighthouse keeper's house preserved from that era. There are easy trails to go all the way down to Lake Superior for some rock hunting and a stunning view back towards Split Rock Lighthouse perched on a sheer cliff. 

I hope you enjoy the stories, photographs, art, adventures, and links that make up my North Shore Collection!

Betty's Pies--A Dessert Lover's Stop

Along the North Shore beyond Duluth, there are limited dining options -- so one has to be strategic about planning where to stop along the way.  Instead of keeping up a more timely pace and swinging through a fast food joint, make time to actually stop and eat a meal -- leaving enough time and room for dessert, too!

Betty's Pies has been well-known since the 1950s for serving yummy, homemade pies.  Some of the pie signature creations can only be found on their menu -- such as Bumbleberry Pie -- bursting with blueberries, blackberries, raspberries and strawberries.  There are also fluffy and sweet cream pies.  Betty's daily list of pies is always changing, so we always place our pie order with our meal order before a favorite pie type disappears before our eyes!

Although the place is no longer owned by Betty and the original fish-shack-turned-pie-place has been replaced by a nice diner-style restaurant, the charm of enjoying pie together in a friendly place has not changed.

So to plan your stop at Betty's, it is located on the Stewart River about 45 minutes up Highway 61 from Duluth and about its only another 20 minutes further to Split Rock Lighthouse.

An Engagement complete with Northern Lights

One summer, a friend and I finished a long day of hiking by getting cleaned up and going to eat at one of the original resorts on the North Shore -- Lutsen Resort.  After dinner, people usually head down to their broad rock beach on the shores of Lake Superior to watch the waves lap in.  However, on that night, we had heard that the Northern Lights were to be visible -- but in the opposite direction of the lake.

We were the only ones who had turned our adirondack chairs to face the lodge, and once our eyes adjusted, the Northern Lights were dancing in luminous greens and reds across the northern sky.  It is truly a sight to try to describe!

A few people pondered what we were watching and we directed them to look up and see.  Then a young couple, who seemed rather dreamy, inquired with a very Southern accent.  Once they understood what they were seeing, they got even dreamier with each other.  After a long, awkward pause the young lady excitedly exclaimed to us, "This is just soooo perfect... I've always wanted to see the Northern Lights because I'm a teacher in Georgia and have never seen them...and also because we just got engaged!".  The young man swiftly took his flashlight to shine on the ring that had just been slipped on her finger.  We were the first to know their news!  It truly was perfect and is such a joy to see God swirling colors in the sky as if in celebration.  

If you have never seen the Northern Lights, a.k.a. Aurora Borealis, from your own home, the North Shore is a great place to possibly see them.  They are only visible in the Northern Hemisphere and the likelihood of seeing Aurora Borealis increases with its closer proximity to the magnetic North Pole.  Their colorful swirls and streaks in the sky are produced by the collision of charged particles coming from the sun moving through earth's atmosphere.  The North Shore's dark skies will enhance the vividness of the Northern Lights if they are on show in the night sky because there is little or no light pollution.  To learn more, check out this website that has good information about the Northern Lights, Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

So don't miss the next time the Northern Lights or other cosmic wonders may be happening in the wee hours of a dark night by checking out this website, SpaceWeather.com, as they post information about upcoming events and activities in the heavens -- perhaps you could even help plan an engagement complete with Northern Lights, too!

Gentler, but Still Rewarding Hikes

The road that runs along the shore of Lake Superior from Duluth to Grand Marais to the Canadian border is Highway 61. For easy short hikes into nature, there are many State Parks to stop at right off the highway.  Many of the popular parks are Split Rock Lighthouse, Gooseberry Falls, Tettegouche, Crosby Manitou, or Cascade.  Each park has unique hiking trails that go along and over cascading rivers, to great look-out points, or down to Lake Superior itself.

There are also sections of the Superior Hiking Trail that are accessible along Highway 61 or a short distance off it. Some favorites are the Oberg Mountain loop and the Temperance River's dramatic and narrow river canyon near Tofte.  Closer to Grand Marais are the Pincushion Mountain and the Brule River Loop trails in Judge C.R. Magney State Park.  I have done all these hikes and can recommend them for people who can do mild to moderate physical activity.

Many of these gentler hikes, which are under three miles long, are described in a handy book, Gentle Hikes, by Tornabene, Morgan and Vogelsang. It is available both on Amazon or at many stops along the North Shore.

So grab a map or book, water bottle, camera, hiking poles, and get out there!

One of the Best in America -- Superior Hiking Trail!

For extensive backpacking and camping, a great resource is the Superior Hiking Trail Association which is based out of Two Harbors.  They created and maintain the Superior Hiking Trail -- a 200+ mile foot trail through the North Shore forests and over its many rivers.  Although we may take this trail for granted because it is in our back yard, the Superior Hiking Trail has received national attention as one of the ten best hiking trails in America according to Backpacker magazine.

In June 2006, the day after school was out, my 11-year-old daughter, me, and three other sets of moms and daughters headed out with a friend and guide from Wilderness Inquiry to do a four-day backpacking trip on the Superior Trail.  All of us carried frame-style backpacks loaded with our stuff, bear-safe barrels for the food, camping gear, and tents. We set-up camp every evening and broke it down every morning to keep moving along a 24-mile stretch from the town of Finland to the end of the Cascade River.  

Through singing many songs, telling stories, and eating much chocolate, we encouraged each other through the physically and sometimes mentally challenging terrain.  As my daughter said afterwards, "That was the hardest and best thing I've ever done!" Ditto!!

Meeting Dorothy the Root Beer Lady

When I went on a Boundary Waters canoe trip as a teenager, we would just dip a water jug into the lake water and drink it without boiling or purifying it -- ick!  Kool-aid nor cocoa could mask the taste of lake water and thankfully, no one got sick from water-born parasites.

We had been promised that a real treat was coming in the way of having root beer from some lady who lived in the middle of the BWCA.  After a hard day of paddling into the wind as we headed westward on long Knife Lake that makes up the U.S.-Canadian border, we came upon a small island.  It had the first semi- permanent structures we had seen for days.  As we hiked onto the island, there were mounded root gardens lined by fences created from brightly painted canoe paddles signed by various scouts  troops, church groups, families, and others who had stopped at this special place.  We had arrived at Dorothy Molter's summer place.  She was affectionately known throughout these parts as "The Root Beer Lady."

As teens, we could hardly wait to have our first pop (as Kansans call it) in over a week. We paid our token 50 cents or so and waited in line for Dorothy to hand out root beer from an old Coca-Cola lift-top cooler.  Although she had no electricity, the pop was kept cold by a solid block of ice in the cooler.  We learned that in the winter, men from the nearest town would cut these blocks of ice right out of the lake.  Dorothy covered the blocks with saw dust and stored them in a cool dug-out so they could keep her root beer cold all summer long.

Dorothy handed out her root beer that was put into old Dr. Pepper, 7Up, Nehi and Coca-Cola bottles and sealed (?) with rusty and dented metal bottle tops.  A funny story was that everyone else got these typical bottles, but the one she handed to me was a "Polly-Wog Cola" bottle.  Because I had never seen my first name on anything, everyone told me to go ask her if I could keep the bottle.  When I finally got enough courage to do so, she abruptly said,  "No!", and took the bottle that I had only half finished!

What I remember about her root beer was that it was a bit darker and maybe more syrupy than regular root beer, but the taste was basically the same.  The hard thing for teenagers was that it wasn't carbonated like pop was -- so it was more like root beer kool-aid.

The second photo is of part of our group at Dorothy's (I'm not in the photo), but you can see the red Coca-Cola cooler by the shed.

On the website for the Dorothy Molter Museum, I read that she lived on Isle of Pines on Knife Lake for over 56 years and served as many as 7,000 people a year. Maybe I understand now why she needed to keep using her Polly-Wog Cola bottle instead of giving it away to me!

P.S.  -- Several years ago, I sighted another Polly-Wog Cola bottle in a small ice cream shop in Taylors Falls.  It was the only one they had, so they wouldn't part with it either!

"Plein-Air" Painting in the North Shore's Plain Air

I have been doing this type of painting of landscapes for several years. It is a fancy way of saying that I paint on location, using artistic techniques to capture the light and sense of a place and especially to not overwork a piece.  Since I love to hike (but don't necessarily have the patience to come home with an empty fish line!), I will sit and paint in some beautiful places while the rest of the family fishes or explores.

In a trip to Yellowstone National Park, I dipped water out of the Yellowstone River to do water color paintings which dry almost immediately.  However, I prefer to do oil painting which takes a couple of days to dry, so it can be a challenge to hike with a wet painting fearing I may drop or smear it and thus ruining it for good!

Along the North Shore, a favorite place to park myself and paint is the Poplar River that is easily accessible just beyond the ski hills of Lutsen's Sawtooth Mountains.  To help you see how a location can be captured and interpreted through plein air painting, it helps to view a photograph and then see how the painting comes out. (Remember, I only do landscapes, so unfortunately my family is not part of my painting!)

This is my family on our first hike near Lutsen as they cross over the old logging bridge that crosses the tumbling Poplar River below.

This is my oil painting done on location at the Poplar River. While painting the sky and river, a breeze came up and flipped my palette so that blue oil paint got smeared on the huge rock I was sitting on just below the bridge. If you take a hike there, you can still see faint evidence of the blue paint on the rock to this day -- a risk of painting plein-air style!

Perhaps you won't want to drag oil paintings on a hike, but I encourage you to take a sketch  pad to do a quick sketch of an area.  It is a way to capture a memory in a unique way.  The North Shore inspires many artists who also capture the spirit and beauty of this region.  One of the best galleries to see a variety of North Shore artwork is the Sivertson Gallery in Grand Marais.  I highly recommend you to visit this gallery online or in person -- and its right across the street from Sven & Ole's Pizza -- enjoy both!

Canoe Paddles & Duluth Packs Needed!

My middle son has always loved the rugged outdoors and everything that goes with it. Our kids have been introduced to the North Shore through an annual father-son (then father-daughter) weekend to Sawbill Lake Campground with some good friends. It is a great was to stay in Lake Superior National Forest and be on the edge of Boundary Waters Canoe Area entrance lakes. From here, day canoe trips are perfect for younger kids. As a bonus, the campground has a very nice camp store that the kids visit everyday... and the dads sneak away to get anything they forgot to bring!

There was an unwritten, but oft spoken rule that "what happens in the Boundary Waters, stays in the Boundary Waters". Rumors are that the kids play a cops & robbers tag game all over the campground into the wee hours of the night, while the dads hang around the campfire. Only on two occasions did I get to visit this place, as I had the vehicle they needed to get there in, but I was sworn to secrecy so to not tell the other moms all about it.

One summer, we had just painted and decorated our son's room in a fishing and 'up north' theme complete with a canoe-shaped bookcase, log cabin quilt, fish pillow, and fish fabric for drapes. But the new double bed just kinda sat in the room -- it needed a headboard. We were pondering what to do about the same time I was at Sawbill for the first time.

Inspiration came in the campstore, where Sawbill also houses all the canoe gear. My son came up with the idea of using birch trees for a headboard, but we didn't have any to cut down. Then he thought of using canoe paddles, but the pretty wooden ones cost over $100 each. Finally, we asked if there were any used paddles that we could buy for less. The guy looked and only came up with two broken ones -- he said we could have them for only $8 total! We had the anchors for our headboard.

On the way home, we stopped at the Duluth Pack Store in Duluth. They make the classic, sturdy canvas pouches that I even used on my canoe trip years ago. When it was time for a portage, someone would hoist one heavy, leather-strapped pouch on my back, and just when I thought I was going to fall over backwards, they put another one on my front. I was basically a solid cube walking through the forest!  Back to the headboard idea... we knew somehow we had to include Duluth Packs as part of the plan.

So here are the details of creating and assembling the headboard that are shown in the photos. First, purchased a simple wooden & iron garden trellis at a lumber store. Next, he sanded and stained the wood, then mounted it to the wall. Then the canoe paddles were mounted to the sides of the trellis covering the electrical cords for the sconces. Finally, we stuffed regular pillows into the three Duluth Packs (although not cheap) and just strapped them to the trellis.

Bedroom Before -- Decorating is done, but a headboard is needed!

The simple garden trellis mounted to wall.


Son mounting the canoe paddles -- they also cover the electrical cord from the sconces.


After -- The "Canoe Paddle & Duluth Pack Headboard" was perfect and his room was done 'up north' style!

A Kansas Adventure to the Boundary Waters

Way back in high school, a good friend convinced me to join her and a group Kansas church youth to go canoeing in Minnesota. I had never been in a canoe... nor on a lake that you could actually see the bottom... nor ever traveled north of Iowa. What the heck, we were young so why not?

I think there were 27 high schoolers and leaders, who I remember being like old scout leaders. My female group leader slept with those prickly plastic curlers set under a kerchief each night. We drove in station wagons, slept in church basements along the way, and basically had no idea what we were getting into. 

We had a pretty simple packing list and took no high tech gear, clothing or gadgets like campers do today. I took a cheap, plastic, blow-up swimming float to sleep on. I do remember that girls were told we had to wear 2-piece bathing suits (bikinis) under our canoeing clothes, which I thought was funny and odd for a church group to require. We later understood as we used the porta-potty boxes in the wide open forest! Even though I promised my brother that I would not lose his pocket knife, it slipped out of a hoody sweatshirt pocket and went straight to the bottom of a lake, never to be seen again.

Finally arriving in Ely, we were outfitted with aluminum canoes, paddles, life jackets, tents, huge canvas Duluth packs, and dehydrated meals for our week's outing. I still have my 1980s map that traced our route. We entered the Boundary Waters Canoe Area at entry point #25 which was on Moose Lake. Then followed a route to the east through Splash, Ensign, Jordan, Ima and Thomas lakes. Next, we headed north going across Fraser, Wasini, Strup, Kekekabi, Pickle, Spoon and Bonnie lakes. At long and huge Knife Lake, we paddled to the other side to step foot in Canada. At the west end of Knife Lake, we came to an a small island to make a much anticipated stop to visit Dorothy the Root Beer Lady (see another blog posting for that whole story). We finished the trip heading back south through Vera, Ensign and finally Moose Lake again.

For a bunch of Kansas kids, it was a great time of camping, swimming and almost skinny dipping, cliff diving, splashing, singing, and hanging together. We saw one moose, saw more lakes, trees, stars, and swatted more mosquitos than we thought could exist. However, Minnesota fish were quite elusive as there were lines in the water all week but the whole group only caught a couple of fish in total. In the end, I rougly calculated that we canoed over 45 miles and portaged for 1,041 rods -- which equals about 5.25 km or 3.25 miles!

Leaving Minnesota, I remember thinking this state could be checked off my list of places I had visited... of course not ever imaging I would live most of my adult life here. It's been great to continue the adventure.  And it was fun to find some photos to share from that first trip to the North Shore of Minnesota!

Me at 15ish.. first visit to Lake Superior.

(Although I incorrectly labeled it Lake Michigan on the back of the photo).

Organizing our stuff before heading into the Boundary Waters.

Notice the 1970s era autos in the parking lot.

A strong girl carrying the canoe on a portage.

Part of our group, my hometown friend is the one in the middle of the canoe.

A beautiful sunset from one of our pristine campsites in the BWCA.

Layers of Memories & Music on Valentine's Day

Following an awesome day of skiing at Lutsen Mountain, we packed up four teenage boys and our pre-teen daughter for a romantic Valentine's dinner at the world-renowned... Sven & Ole's Pizza in Grand Marais. It is a perfect place to see a cross-section of sturdy locals who make up the character of this area mixing with the urban and surburan visitors who frequent it. Bumper stickers from Sven & Ole's have been sighted far from this quaint little North Shore town.

After depositing the teenagers at the ski unit, my husband and I followed GPS directions to head back up Highway 61, then our GPS voice guidance told us to turn onto back roads even though "route guidance was not available for this area." Now using scribbled directions, we soon reached a warmly lit log home nestled in the woods. I did not know what surprise was in store, but soon learned we were going to a private concert to hear North Shore's musical icon, Michael Monroe, at his own home.

About two dozen people were welcomed and warmed by the hospitality of Michael and his wife, Deb.  After engaging with the other guests, we all intimately gathered around Michael as he put forth his creative music for us to experience and absorb throughout the evening.

I had first heard Michael Monroe several years back. His self-created and self-performed music is truly something to hear and see. Using custom-made acoustical guitars connected to computerized foot pedals, he records layers & loops of musical tracks of multiple sounds to build a song live in front of you. It is one thing to hear his reflective songs about nature and a life well lived, but it is another thing to experience them. 

Click on this YouTube video that shows how Michael layers & builds his music live -- enjoy!