Archive for June 2025
Headed Home
Today is the last loop ride of the week, after which we pack up and drive back to our regular lives.
In truth, I don’t think I’ll bother with the biking since my precious Trek bicycle isn’t much fun to ride in the condition it’s in.
I gave it an attempt yesterday, and the crunchy sounds and precarious status of a broken bolt made the ride much less enjoyable.
In contrast, hanging out with great friends is the best part of this annual adventure.
I chose the short option which logged 33 miles past a beautiful patch of the state flower, Lady Slippers, and through scenic iron range terrain.
Yes, there were hills. There was also a persistent drippy, pesky sprinklely drizzly precipitation that barely wetted the ground, but did a good job of messing up our bikes.
Of course, as soon as Steve and I got back to camp, the sky turned blue and hot sunshine prevailed for the rest of the day.
All in all, the weather was far from the worst we’ve endured, the camping was good, and the northern Minnesota scenery was as beautiful as ever.
My body was in better shape than my bike. I keep threatening that I don’t want to continue to do this ride every year, but oh how I would miss these friends if I were to finally stop.
I plan to drop off my bike for service on the way home. Then comes the post-trip cleaning and drying of gear, followed by a luxurious sleep on a real bed again.
Adventures with friends are great, but gee, it’ll be great to be back home!
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Interesting Day
I recognized his face right away, but it took a second to figure out from where. When he turned to me and instantly recognized me, we both quickly knew it was PHI.
It was John Newman from the Lab at Physical Electronics. Finding him in the kitchen of a Catholic Church in Ely, Minnesota where the Knights of Columbus were serving us breakfast was a wonderful surprise.
We shared the classic life comparison that follows “What are you doing here!?”
We biked mostly roads to Babbit and back before packing our gear to drive down to Chisholm.
After dinner, some stretching was needed before the walk back to our tents.
My bike was back with the mechanics again to continue their efforts at silencing the ratchety creaking.
Efforts were suspended after a screw sheared that will require more work than they are able to provide from their mobile repair trailer.
I’m going to try gently riding it as is today and see how it does. I will have the phone number for the sag driver handy, if things don’t go well.
It was an interesting day.
Happy Juneteenth today!
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Constant Shifting
We rode from Ely to Tower after barely surviving the epic downpour on Monday night.
I took a picture of the high water mark where floating debris remained after the flood receded.
Just a little further and our tents would have been inundated.
Riding was superb on this leg of the Mesabi trail.
In the photo, I am secretly trying to hold Steve’s pack so he can pull me while I coast.
The up and down gyrations of this trail forced the most shifting of gears that I’ve done in a long, long time.
Eventually, the sky cleared up so we could dry things out after we returned to our tents in Ely.
It looked like the tent had regurgitated its contents.
In honor of Rich’s sharing his photos with me to use here, I will close with a shot he took that features him prominently.
Thanks, again, Rich!
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Telling Trend
I seem to be all too willing to skip a day of riding lately when rain looms close on the radar.
Some folks squeezed in their miles before rain reached Grand Rapids, others got a little wet.
I joined a group that opted to pack up dry tents and set out for Ely early to put them up in the park here before even bigger storms arrived.
There was a possibility of riding around Ely, but we chose to eat lunch and wander the shops instead.
Back at our tents, we debated the amount of rain headed our way .
It was a LARGE amount.
A single dripping leak in a rainfly can lead to a big mess in the tent.
Looks to be much dryer today, so the likelihood of riding is high.
I suspect the trend of becoming more willing to forego biking on “iffy” days reveals my priorities are on spending time with these special friends more than accomplishing big miles on the bike.
Unfortunately, I still ate yesterday like I was burning a lot more calories than I actually did.
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Mesabi Scenes
It didn’t rain on our first day!
Something was creaking on my bike. Very annoying. Yet to be solved.
Thanks go to Rich Gordon for providing photos he took with me in them!
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Grand Start
The day is starting promising with visible sunshine.
I’m ready to ride!
Almost Packed
Today, I depart for the annual Tour of Minnesota biking and camping week. I think this will be my 26th time in the 31 years since I first tried my legs at long-distance cycling. I guess you could say I found out I liked it.
I almost finished packing last night.
The bag currently weighs in at 45 lbs. That’s not a concern this year because the tour has changed from them hauling our gear from campsite to campsite, to riders needing to drive their own cars to each destination after biking a loop that day. Unless this new routine really ‘wows’ me, I believe this will be my last year riding the TOM.
What brought me back this year? The people who have become treasures whom I get to share the week with, submersed in the great outdoors and pedaling together for long hours over many miles.
One of the things I find challenging about packing for trips is the number of things I am still using, and thus don’t get packed until the last minute. After that, my challenge becomes trying to recall where I put things that did get packed.
Usually, I end up figuring out a system by the 3rd or 4th day, but by the end of the week, I’ve started tossing things anywhere and everywhere, and my duffel bag becomes a big mess. The amount of chaos in my bag is often related to how rainy the week has been.
This year, the forecast looks like a good chance of rain up north. We are starting in Grand Rapids, then heading up to Ely for two nights before coming back to Chisholm. I predict my bag will end up messy.
I’ve not prepared any posts in advance this year. Hopefully, I will be able to connect to the internet through my phone and, at the very least, provide an image or two each day.
Northern Minnesota Iron Range, here we come!
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New Discoveries
Quite a while ago, we discovered that a person we knew from our school days in Eden Prairie was a volunteer for elections in our township. She and her husband own a log home nearby on the Rush River. We plotted getting together for lunch, but somehow failed to accomplish it for years.
Yesterday, we finally made it happen. Ann and David showed up at our house, and the minutes flew by as we shared snippets of our life stories over a fantastic meal and a tour of portions of our property. We found Dave to be a wealth of knowledge about our plants and trees.
I queried him on the demise of the maple in the labyrinth, but he was stumped (no pun intended) as to why it died so mysteriously.
Right away in our woods, Dave spotted golden oyster mushrooms on a downed tree and alerted us that they are good eats. We gathered a bunch to try cooking up.
That is definitely a discovery for us, as we’ve never considered eating mushrooms growing in our woods. When we first moved in, we spotted some that looked like the coveted morel mushrooms with the irregular honeycombed surface, but we weren’t confident enough to try them.
We learned later that it was very likely that they were morels, and we could have consumed them. Sadly, we’ve never seen them growing here after that time.
Dave went on to share his experience cooking down wild plums, making juice from wild grapes, creating a lotion for skin out of jewelweed, and he pointed out one other edible berry I didn’t know about on our property of which I’ve already forgotten the name.
The most important discovery is that we need to get together with them again soon, as we share many commonalities and a similar respect for the natural world in which we live. We are looking forward to seeing their property and strengthening the surprising number of connections we discovered during this initial all-too-brief visit.
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Tonight
.
late
at night
long after darkness
swallowed all the light
when coyotes howl
and raccoons
snarl and scream
at each other
for reasons we don’t want to know
lying awake
thinking about scenes
that should be in dreams
wondering why
earworm lyrics
loop after just two lines
while the person still asleep
snores softly
one pillow away
someone
somewhere
is remembering
the sound of our laughter
when we both got the joke
at the same time
after that awkward delay
that spoke volumes
about how things would work
decades later
a future we never imagined
a lifetime unanticipated
a reach
exceeding both of our grasps
from a time
before we had met
before we knew
before we had any idea
tonight was bound to arrive
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Quiet Time
Even though I continue to avoid exposure to news media, there are still enough trickles of information that I am aware of Marines being ordered to Los Angeles, where citizens are protesting. It is crazy reports like this, reflecting the many lunacies spelled out in Project 2025*, that are happening right before the world’s eyes, that reaffirm my choice to refuse to wallow in real-time reporting.
*(So I’ve read other people reporting, since I haven’t personally looked at the document; I simply voted against anyone who would have anything to do with it)
Instead, I walk outside and listen to the birds and the chirping frogs, bathe in the scenery of green growing plants and trees, and spend some quiet time with the horses.
Last evening, someone was riding a horse along the road at a slow, clop-clop pace, and it got everyone’s attention. Asher’s hackles went up, and he started barking with great purpose. While the other horses retreated to the small paddock, Mia did the opposite and headed all the way to the fence line along the road for a closer inspection.
When her curiosity was satisfied, she decided her return to the rest of the herd should happen at top speed. It is moments like this that make it easy to visualize these thoroughbreds as the race horses they once were. She did one heck of a beautiful sprint.
Long after all the excitement had faded, the horses chose to stay in the small paddock, grazing the grass growing there.
I snapped a photo when Swings was looking right at me, with the fresh branches of the once mighty willow tree on full display just beyond her.
When the evils of the current US administration have reached their peak, and people like me are incarcerated for any reason they choose, I will conjure memories of standing with these horses and the peacefulness I was able to experience at one time in my life. […that’s hyperbole (I hope) – if you didn’t sense it]
I will try not to recall the unhealthy air quality we were enduring at the time.
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Relative Something 