Superior Hiking Trail #1-11 - Haines Road to Twin Ponds Trailhead

 

Superior Hiking Trail

Map 1 - Section 11

Haines Road to Twin Ponds Trailhead

Date Hiked: May 3rd, 2025

Other Sections Hiked That Day: Map 1 - Section 8, Map 1 - Section 9, Map 1 - Section 10

 

Not all miles are created equal. 

 

For example, the 12.5 miles of this hike are not equivalent to the same distance on the nearby Munger trail. While there may be gentle grade on an old railroad trail, it is generally easier to add distance without nearly as much of a strain. This section, these 12.5 miles, had just under 2000 feet of elevation gain. This trail proved wonderful for spending some of my summer hiking mountains in the Pacific Northwest, and that is not hyperbole to say. Most of the state may not be able to provide such practice, but the Superior Hiking Trail be all like "what's that, a hill? What if we went straight up? What mud? Here's a rock, have fun." That is not a complaint, for the record, just an observation. This trail is not for novice hikers. 

 

By the time I reached this section, I was regretting my life decisions. I had a ride waiting to meet me at an undetermined stopping point, and I figured with only a mile and a half to go, I might as well knock out just one more section. What harm could it do, after all? 

 

Sections 8-11 took nearly six hours for me, and I am nothing if not stubborn. On a relatively flat trail, I can usually average 16 minutes a mile speedwise. This hike? It was a 27 average, and if you haven't gathered by now, I am no beginner-level hiker. That is also not a complaint, because I wanted the challenge. I had dreams of hiking Mt. Si as my first (which would happen, but that's for another day), so the Superior Hiking Trail was exactly what I needed to prepare myself. 

 

But I really should've stopped at Haines Road. 

 

I've been spoiled by trails with bathrooms and water fountains. My empty water bottle clanging in my backpack pocket, taunting me with its severe lack of hydration, I was stumbling toward Enger Park, aiming for some arbitrary stopping point based on a now-irrelevant scene from a memory, but alas.

 

One thing that perked me up was the Forgotten Park, as from the Hiking Club trails you'll know that the chance for abandoned photography is always a booster in the point system. Passing a basketball court with a Cthaeh habitat dominating what once was a basketball court made me forget about my zero percent physical battery. 

 

Minnesota State Parks Revisited: Mille Lacs-Kathio

 

Mille Lacs-Kathio State Park

Date Hiked: June 1st, 2025

Trail Hiked: The Hiking Club Trail

Distance Hiked: 3.4 miles

Elevation Gain: 154 feet

Duration: 1h 5m

 

With this being one of the parks toward the end of my speedrun to which I barely paid any attention, I felt like I owed it another chance, perhaps even without an addition trek through deep and drifting snow. Some will be surprised by this, but there wasn't any snow on this June day in Minnesota, though I wouldn't rule out the possibility of its occurrence. Anywhere near the Great Lakes region knows of at least one story with a massive surprise well out of season. 

 

Though I had enough bug spray to take down an entire horror movie-level swarm of mosquitos like the time I explored the ghost town of Taconite Harbor, there was another menace that put me in sensory hell that bug spray couldn't help against: the seemingly millions of spiderweb-like strands of silk hanging off the trees. The first time around, I was mindlessly trekking through heavy melting snow, but this time I was swiping my arms nearly the entire time. You know that feeling when there's a hair on your shirt and it's tickling your arm but you can't find it? Imagine that but magnified exponentially. At least with mosquitos, occasionally there's the satisfaction of a neutralizing swat that'll take care of at least one potential itchy situation. Not so when you're a few spinny spins away from doing a glowy Frodo impression from Shelob's Lair. 

 

The history of this park cannot be glossed over, and as I stated in many travelogues, I never intend to dissuade anyone from attending any parks in the diverse and plentiful Minnesota State Park system, nor does anything I say about the hiking trails specifically apply to the park itself. But if this hike were a person in high school, it'd be the one in the group project that talked a big game and came from a locally-famous family that owned a couple car dealerships, but once it was time to produce a piece of multimedia that their second uncle twice-removed was able to do for free to help the project, they shrugged like they'd never suggested it, then skip the rest of class to go repeatedly hang out in the boys' room. 

 

With my experiences being "there's snow in my allegedly waterproof boots" and "maybe if I had a paper-thin machete-like instrument, I could at least cut a swath through this silky, sticky situation," I understand that my judgment is coming from an experiential point of view that may not apply to most of the population. However, the lack of Mille Lacs lake views is also rather surprising, given its proximity and, oh I don't know, the name itself? I'm well aware that it's eponymous of the indigenous people and not of the lake necessarily, but what can I say, I'm biased in favor of grand views of massive lakes when I go hiking. 

 

It is not a bad park, but outside of a second speedrun to beat my first for some reason, I don't anticipate a return.  

Superior Hiking Trail #1-10 - Skyline Parkway to Haines Road

Superior Hiking Trail

Map 1 - Section 10

Skyline Parkway to Haines Road

Date Hiked: May 3rd, 2025

Other Sections Hiked That Day: Map 1 - Section 8, Map 1 - Section 9, Map 1 - Section 11

 

This was one of those hikes where I wished I'd chosen to stop one section before I did, and the empty clanging of my water bottle only further emphasized that lack of better judgment. 

 

With this early May jaunt providing tremendous views of Canal Park and the big ol' eponymous gnarly bitch of a lake, it was also accompanied with a surprising level of heat to which I had not yet adjusted. After all, mere weeks earlier I was pushing myself through temperatures with a minus in front of them and questioning my life choices for pressing on through thigh deep snow in a town where they'd have to figure out where it was before even attempting to find my Shining-esque, hilariously frozen hiker face amongst the rest of the Nothing. 

 

Reflecting on these hikes now, given how long it's been since my entire summer of displacement, disappointment, heartbreak, and dearth of terrible decisions, it's hard to remember when completing this trail was the foremost goal in my mind. As of this writing, recent attempts to pick up where I left off in section 3 have led me to pick the wrong place for an entrance, be warded off by the dangerous levels of smoke being about, and also opting for paved, photogenic lakeside paths when I've been up in the arrowhead. Perhaps I'll continue finding sections to highlight on my massive poster when spring comes back around, but it feels like a different lifetime when I was pursuing this milestone, so the distinction between sections is a bit harder to recall than it was months ago when I was penning these entries as they were fresh in my mind. Life comes at you fast, and if you don't flip Ferris Bueller the bird and empathize with poor Jennifer Gray's character, you could miss it.  

 

The Brewer Park loop section is among the more difficult in Section 1, including for making Enger Tower appear much closer than it actually is, at least by hiking standards. It reminds me a lot of the bluff trails in the Hiking Club reviews, with the trails along the edges of massive hills and rocks. They make one grateful for the scenery and relative lack of leaves that haven't obstructed the views quite yet, but also for trekking poles, as one slip on the steep elevation gains and declines could make for a less than pleasant afternoon from headbanging with a rock the size of a bulldozer.  

 

While the views of the urban landscape, particularly of the gorgeous architecture that is Duluth, the scenes in distant, diorama spectacle aren't quite equal to crossing roads and dodging drivers uploading their panoramic shots with thumbs visible in the corner while driving up the hills. It may be part of the territory for section 1 before it becomes dystopian levels of rural, but it's still not what I prefer in the general context of hiking. Though by the time the trail reached lakeside, it was paltry by comparison.

Superior Hiking Trail #1-9 - Waseca Street to Skyline Parkway

 

Superior Hiking Trail

Map 1 - Section 9

Waseca Street to Skyline Parkway

Date Hiked: May 3rd, 2025

Other Sections Hiked That Day: Map 1 - Section 8, Map 1 - Section 10, Map 1 - Section 11

I had to keep reminding myself that this was the urban section of the trail. Duluth is magical that way, in the sense that you can be near a dense section of the city, but within a few steps, you're transported to something that feels like it should be 100 miles north. The noise doesn't always reflect that illusion, but Duluth does an amazing job of providing that separate immersion without the necessity of pushing onward beyond cell phone signal or bathrooms that would make characters in a Laura Ingalls Wilder setting feel a bit apprehensive. I'm sure there are people more rugged than me that laugh at such an idea, but they're also the ones who can sleep outside and not be constantly worried that there's a bug crawling on their skin, so I take any mocking condescension with a "you were raised in this shit and are used to it" grain of salt. With how I grew up, my family's idea of camping was sleeping on Grandma's couch instead of one of the guest rooms because more than my parents and sister were visiting at one time. Don't laugh, that couch had abrasive ridges that would leave imprints on my face, and my skin is so sensitive to texture that it takes over my entire internal monologue. 

Hey, it's almost like that's why I'm pushing through as much of this trail as I can before the mosquitos invade or something! Even if they aren't biting me, the feel of anything buzzing or crawling near my skin (these wounds they will not heal), fear is how I fall into a constant state of swatting around my head and getting the sensation of prickly little pointy bastards on my arms whether they're there or not, thus confusing what is real. 

Might be a stretch, but there is a Lincoln Park in Duluth and I can't not hear that shit in my head every time it's even mentioned. Say you were a teenager in the late 90s without saying you were a late teenager in the late 90s, check. 

I probably could've paid more attention to where the sections were splitting between each other, but that would involve looking at street signs and such, and my mind was indeed elsewhere along this hike. Like other sections, every mile was at least twice earned. 6 miles of flat hiking was not 6 miles of Superior Hiking, and the ascents and descents were quick to remind me of that whether I asked for confirmation or not. 

I could see Enger Tower in the distance, though the distance could've been deceptive, given how easy it is for a massive structure on top of a giant hill to stand out. It was still a good motivating waypoint, though the amount of sweat I was producing led me to once again question my life decisions and my compulsive, obsessive need to push past ridiculous and arbitrary goals no one else but me had forced onto myself. 

Superior Hiking Trail #1-8 - Grand Ave. Chalet to Waseca Street

 

Superior Hiking Trail

Map 1 - Section 8

Grand Ave. Chalet to Waseca Street

Date Hiked: May 3rd, 2025

Other Sections Hiked That Day: Map 1 - Section 9, Map 1 - Section 10, Map 1 - Section 11

With a memory of the view from the top of Enger Tower, I set out from the Spirit Mountain parking lot with the intention of reaching that park, despite both the heat and how crowded it might be on a gorgeous Saturday in the north. The first spur led me to see the ski lifts from the other side, so I knew the visibility was going to be outstanding. With no familiarity of these sections, I couldn't predict how difficult it would be to reach Enger Park and meet my ride, but missing someone who stood in the top of the tower with me that day, the next best thing I could do was pursue a scene from a memory. 

Normally a trail getting this close to a major interstate would be a turn-off, but it was the magic section of the 35, the one for which I'm always building up for someone taking the trip to Duluth and the North Shore for the first time. After two hours of mostly uninteresting highway driving, crossing over the hill and the following descent into Duluth is one of my favorite sights, and this day's hike would give me the chance to admire it as long as I wanted to from a place where I didn't have to worry about driving while sneaking glances at both the view and the first-timer's face when it unveils itself. 

Along the ridges, mud was still a factor, but not as much as it had been with a few of the previous hikes. The urban sections were naturally going to have more than just remote nature, which had both advantages and disadvantages. There was more likely to be infrastructure like bathrooms or places to fill up on water, but it also meant concrete, sidewalks, crossing roads of varying traffic flow, thus increasing the noise level from which a sensory sensitive autistic person like me is constantly trying to flee. 

Going under the 35, briefly reacquainting with the DWP trail, and heading back into the woods, my confidence was high that I could reach my goal. The heat was becoming a factor though, as I was more sensitive to it than ever before. It took so much conditioning and adjustment to complete the winter speedrun of the Minnesota Hiking Club that conversely, the heat felt more overwhelming to me than it likely would've at any other point in time. I wrote about this in my William O'Brien log for the Minnesota Hiking Club series, where 70 degrees seemed like 120 because I'd only recently been used to numbers with negative signs next to them . Year-round hiking is a series of adjustments in all capacities, but temperature tolerance is one that's constantly in flux. It's either tempering the cold and finding ways to minimize the impact it has on your motivation, or it's wondering why you're suddenly going through so much water and your chest seems heavy even though you haven't put in the miles you're used to. 

Superior Hiking Trail #1-7 - Magney Snively to Grand Ave. Chalet

 

Superior Hiking Trail

Map 1 - Section 7

Magney Snively to Grand Ave. Chalet

Date Hiked: April 28th, 2025

Other Sections Hiked That Day: Map 1 - Section 6

Damn, that's a big pokeyboi on a very skinny treetop!

This was another section with which I was familiar. The previous fall, my delusions of being ready for this trail were confronted by my obsessive need to complete every Adventure Lab in existence (if you don't know what ALs are, it's a Geocaching thing. If you don't know what that is, I can't help you. I'd say 'Google it' but even that's not good advice anymore). Autumn ere, I was working on a Lab about trails in Duluth and I used the Superior hill descent to reach the DWP, a rail trail following a similar path through the hills into Duluth proper. It involved crossing the same high bridge, but where I once stayed on the flat and paved route, this time I followed the blazes into the hills and rocks. 

But not before I saw this guy while crossing that bridge! I've never seen a porcupine in the wild before! While my constant running paranoia mistook every noise for a bear or mountain lion making chomps out of my solo hiking ass, giant porcupine in the tree nearly passed me by. But, even from across the bridge, I couldn't help but be like "what's that giant thing up there?" As a birdwatcher, I'm used to mistaking vague bird shapes for branches or bunches of leaves, but... Are they that excellent of climbers or are the birches that deceptively robust?

This is a smaller section of the 14 in Map 1, and my views of sections will alter dramatically by Map 2, but even then, I am devoting so much of the uniform word limit to this fella because... even if only doing this section, nostalgia and spinyguy are really all I remember. I mean, this was the same hike as starting off with Ely's Peak, which is like having Ospreay/Omega as the curtain-jerker but featuring a tag match with no stakes in the main event; not necessarily bad, but damn is it difficult to follow (If you don't know wrestling either, just insert a comparison of whatever subculture is appropriate for your comparison). 

I could talk about how the final patch approaching the chalet had become a miniature waterfall, but it's spring in Duluth. The mud comes with the territory, despite what some in reviewer culture would have you believe. I could talk about how I picked this stopping point because the Munger Trail was right across the street, but I've referenced that hike so many times that you're likely filling in the background of it yourself if you've read this blog more than ever. I will say though, after it took me over three hours to get the six miles of these two sections, the steady grade going back up the hill only taking an hour and ten minutes was a pleasant surprise, as well as a marker of how far I'd come. 

But I was honestly just relieved for the thankfully easy hike to loop back up.

Superior Hiking Trail #1-6 - Becks Rd. to Magney Snively

Superior Hiking Trail

Map 1 - Section 6

Becks Rd. Trailhead to Magney Snively

Date Hiked: April 28th, 2025

Other Sections Hiked That Day: Map 1 - Section 7

My plan of working on the Superior Hiking Trail on Saturdays lasted an entire two of them. Given the previous series about the Minnesota Hiking Club, the only surprise about that is likely that I made it an entire week without jumping ahead. Even with how exhausted I felt staring at the impending Ely's Peak at the end of the previous hike, temptation won out. When the weather looked to be relatively cool and dreary, and with the season of bugs and North Shore crowds approaching, I imagined that this section might be one of the more popular weekend spots. Therefore, a cold morning summit felt like a good way to knock some miles off the highlight poster. (Why does that sound dirtier than it is?)

Only one other car was at the Becks Road trailhead that morning, as compared to the overflow situation that past Saturday. further validating my decision. Granted, that one car was one of the "Idling in the Car for Hours at a Time at a Park" Club I've seen so much of in the last few years, but I digress. 

A few flurries began to fall as I recalled the tank top weather only a couple days earlier. The FAQ on the SHT website makes sure people know that the trail doesn't control the weather's predictability any more than it manifests mosquitoes and deer ticks, because some people apparently think going through the remote northwoods in the summer has an off switch that's only not flipped because fuck you, that's why. I wonder if they think mud is also a conspiracy to piss off the rubes. 

I couldn't help but recall two previous adventures as I slowly pushed myself up the steep, rocky incline. First, that time my partner and I accidentally climbed Cougar mountain (no, accidentally is not a typo), where I was in mesh shoes, had no water, and every step on the hike down hurt my knees. How far I had come in three years, indeed. Second, my longest hike to date (as of this writing on May 14th, 2025), the 22.2 miles on the Münger Trail, likely because it was right below and I'd be taking it on the way back, but also because there was a time where that rail grade incline seemed difficult. 

Blue blazes on rocks as a guiding sign were really useful. Good invention, them trail blazes, because AllTrails can be a liar. The views were good, but some white blazes led to the actual peak, and I was already there. Why not stare down from the place at which I stared up hours earlier? I mean, it's no Unimpressive Overlook, but it's alright, I guess. It's not its fault that it can't meet the impossible standard of Unimpressive, that doesn't mean it should stop trying. 

After that though, it starts feeling like getting lost in Emyn Muil for a while (and that's not a bad thing, unless you're going in circles), but Duluth's skyview awaits.