Minnesota Hiking Club #24 - Crow Wing State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#24 - Crow Wing State Park

Date Hiked: January 7th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Charles A. Lindbergh State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 3.42

It would be very easy to say that the January 4th trilogy of hikes were what led me to attempting this single winter speedrun of the Minnesota Hiking Club, especially since zero of those three have been listed yet, so the implication of how I felt about them should be obvious by now. 

But, that also wouldn't be accurate, as the trilogy was more of a single day mission statement (more on that when they come up) than the beginning of an attempt to complete the entire club before the yellow-rumped warblers start arriving in the trees. Crow Wing State Park, and specifically the photograph above, was where I truly started to feel like I was onto something with this odyssey and how it might be a unique experience to write about. And not just because the GPS tried to take me 20 minutes farther than the brown sign pointing to the left did, which was an early hint of rapid epic failure piles of sadness by a certain tech company, but that's a different travel series. 

After I unfortunately found out the loo was locked, the speed with which I intended to traverse this relatively short trail was considerable. This moment, at the confluence of the Crow Wing and Mississippi Rivers respectively, felt magical in a way that was hard to articulate. It took the words of someone important to me, who may very well be reading this, for it to truly process. An ethereal sky, a moment frozen in time, still waters where movement is more prevalent and observed; I was traversing in solitude and cold weather, but I wasn't just checking some name off a list with a stamp and a password. I was figuring out, on many levels, who I actually am; not who people wanted me to be, not who people thought I was, not who I was expected to embody, but the authentic and unfiltered Wanderloon that has always been there before the filters and societal programming interrupted or otherwise corrupted that image The E.A. Moon that writes to you of this journey in retrospect, not the one that set out to combat loneliness and seek new photographic waystones. Granted, that did happen, but I ended up with a lot more than I expected along this speedrun. 

I don't owe anyone the folding of myself that I was doing constantly in order to feel more socially acceptable or to fit someone else's definition of what identity means. I spent far too much of my life trying to be what and who people wanted me to be, but alone on these trails in the winter, my body and mind forced themselves out of those tiny boxes and Wanderloon energy radiated in a way I could no longer ignore. 

This simple, flat, beautiful hike didn't create that epiphany in a flash that I understood, but looking at that photo brought it all back in a tangible way in which I now flourish with infinite gratitude.