Minnesota Hiking Club #1 - Cascade River State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#1 - Cascade River State Park

Date Hiked: January 4th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Tettegouche State Park, Temperance River State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.42

I woke up feeling dangerous. 

Of course my number one-ranked hike was going to be in the January 4th trilogy. I told you all along what that day's hikes meant, beyond the Hiking Club accomplishments themselves, but to me as a person overcoming ridiculously loud demons trying to destroy me from within. 

Is this technically a mountain? By Minnesota standards, I suppose it is. By Washington standards? It's a nice hill, but don't mistake that comparative analysis for being an easy climb. I could easily say that I climbed a nice hill, but instead I'm going to say this:

I climbed a fucking ice mountain in a -20 polar vortex after two strenuous hikes already that day! Fight me! 

614 feet of elevation gain can be hard, but imagine doing it on pure ice. 3.2 miles can be difficult, but imagine doing it when the temperatures are low enough to merit severe weather advisories. The weather could get doppelgänger Cooper'd for all I cared, it didn't stop me. I'm not saying it was a smart decision, but I did it. 

I pulled up in the parking lot at 3pm. Sunset was at 4:30pm, and the estimated time of completion was 1 hour, 30 minutes. No time for rest. And there's no way the temperature didn't drop even lower by the time I finished. I have no problem putting myself over for how difficult this was on even an experienced hiker like myself. I made it to Lookout Mountain as the sun was beginning to set, knowing I'd have an intense descent over rough terrain and a less-maintained trail. I still took a few minutes to vibe and take in the views of the Big Lake and the forest. Even with that, I made it down in time. Barely, but I did. 7 minutes to spare, to be exact.

By this time, my knees were swollen from the three hikes with considerable elevation gain, my skin hated me for the exposure to temperatures comparable to the location of the Edmund Fitzgerald in its current condition, and I had updated precisely no one on my activities so they couldn't talk me out of it.

Instead of filling them in right away, I made the drive to my favorite small town, Grand Marais. Like this park I'm sure, probably filled with tourists and hoards of people when the weather is good, I instead got to take in a Grand Marais sunset with only a few others.   

What I'd just done, at Cascade River and on that day, was dangerous, ill-advised, and unnecessary. But, if you've gathered nothing else from these 67 stories: 

Doing things the hard way, alone, without help, and without telling someone the danger I was in is who I am as a person, for better and worse. 

I am E.A. Moon, the Wanderloon. 

I love you. You know who you are. 

Sorry I didn't tell you until afterward. 

But...

Seriously...

Would you expect anything different from me?

NOTE: This piece was written on April 11th, 2025, concluding this series more than three months before the every-other-day posts will reach this entry So, if you need further proof of the "who I am as a person" claim, note that I wrote about the Hiking Club the same way that I did the club itself: faster than anyone needed to in a way nobody asked me to do, but I worked so far ahead for no other reason than I could and I chose to.