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.
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