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.