Minnesota Hiking Club #8 - Judge C.R. Magney State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#8 - Judge C.R. Magney State Park

Date Hiked: February 15th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Grand Portage State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.17

"I can't believe you thought that was an appropriate thing to ask!" 

Not how I would've normally expected to start out a top-ten hike essay, but despite how amazing this place is, even all this time later, I can't escape the prevailing incredulity I felt while I was there. I mentioned it in the Grand Portage essay, and I'll elaborate further here. 

But first, the park itself. After several attempts ere to start with Grand Portage and work my way down, there were only three North Shore parks left, and reading the reviews of George C. Manitou made that one feel unadvised. That turned out to be a good decision, given how it went a month later after more warmer temperatures, but I digress. Grand Portage and Magney were left, and they were very far away. Magney was closer, and even that took going through Grand Marais to get there. Whatever, it was that holiday weekend I don't care about, but the loneliness factor was getting to me, so I drove very, very far away to go on a hike and forget about life for a while. 

The straight couples did not allow me to do that. 

I don't blame them for being there. It was a nice day for February near Canada. The hills in the snow are picturesque, there's a kettle waterfall, it's a long way up and a long way back down, then back over again on the return. Maybe it's just the avid hiker in me annoyed with non-avid hikers unfairly, but when the trail is a very narrow path carved out of the snow, perhaps one selfie and not 38 would be sufficient? There are courtesies on the trail, even for tourists who aren't hikers, but not standing in the way while people are waiting to get around seems like it'd be among them. 

I don't seek out conversation. I'm originally from the east coast, but I've at least put on the mask to play the part out here in the Midwest. A brief, formulaic exchange with one person in one of these couples transpired, it was fine, commented on my trekking poles and how they should get some, but then this person asked, "so, couldn't get a date this year, huh?"

Granted, I was the only solo hiker. Everyone I encountered, which was a lot compared to most of this speedrun, seemed to be in a couple. I have special people. They were other places, like the ocean. The far northeastern tip of Minnesota is... not the ocean. I was trying to get away from that void. I didn't care about the day itself, I just missed them terribly. 

But what in the blue Minnesota Nice Hell made someone think that was an appropriate thing to ask a person? I'm not single, but even with the other factors, what if they didn't also feel like driving five hours, hiking steep slopes in the snow, and walking out on a frozen river to see a waterfall? 

This trail was snowy awesomeness, I should've remembered more about that. 

Minnesota Hiking Club #9 - Banning State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#9 - Banning State Park

Date Hiked: January 31st, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Moose Lake State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.17

The autistic special interest trap nets me a higher score yet again! Regardless, Banning State Park is really freaking cool! 

Excuse me one moment though... ABANDONED BUILDINGS! STACKS OF GIANT ROCKS! ABANDONED MINING STUFF! COOL BRIDGES! ... Okay, we now return to your regularly scheduled programming. 

Somehow it was t-shirt weather at the end of January. I certainly wasn't going to complain. Both Moose Lake and Banning are right off the 35, or at least a lot closer than the signs for William O'Brien and Wild River would have you believe. Banning is a massive state park that has its own little journey just to get to the appropriate area for the Hiking Club trail, and the snow drifts in the beginning weren't to last.

It's an odd route of intersecting trails, more than one of which I want to go back and do all on their own. Hiking Club appetizer sampler tray, you got me again. You know what you're doing. The loop itself looks like a flimsy axe in the middle of being bendy flung like a javelin. Does that make sense? Are you expecting it to this deep in the list? That's on you then. 

The trail goes from a standard Hiking Club trail trope of a walk in the woods, but descends into a skinny out-and-back trip through an old quarry. They could've gotten rid of all this stuff. There are plenty of parks built on repurposed areas that don't have evidence or cool things left from what it used to be. Not the Banning State Park's Hiking Club trail! It goes right next to the cut-out rock faces. Then there are stacks of rocks the size of glacial erratics just hanging out on top of each other. There's old equipment around. There's a massive shell of an abandoned building. There's probably even more of which I would've taken a million pictures and sent them to someone specifically had I not been in a speedrun. It was date night after all. 

This place has that undefinable quality of off-the-charts vibe, and yes I'm heavily biased because they're the vibes I specifically wanted that were enhanced by my subjective ranking system, but show me a travel writer who isn't more excited about the things they like. Throw in neurodivergent giddiness, and I am unapologetically geeking out over abandoned shit that also gives you a badass hike by the river. I make absolutely zero apologies to anyone who has a problem with unfiltered happiness. I call myself the damn Wanderloon, are you expecting a transcript of an informational brochure? I'll just be over here, skipping and posing like Toni Storm on the bridge. Watch for the SHOEEEEEEEE! I'm ready for my close-up, get the abandoned quarry as my backdrop. Dramatic pose, and.... Scene. (Yes, I absolutely did a Toni Storm dramatic pose on a bridge on this hike and there's nothing you can do about it. That's who I am as a person.)

Banning State Park is absolutely amazing.

Minnesota Hiking Club #10 - William O'Brien State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#10 - William O'Brien State Park

Date Hiked: March 14th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Wild River State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.17

We're leaving together, but still it's farewell. 

The last hike of the Minnesota Hiking Club Trail. #67 of 67 (sequence, not ranking, obviously). The 73rd stamp (I had to come back the next day to finish my book with St. Croix Islands, because the office was closed. Of course it was closed). 16th Hiking Club trail in a week. 

Apparently my limit is 15.5.

I say once again that nobody made me do this. Nobody challenged me to do the entire Hiking Club in a single winter. Nobody told me that I had to finish before March 21st. I did that on my own. 

And maybe we'll come back to Earth, who can tell?

Most of these hikes, I did in weather that had negative number temperatures, or at least the wind chill made it feel as such. I was not prepared for 70+ degrees, but conversely, that's why I chose to get it done on this day. No good weather goes unpunished in Minnesota, and while it was 72 degrees as I was hiking this trail, by the next morning it would be half that, and I know because I hiked 8 more miles without planning to at this very state park after getting the aforementioned final stamp. 

I guess there is no one to blame, we're leaving ground, will things ever be the same again?

The final mile count of 191.7, which didn't seem high on the surface, as in October of 2024 I hiked 175 miles. But all of these trails were pre-determined, passwords were needed, and temperatures plummeted (not this day, but mostly). This was an accomplishment, even if nobody else knew or cared, and even if I'd never write about it (Ha.) I did the Hiking Club, start to finish, in 82 days. December 22nd, 2024 to March 14th, 2025. Nobody could ever take that away from me. 

But, holy shit this place was crowded, and holy shit I was not used to hiking in the heat. That's different than hiking in the cold, and I paid for it exceptionally.

William O'Brien State Park, the best of the St. Croix line; its Hiking Club trail covers everything from forested walks to crossing railroad tracks. While I'd never downrate the trail itself for being muddy... I've said many times: it's MARCH in MINNESOTA, WHAT DO YOU EXPECT?! ... But the wooded areas of the trail were so incredibly muddy that I had to tiptoe through something even more slippery than the tulips. Even still, my pants were covered in mud up past the shin. 

I turned too early for the rise, and wound up bushwhacking instead of turning back around. By the time I reached the summit of the park, I was wiping sweat out of my eyes and too weak to hold my trekking poles. 

It's the Final Countdown!

I still finished. Barely, but I finished. Overheated, dehydrated, exhausted, I finished it. No shortcuts, no excuses. Certified complete, Billy Bries could not stop me. 

Minnesota Hiking Club #11 - Grand Portage State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#11 - Grand Portage State Park

Date Hiked: February 15th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Judge C.R. Magney State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.17

Did I just rank another rest stop state park hike ridiculously high? 

Yep. 

But if you can see a giant frozen waterfall on the border of Canada, are you really going to be blasè about it? If you said yes, you're a stronger person than me. 

Grand Portage State Park, near the Grand Portage of greater historical and cultural context for which I am not equipped to explain or on which to elaborate, is close enough to Canada to yell "yo what's up, eh?" and have someone respond from the other side. Though given the current cultural landscape (upon writing, April 8th, who knows how bad it's gotten by the time this gets posted?) maybe they'd apologize before telling us to go fuck ourselves, and as we nodded and got back into the Cyber Truck equivalent of a country, both in design and likelihood to spontaneously combust, we'd know we deserved it. 

Grand Portage's Hiking Club trail itself is nothing that special, but it's the experience that makes this such a magnanimously regarded trek. It isn't that long, there's not much elevation gain, and even with ice and snow everywhere, it didn't feel that dangerous. But holy shit, is the payoff worth any other factor within this Hiking Club against which it should be ranked? Obviously not, it made it this high. Though I can't help but note that I don't speak of this day with the same reverence of which I lauded the January 4th trilogy, and both of these are ranked higher than two of those three. Sometimes the statistics don't tell the whole story, but that's what this travelogue is there to do in the absence of experiencing it firsthand. 

I won't lie, before I saw those falls, I was annoyed as hell. Not because of the trails, but because during the previous hike at Magney, the trail was littered with non-hiker couples who decided hiking was what they were going to do on Valentine's Day weekend. That of itself is fine, if a bit obnoxious, but the contempt for which they held the only solo hiker there, or so it felt, made me resent all of them, and I'm not even single! 

Make no mistake, I was missing my people hard, and while I was happy for them and what they were doing, this is yet another time I ran far away toward escapism rather than deal with the shit going on in the present. Yet it caught up to me anyway. It always does. I was far better equipped to deal with it than I was on January 4th, but progress isn't always linear and dead demons don't always stay deceased. 

What's there to say about this trail itself? It's barely a hike by any standards, but it's got a giant fuckoff waterfall to pay it off. It's not even really a trail, if we're being fully transparent. But this is my travelogue and my subjective ranking system all the same. Grand Portage is amazing. 

Minnesota Hiking Club #12 - Sibley State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#12 - Sibley State Park

Date Hiked: January 12th, 2025

Other Hikes That Day: Monson Lake State Park

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.08

Just because I beat my demons' asses on January 4th didn't mean they were gone, but it did mean I had an advantage on them this time around. 

Sibley State Park's Hiking Club trail would've been a journey all on its own, but instead I spent half of it wrestling with trauma and coming out in an unexpected victory that I hadn't counted on  that morning. 

Traversing the prairie into the mystical woods of Sibley State Park, I set out in the snow and immersed myself in the silence of the woods, fresh fallen snow crunching under my every step. The rapid decrease in temperature hadn't happened yet and the trees protected me from the icy winds. The hills were rough and plentiful, my spikes gripping into the grade with all the hope in the world relying on them to hold so I didn't have an unexpected sledding journey. I never wanted a Rosebud, but more importantly, I never wanted to be Rosebud either. 

Along the way, something was said over my phone that could've resulted in a disaster from an emotional standpoint. And, at first, I let it start to fester. My brain wanted me to put it down and ignore the fire that stirred because of a misunderstood exchange. Something that bothered me took a spark and fanned it with flames that the Me of even several months prior would've dwelled on, allowed myself to be consumed by, and kept it in silence rather than assertively and calmly treating the situation with the care and deference it deserved while simultaneously hiking a small prairie mountain in a cold where my fingers shouldn't have been exposed to type the words. I hadn't woke up feeling dangerous, necessarily, but by the end of the trail, what could've been a distance-exacerbated, text-based conflict rather reached a copacetic conclusion that made me feel like we'd both grown with each other and worked something out rather than fall back on old habits and allow the spectres of our past to retain dominion over our behavior. 

Even if I hadn't gone through that during the hike, this would've still been ranked incredibly high on the list. This Hiking Club trail is freaking awesome, and I never would've expected it in this area of the state. I have no idea what it's like without the snow, cold, and solitude: the only other person I saw the entire time was someone working there to clear the parking lot. It was barely over 0, it's a longer trail, it has nearly 400 feet of elevation gain, and the snow made traversing that grade harder. 

I began this writing series to talk about Hiking Club trails, but I conquered more than the completion of a Hiking Club at an unusual pace and setting. I went out for passwords and stamps, but I really found the real E.A. Moon lurking in those snow drifts. 

I started wearing pants again, and I think I like the way they fit. 

Minnesota Hiking Club #13 - Temperance River State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#13 - Temperance River State Park

Date Hiked: January 4th, 2025

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

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.08

Hey, let's pick up right where we left off, except this is where shit gets real. 

I put on my ice spikes for the first time, figuring it out from the vague and confusing instruction graphic. I'd never used them before and I picked a hell of a day and park to hope like hell that they worked. After doing the world's coldest Slip 'N' Slide over Tettegouche State Park's Hiking Club trail, Temperance River State Park loomed ominously right off the 61, and it was clear from the parking lot that I either had to decide if I wanted to play golf or fuck around. 

This trail is a shade over two miles, but don't let that deceive you into thinking this is a quick trek, even without a polar vortex and enough ice to make you think the glaciers haven't actually retreated. There's over 200 feet of elevation gain, but there's a difference between going uphill and climbing steps carved out of smooth volcanic rock ancient river bed, next to an active river with a waterfall that's carved out of  the stone over a hundred feet straight down. One slip and you're suddenly part of the scenery. "There's the frozen waterfall, here's where a waterfall once was, there's an awkward hiker frozen in place who fucked around and found out during a polar vortex on a trail with dangerously smooth volcanic rock, steep elevation, and was 100 percent covered in ice." I once again reiterate that I'm not saying this was a good or wise decision, but I woke up feeling dangerous. I probably made it even more dangerous because I didn't tell my people what I was doing, but that was part of the process. They were all doing things with their people, and I had a feeling they'd try to talk me out of it, whether for the temperature, ice, or any other factor that went into it, and I didn't want them to have the chance. I didn't want to be talked out of it, and I didn't want them worrying about me, or thinking about me at all while I was doing this. This was my confrontation with the demons inside my head, and I gave them a double bird and told them where they could go and what they could do. 

This Hiking Club trail is goddamn majestic. Its two-plus miles feel like an ice-induced transformation, starting and finishing next to a frozen waterfall deep within jagged rock, going back and sampling a bit of that sweet Superior Hiking Trail goodness, and then descending steps nearly straight down, covered in several inches of ice, just waiting for the opportunity to teach you the error of your ways. 

I told my people what I did only after this day's hikes were done. I still had one to go, and it would be the hardest one of the three. I woke up feeling dangerous, and my demons got their asses kicked. 

My challenge: I won. 

Minnesota Hiking Club #14 - Tettegouche State Park

 

Minnesota Hiking Club

#14 - Tettegouche State Park

Date Hiked: January 4th, 2025

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

Wanderloon Ranking System Score: 4.08

It's finally here: The oft-aforementioned, life-changing, epiphanic trilogy of January 4th hikes that I haven't stopped yammering about since commencing this ranked list of the Minnesota Hiking Club's trails, and the "lowest" one is ranked 14/67. Buckle up, bitches! We're in for a wild ride on these three! 

This is the day that the Hiking Club went from an excuse to get outside and do a thing to a moment in which I had the choice of folding up, letting my demons and trauma get the better of me, and fading into the mist like a fog on the big lake upon the morning sun... or... to quote Baker Mayfield, "I woke up feeling dangerous." 

Dangerous this was, make no mistake about that whatsoever. I was not in my right mind. The New Year's Day trilogy of hikes detailed this, but January 4th is where it went from a distraction to a mission, and I cannot reiterate enough that I'm not saying this was entirely a good thing, nor would I say I recommend it, at least in this fashion. 

To further elaborate, it wasn't just cold, it was cold for Northern Minnesota. It was -17 without the wind chill, and that was just at the start. This was the first hike of the three that day, and it was partially because by the time I'd gotten up there, if I tried to go the whole way to Grand Portage, I may not have had the time to do anything else. I was hurting, my brain was making the worst of everything, my separation anxiety was at its height, and instead of spiraling into a dangerous puddle of instability, I ventured out into dangerous levels of cold, ice thick enough to do damage to any creature, and the joys/dangers of solitude in a place that is normally overrun with people when frostbite isn't a major concern.

Tettegouche State Park's Hiking Club trail is comparable to Gooseberry Falls State Park's, and not just because of its free parking and rest stop nature. It's on dangerous, jagged cliffs, and the short distance is deceiving, even if you're not treading over thick layers of ice on volcanic rock on steep elevation gains in temperatures that would make someone from the dark side of Saturn ask what the hell you were doing there. 

I did this trail without my ice spikes. When the trail started off being paved, I didn't think it'd be necessary. Within the short distance of this trek to Shovel Point, you go up, down, back up, back down, along the side, step on up, head back again, "oh shit, if I slip on that ice I'm unintentionally shipwreck diving on the coldest day of the year," I can't feel my face, "I've gotta climb all those stairs," holy shit, "what decisions in my life brought me to this point in time?" and then you have to go back. 

I made a bad decision, and it changed my life.