Clearly I’ll Do Anything for a Post: Highpointing in Northern Minnesota

Suggested prereading: Blog Buddy Meet-Up #5: The Shores of Lake Superior, Minnesota, USA

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With France and Andorra as the focal point of our summer travel, we knew all other adventures would need to be local, and because we’re getting ready to sell the Bobbie (😢), we thought we’d kill two birds with one stone two mosquitoes with one slap (foreshadowing) by combining one final travel trailer trek with a couple of highpointing endeavors.

We made our way to what Minnesotans call the “North Shore of Lake Superior,” what everyone else in the world would probably call the “Southwest Half of the Northwest Shore of Lake Superior,” and what we now call “The Mosquito Coast.”

Source: northshorevisitor.com

Arriving at Temperance River State Park, we alighted from our vehicle in woodsy campsite #35 and were greeted by a horde of attack mosquitoes, the likes of which would bedevil us the entire trip. We set up Bobbie as quickly as we could manage, slap-slapping the whole time and yelling at each other to “Keep the damn door closed!” 

Are they aedas vexans or coquillettidia perturbans? Probably the satanic offspring of crossbreeding:
aedas tormentas horibilis vexans perturbans.

We then practically ran to the lower campground to meet Diana and Pat, who were lucky enough to have a site near the shore, which was both scenic and practically mosquito-free—a just reward for having to lug a job lot of camping equipment onto a plane.

Crossing the Rubicon Temperance River . . .

. . . to meet our hiking companions.

After some “get to know you, even though I kind of know you” chitchat and our first rousing game of stone skipping, we made for a local lakeside restaurant.

Look at that wind-up. Someone call the major leagues!

It was there that we plotted our assault on Eagle Mountain and also where I demonstrated the correct technique for eating a hamburger in a way that prevents all most of the toppings from squeezing out the back (a big thank you to An Orcadian Abroad for inspiring me to research and ultimately master this refined and sophisticated approach to burger consumption). Forgetting to get a picture at the restaurant, I got the husband to grill some burgers at home after the trip so I could demonstrate the method. Behold:

Pinkies go under the burger. So simple, yet so effective.

The next day—the day of our long-awaited summit push—I pulled my trademark Early Morning Campground Wake-Up Maneuver:

I’m not trying to be a jerk, but I need my coffee. I blame Nespresso® for making such a clamorous machine.

Adequately coffeed-up, we made the nearly hour-long drive west to the trailhead, where we doused ourselves in bug spray and where I marveled at Diana’s taunting of the hellish buzzers with her brazenly bare shoulders. That girl’s got guts.

For the next 2½ hours, we climbed a muddy Eagle Mountain Trail Trail of Torture as we played an incessant game of Whack-a-Bug, slapping, brushing, and blowing hungry mosquitoes out of our faces, off our necks, and away from our limbs, causing me to silently wonder at the symptoms of West Nile Virus and how long they would take to appear. 

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  Camp at Whale Lake? Yeah, right.

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  Mosquito birthing pond

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Using conversation to distract ourselves from the winged onslaught, the roulette wheel of topics eventually landed on chest freezers. It was at this point that I imparted my most sagacious life advice—a nugget of wisdom that made even the hamburger-holding demo seem pedestrian: never get a chest freezer. Our hiking companions seemed to take the major appliance warning to heart and I do believe that a small upright overflow freezer is in their future, thanks to my intervention.

Inconvenient black hole of freezer-burned mystery meat

Get this instead

Near the top there was a scenic viewpoint with enough of a breeze to permit a brief photo stop before we were set upon again and forced to keep moving.

Then it was back into the dense forest for a few more steps through clouds of buzzing blood suckers to reach the actual summit.

I figured Diana would attempt a handstand up there, so I countered with the only move I have: Boat Pose.

In fact, Diana did attempt a handstand, but was she successful?

You’ll have to read her blog to find out.

On the way down, I took the lead and was dismayed to discover that the vanguard bears the brunt of the skeeter army onslaught.

Yukking it up while I act as a mosquito shield up front. Diana doesn’t look harassed at all. Are they even biting her?!

Hiking Hickeys . . .

. . . and Highpointing Hematomas

We celebrated our feat with a stop at North Shore Winery, where Pat and I got wine while Diana and the husband went rogue and ordered cider. It was here that fatigue set in and I declared a dire need for a nap. Was it the alcohol, the mosquito-fraught hike, or the onset of Zika Virus? Probably a little of each.

With Minnesota’s highest peak hiked into submission (and hundreds of mosquitoes slapped into oblivion), we said our goodbyes to Diana and Pat the following morning and parted ways. The husband and I weren’t finished with northern Minnesota just yet. We’d dragged our bikes up north with us in order to cycle the state’s highest road. Braving still more bites to break camp, we drove a different route west for nearly an hour, to the exact GPS coordinates of The Middle of Nowhere. Pulling to the side of a deserted dirt road, we exited the vehicle only to be swarmed by a pack of voracious mosquitoes that clearly hadn’t tasted human blood in weeks and made the Temperance River and Eagle Mountain buzzers look like vegetarians.

Plan aborted.

Like Hitchcock’s The Birds, but with Minnesota’s State Bird

Denied the opportunity to actually cycle his bike, the husband instead cycled through the first four stages of grief (DABDA: denial, anger, bargaining, depression . . .). When he got to acceptance, he sagely remarked,

Everest didn’t give up her secrets on the first attempt. Why should Forest Route Road 103?

the husband

We spent the entire four-hour ride home slapping at stowaway mosquitoes or coaxing them out the windows to what we hoped was a windy death, scratching at real and phantom bites, and discussing the best time for the husband to return north (without me, please) and get his cycling goal out of his system. And though our nightly dreams still morph into terrifying, buzz-laden nightmares, from which we wake sweaty, shaking, and slapping ourselves silly (early signs of Malaria?), there is no question that it was worth risking Dengue Fever to highpoint with blog-buddies-turned-friends, Diana and Pat.