Up North

We celebrated our ninth wedding anniversary by hiking eight miles to Durfee Creek and back.

at about 2:30 that afternoon, on a day when i would normally be at the Sunday Planning Meeting, i was sitting on a mossy birch log, eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

the boys were great. the weather was great. everything was great. every day, we read all morning (i read three books, plus parts of two more; i have broken the back of "ulysses," though i haven't quite finished it yet, and i have fallen deeply in love with "lonesome dove"), hiked for three or four hours in the afternoon, and then went back to the cabin for the evening. the cabin had a DVD player, and we watched some old movies: "the graduate," and "out of africa."

here's the view from our cabin window:



not really our cabin; we rented it for the week. here are the boys on the trail:



here's your faithful blog correspondent, gathering material for the blog with her two able assistants:



on the one day when it was spitting rain (all the other days were sunny and quite nice for hiking), we drove to the end of the gunflint trail to see the fire damage from earlier this year, when they had feared that the whole gunflint would burn. it was quite stark--pine trees that were nothing but burned sticks in the dirt, and rocks that had been burned clean of all moss and lichen and vegetation. it looked quite novembery. but the undergrowth has already sprung back, green and vibrant.



here's a little movie of the boys on the trail. i wish i could do Smell-O-Vision; the fragrance of the forest was so fresh and piney--it was the smell of wet cedar and pine needles and decaying maple leaves.