Logging Miles

Bicyclists on the Munger trail follow the tracks of local history.

 

Text and photography by Maureen M. Smith

As we biked the Willard Munger State Trail last May, we coasted down slopes spangled with white blossoms to wide-open views of Lake Superior. Our tires slapped the pavement, like the sound of an old steam engine chugging. Wind piped through our bike frames, like a train whistle blowing.

The sounds made it easy to imagine the historic trains that once roared along this route, carrying loads of lumber and passengers. The railroad first connected St. Paul and Duluth, and once delivered survivors from the disastrous Hinckley and Moose Lake fires.

But those trains stopped running long ago. All that remains of the original railroad is six miles of tracks, with a lone passenger train that takes tourists curving and rocking along the St. Louis River in summer. Bikes and rollerblades leave Duluth on a straighter paved trail, where the railroad ran near the turn of the century. Near Carlton, the paved trail rejoins the original railroad route to Hinckley.

When we saw the junction of the biking trail and the tracks, I marveled at this intersection of past and present. Later I’d examine historic maps to see which railroad route really came first.

To explore this human and ecological history, to glimpse scenery the first rail passengers saw, I wanted to bike the whole 70-mile trail. My trip began on a Greyhound bus, with bike in a box and handlebars jutting out like antlers. My partner, Mark, joined me in Carlton to bike to Duluth and back over a weekend.

As we biked, it looked as though spray-paint gods had speckled the woodsy hills with trillium. We spotted woodpeckers and fox holes; we distinguished gray-barked aspen from white-skinned paper birch.

Quaking aspen leaves fluttered like chimes in the breeze. Musical streams and brooks wove through surrounding ravines. Stout young cedars and taller firs grew out of rocky crags.

"How far did you bike today?" asked the manager when we checked in at the Willard Munger Inn in Duluth. If I’d realized he was the son of the late Sen. Willard Munger–environmentalist, founder of the motel, and namesake of the trail–who had also biked the entire trail in a day, I might have fibbed. Our 13 miles did not impress him.

In the morning we retraced the previous day’s ride, this time uphill from Duluth. My legs felt invigorated with the rhythm of riding. A minor sprinkle didn’t prevent us from making uneducated examinations of cones and needles, combing my new field guide to state trees, and searching for a ravine of rare hemlocks.

On the edge of Jay Cooke State Park, a scientific and natural areas sign explained how steep slopes protected Minnesota’s largest remaining stand of hemlock forest, which includes eastern white pine, sugar maple, American basswood, yellow birch, and paper birch. Fire and logging eliminated most of the state’s hemlock. A species fond of cool, moist locations, it is at the very western edge of its range in Minnesota.

At the park information center, naturalist Kristine Hiller offered to show us common spring wildflowers: wood anemones, marsh-marigolds, sessile bellworts, and large-flowered bellworts. From the forest floor uncurled ferns as well as tiny petals of pink spring-beauties and purple hepatica.

As we walked across a creaky swinging bridge, the St. Louis River fizzed like root beer over rocks and rapids beneath us. The banks had healthy stands of aspen, birch, red pine (the state tree), and once-abundant, tall white pine, now prone to blister rust. Hiller said that park staff protect white pines from disease by pruning the more susceptible lower branches.

I asked her whether the park had ever been logged. She described old black-and-white photos of barren riverbanks. "They could throw their logs along right into the river and railroad it out," she said.

Hopeful that such intense logging might have become a thing of the past, we followed a recently paved spur out of the park. South of Carlton along some railroad tracks, we saw a mammoth wall of logs stacked nearly two stories high. I lamented how few safety zones seem to remain for trees.

My spirits lifted while biking through some alder swamps. Birds I couldn’t name fluttered away—a small shorebird with spindly legs, a yellow finch or warbler, one bird the color of blue slate, another of creamy coffee. Sometimes the beauty of biking is in the mystery of the fleeting scenery.

Serendipitously, we stumbled on trail-side entertainment and free food in Mahtowa. I’d heard of festivals such as Agate Days in Moose Lake, but not of Wurst Day at T.J.’s Country Corner, a general store with a dozen flavors of homemade wurst stocked next to nuts, bolts, and handmade soap. After sampling wild-rice wurst and potato wurst, we waltzed to a three-piece polka band with tuba, squeezebox, and banjo. We may have been the "wurst" dancers, but the waltz made a nice interlude in our day.

In Barnum I realized the lodge where I’d booked a room was miles from the trail. A wrong turn added eight miles, plentiful hills, and some worthwhile off-trail deviations: a llama farm and the old gravel Military Road, which stagecoaches once followed to Duluth. Hanging Horn Village was a pleasant surprise. Built as a lakeside Methodist colony near the turn of the century, it became a band camp, then a lodge and hillside cabins overlooking a lake. According to plan, Mark left and my friend Karen joined me at the lodge.

We began the southern segment of the trail in the morning. At the Moose Lake Depot and Fires of 1918 Museum, Karen and I stared sadly at photographs of men loading caskets and digging mass graves for some of the 453 victims of the 1918 fires in Moose Lake, Barnum, Cloquet, and other northern towns. Railroad sparks and arid weather led to the massive fires.

Len Schmidt, the town’s historical society president, showed us some displays: a portrait of his mother’s family taken before most of them died in the fire, and a pile of melted coins later found in the charred house. "She was 19, working in Superior at the time, so she survived," he said.

Outside, some bright yellow loaner bikes tempted me like a tall glass of lemonade on a hot day. I could ride off light in the wind. But we continued, I on my heavy mountain bike, new panniers weighted down with field guides and writing paraphernalia: laptop, camera, recorder.

Pine scent thickened as we pedaled south past some surprisingly tall red and white pines. We studied their differences and identified scraggly jack pines and stout eastern red cedars.

Farther south, the trail meandered near lakes, streams, hilly farms, tiny towns, and all kinds of wetlands: swamps, bogs, marshes, meadows.

A tail wind pushed us along. Clusters of bright yellow marsh-marigolds fringed moist ditches. Wild strawberries and violets with purple, yellow, and white blossoms laced the higher ground; cherry trees, elder, and dogwood lined the trail. Every few minutes a discovery awaited: a white-flowering shrub more fragrant than the last, a distinctly marked black and white bird I’d never seen before.

Birds seemed to chirp warnings as our bikes approached. Swallows swooped near water. Blue jays fluttered in the trees. Red-winged blackbirds trilled in the cattail marshes.

From the trail we could see most of the town of Willow River—its general store, church, post office, bar, antique shop, bank, and barbershop. Peggy Sue took our order at Peggy Sue’s Willow River Cafe, and told us the turn-of-the-century building had been used as a clinic, post office, school, and ice cream shop.

The rest of our ride, we studied the trees that thrive in wetter soil, such as northern white cedar in swamps and black spruce in bogs. Tamaracks—which flourish in either and shed feathery soft needles each autumn—intrigued me most.

"I want to see a tamarack," I whined.

"Well, look over to your left," Karen called as the trail sliced between a farm field and a swamp. "These are all tamaracks."

Excited, I jerked my handlebars around and nearly collided with Karen. We got off our bikes and then I almost tripped over a cow skull, picked clean and now growing moss. We stepped carefully into vegetation near the bog’s edge. The young trees with light green needles looked thin, almost translucent.

"Do you see any big, tall ones?" I asked Karen.

"No, it’s new growth. It’s the first step in the succession of bogs to forest."

The weather grew cool and cloudy; we biked against a head wind and spit out puffy cottonwood seeds. We sped up, and the scenery blurred as storm clouds hung overhead.

Under threatening gray skies, we packed our bikes into the car. Then we ducked into the Hinckley Fire Museum, a re-creation of the original train depot destroyed in the 1894 fire. Director Jeanne Coffey was explaining to schoolchildren how logging and railroads made Hinckley a boom town, and a virtual tinderbox. Loggers took trunks and left treetops and branches. Small fires started and grew. On an intensely dry September day, the unstoppable firestorm ignited and killed at least 418 people. How many Ojibwe people died nearby while harvesting rice remains a mystery, since no documentation was ever found.

As I looked at exhibits showing the progression of human habitants—Ojibwe, European settlers, loggers, and farmers—I felt moved by the story of Blackfeather, a 22-year-old Ojibwe woman who canoed a white mother and children to safety. She gave them food and shelter, and made moccasins for one boy.

A larger group of survivors jumped off a northbound train from Hinckley into Skunk Lake. When we had stopped there earlier in the day, we had imagined the fast-moving fire catching up to the slow-moving train. Back then, the lake was big enough to save people. Now, it looked shriveled, perhaps dried up over time or filled in with sediment. Still, it harbored much life: a Baltimore oriole, marsh grasses, an orchestra of deep droning croaks and high creaks of treefrogs or spring peepers. We listened to a tape of frog calls to try to identify them while we drove home in the rain.

I wished we had started in Hinckley, to learn the history of the manmade catastrophe, then biked north to witness nature’s restorative powers over the scarred land. In the heavy traffic, I recalled images of the trail—young tamaracks, white pines fighting disease, and tall hemlocks still standing.

 

Maureen M. Smith is a Minneapolis free-lance writer who prefers traveling on two wheels, rather than four.