Goodbye Hiawatha - Day 411

We finished the Hiawatha National Forest trail miles today! This is a beautiful section, and very much like my home trail because the hills are stabilized sand dunes.

The trail climbs to the top of a ridge and undulates along the ridge for several miles. We made it to the Eric Cox bench just at the right time for our snack break.

There are some decent views over the forest from there, but the neatest thing is that you can see the Mackinac Bridge, 8 straight-line miles away.

We hiked little farther, and I stopped dead in my tracks and said, "This is a really nice piece of benched trail." Guess what? Bill said this is the exact place where Bill Menke (you may recall all the times previously that I've invoked his name where perfect trail has appeared) led a training session on how to build good trail.

This is the Hiawatha Shore-to-Shore Chapter section of trail. I want to tell you how much great work they have done since I last hiked this in 2009. There are a whole lot of places where they have moved eroded trail to more sustainable locations and have benched trail around the sides of hills instead of going straight up to the top and down (not fun for hikers, not good for preventing erosion). Yes, it was hilly, but it wasn't a grueling slog.

Finally, we got to the easy part. The last few miles were on a former Soo Line rail trail. Our pace picked up to 3 mph.

And then we reached the I-75 overpass and the car!

This was the longest day I've done for a while. But the temperature was perfect at around 40 degrees. We are going to try to sneak in a few miles early tomorrow before some serious rain hits.

Miles today: 12.0. Total miles so far: 4565.4.

See Br-r-r-r-r-evoort