Memorial Day weekend is just a few days away; it’s when summer gets real in Minnesota. The holiday really sneaked up on me this year, but that’s how summer is.
Soon, the blur and bustle of the season will be the only existence imaginable. A blast of hot and humid weather starting last weekend was a wake-up call that the season is underway, and I started thinking about how Minnesotans will celebrate the weekend.
Everyone knows that Memorial Day weekend marks the start of summer in Minnesota. The current blast of hot and humid weather has gotten a lot of folks pulling out the shorts and sandals, and looking for ways to enjoy our state’s great outdoors.
We’ve picked some of the most promising events and opportunities for fun scheduled in Minnesota’s state parks and trails this holiday weekend.
Whether you’re looking to learn about nature or history, or walk through the woods looking for birds, or even just get some pancakes, we’ve got something for you.
Memorial Day is not just an extra day off work, of course. It’s also a solemn holiday for all the brave Americans who have made the ultimate sacrifice for our country. Take a moment while you’re enjoying the parks and trails this weekend to remember those that never got the chance to, so you could.
I still don’t quite know what I’m going to do with myself this weekend, but I’ve certainly got a few ideas. Head on over to the magazine’s website for seven interesting events at parks around the state, as well as a special bonus featuring some paddling opportunities!
Near the 1850s Point Douglas-Superior Military Road, Wild River State Park
There is a concept that I’ve struggled to state clearly in the past about home, but I have come to this: It is home because I love it; I love it because it is home.
The author and theologian Tony Jones lives in Edina, Minnesota, two blocks from his childhood home. He has always lived within five miles of it. In a recent blog post titled “Why I’m Staying Put,” he offers a defense of the well-rooted. (And yes, we have a tendency to be defensive.)
Why have I stayed put? There are several reasons:
First, I like it here. Minnesota is a beautiful, fantastic, seasoned place, filled with genuinely good people. I like the culture, and I know it. And the Twin Cities makes just about every list for best places to live, bicycle, run, etc.
Second, the land. My family owns some woodland about 120 miles north of my house. I want to spend the rest of my life within a couple hours of that, my spiritual home.
Third, influence. Because I know this place and I know these people, I’ve been invited to serve on some youth advocacy committees, I was a volunteer police chaplain for ten years, and I hope to run for public office (probably school board) some day. Of course, none of this is only available to someone who stays put, but it seems a lot more natural to me since I’ve been rooted here.
It should be said that the fourth reason is his divorce and the subsequent shared custody, but it’s a long story and, fortunately for me, I don’t have that aspect to relate to. Those first three are compelling, though. I would add that, in addition to the influence aspect of knowing the place and its people, there is also simply the joy of the relationships one can build with family and oldest friends.
This is not to say that I don’t admire people who move away. I love to travel, and almost anywhere I go I enjoy thinking about what it would be like to live there, maybe just for a while. Sometimes I’m envious of the nomadic for choosing the place where they want to live the most, and living there. To me, it feels like the place chose me.
I put on an old pair of waterproof hiking boots, a war-torn rain jacket, and a big ugly hat and I headed out on the Hjelmar Road.The Hjelmar Road leads to the Hjelmar land, that old Hjelmar Huff, a Norwegian, homesteaded in 1884. My grandfather, a Norwegian married farmer, bought the little six-acre patch of land from his son August in 1922.
I’ve hiked, skied, Jeeped, cut wood and hauled hay on that old road most of my life. I shocked wheat and oats in the Hjelmar Land, camped in the summer and dug a snow cave in the winter. I shot my first deer here and picked blackberries by the quart.
Dave goes on to say that every child, every person, deserves to have such a place, and to experience all their lives the mystery of what that attachment means. I agree, but I also agree with the second part of what he gets at: that not every kid can have a 300 acre family farm to grow up on and grow old on, but we can all have attachments to nature through public lands and waters.
A great-great-…-great-grandfather of mine rode a boat over from near Trier, Germany in 1851. I visited the village when I was traveling in Europe in 2003. The thing I remember the most was the bus ride to it; how the rolling farmland looked so much like the Wisconsin where he would ultimately settle. Even he, who was willing to leave everything he knew behind, must have found comfort in the landscape.
* Disclosure: I am currently doing some writing, Web and social media work for Minnesota Trails magazine.
Next Saturday, the Kinnickinnic River Land Trust will organize crews of volunteers to fan out along the river’s 22 miles and pick up trash as part of an annual event. It’s a good spring cleaning for the premiere trout stream in the St. Croix River watershed.
I just completed an update of their interactive map, to help with the effort. A couple years ago, I created a Google Map displaying all the public access points to the river. At the time, I mostly located those maps by cross-referencing an old PDF map with satellite imagery. But, since I created it, some of the points have been found to be inaccurate, and there have even been a few new ones created along the river, with new DNR parking lots for anglers (or trash picker-uppers).
Additionally, in order to best organize the effort, the Land Trust staff split the river into seven sections, with 3-5 access points per stretch, and they wanted to have the map easily reflect those sections. So, I got to work.
This time around, Land Trust Conservation Programs Manager Eric Forward sent me a document with precise GPS coordinates for all the access points, as well as names for each, and notes for some. I used Google’s Spreadsheet Mapper tool for the initial input. I thought it was going to help me to get to final product, but either what I wanted to do isn’t possible in the tool, or I wimped out before I figured it out.
After entering all the points and their names into the Google Docs spreadsheet, I viewed the dynamic Google Map created with the data. At this point, all was fine and dandy. In the left-hand “table of contents,” the access points were handily organized by folders matching the seven river sections. Updating data would be as simple as updating the spreadsheet.
But… it wasn’t perfect:
All the access points had identical markers, rather than separate colors/numbers for the different river sections.
The content that was displayed when you clicked on a marker was a mess, with multi-column layouts that I didn’t need. I needed the name and number of the access point and a little room for description; the Land Trust’s logo and a link to its website would also be nice.
The Spreadsheet Mapper tool provides six templates and–this is where it might be possible but I didn’t figure it out–I couldn’t edit the templates to get the layout I needed or the place marker unique for each section. I also had seven sections of river and couldn’t create one more to accommodate all seven sections.
It seemed difficult to divorce the map from the spreadsheet back-end, so simply modifying the map right in Google Maps was problematic.
So, under a bit of a time crunch, I decided to get a little more manual. I exported the map as a KML file, and then opened it up in Google Earth, where I could pretty much edit to my heart’s delight. Then I created seven unique numbered markers, pretty simple black circles with unique fill colors, and I assigned each of these markers to a section of river. Lastly, and this was perhaps the most tedious, I created a basic HTML template and customized it for each of the 27 access points to include the necessary information.
In this month’s Minnesota Conservation Volunteer, the Department of Natural Resources treasured by many in the state, a story by Michael Kallok covered the allure of trout fishing during the Hexagenia mayfly hatch. While to most trout anglers, mayflies mean Blue-winged olives, Hendricksons, Sulfurs and so on, to the non-trout angling world, mayflies are Hexes, the giant flies that hatch on damp June nights, sometimes making roads and bridges impassable due to their sheer number.
But that’s not to say that the Hex is ignored by trout anglers. Anything but. There is a mysterious quality to the hatch; the big bugs and the fish that eat them only become active after sunset, and Hex hunters return with stories of fishing by ear—casting toward the sound of a rising fish and striking blindly at the hungry splash when one’s fly should be in the right place.
As with all fishing, it is about more than the catching. Hex aficionados also boast of stumbling along river banks in pitch black, and of the strange encounters only experienced after dark on lonely trout streams.
Kallok’s article focuses on the Straight River (PDF), which is not much discussed in Minnesota’s trout fishing community. Perhaps it is better known than I assume, and perhaps it has been quietly–secretively–fished by otherwise extroverted anglers. In any case, the secret is out now, and I’d be interested in a follow-up article to cover what this year’s fishing experience is like. I bet the Straight devotees, some of whose decades of dedication to the river and its Hex hatch was apparent in the article, won’t be so lonely this summer.
As the sun creeps toward the western horizon, swallows feeding high in the air offer hope for a spinner fall. At 9 p.m. Bill and Edie paddle downstream to settle in to other promising spots and wait for the bugs to arrive. Up above, a loose swarm of Hexagenia appears like specs of static in the darkening sky.
The river has taken on the tint and texture of a blued gun barrel. On the otherwise silky water, I focus on a small dimple, and it suddenly transforms into a pair of upright wings. Soon, graceful sailboat-shaped forms are popping up everywhere, lingering briefly before taking flight.
Hex are emerging!
I clip the spinner pattern from my leader and select a pattern to imitate an emerging Hexagenia. As I struggle in the dark to tie a new knot, a pod of trout begins to feed enthusiastically. One leaps clear out of the water, as if paying tribute to this time of plenty with an elegant waste of energy.
A commotion downstream, sounding like a nervous puppy’s first swim, precedes Bill’s exclamation: “Fish on!”
Moving into the 21st-century, the DNR provided a YouTube video to accompany the article featuring some photos and short video clips. Looks like great paddling, if nothing else!
I spent much of Sunday afternoon and evening traipsing through various woods in the St. Croix River valley, alternating between scanning the forest for standing dead elm trees and studying the detritus of the forest floor. My reward was a handful of morel mushrooms, and several photos which fail to do justice to what a beautiful, peaceful Sunday it was.
The few mushrooms we found were the leftovers at a spot that had already been visted–and harvested–by another hunter. Not a surprise, as it’s a popular spot for such foraging. Whoever it was got quite a haul; there were lots of big broken-off stems that we could only admire enviously.
After this first fungus foray, I see there are a few strategies for successful mushroom hunting:
Get to a well-known spot before anybody else
Discover an unknown spot and keep it secret
Make friends with a landowner that has a good mushroom spot–share your bounty
I also came to understand just how finicky these mushrooms are. They like to grow at the base of dead elm trees, but the trees shouldn’t have been dead too long. They like a little bit of sun but not too much. The soil can’t be rocky. It should be moist but not wet. And so on. All the conditions coming together is a rare thing and I get why people post boastful photos of their bounties when they hit the bonanza.
After collecting what we could at the well-known spot, we pursued strategy #2. We walked about four-miles along some railroad tracks, investigating every dead elm we saw, and a lot of other shroomy-looking spots. Our biggest obstacles seemed to be that the railroad embankments were too steep and thus too well-drained, or the plentiful springs coming out of the limestone bluffs made for vast boggy areas that were also unsuitable.
Fiddlehead–mushrooms weren’t the only bounty of the day.
Public land, public trees
Something about the aesthetics of railroad tracks…
A spring-fed cascade in springtime.
Diversity of life, from plum trees to white pines.
A bridge I have more frequently seen from the water.
I have published two volumes of a chapbook titled "Esker." The most recent volume, "Nowhere Else But Here," was released in January 2010. It features writings from every day of June 2009 in an old Japanese form called haibun.
Posted: May 25th, 2010 
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Memorial Day weekend is just a few days away; it’s when summer gets real in Minnesota. The holiday really sneaked up on me this year, but that’s how summer is.
Next Saturday, the 
