Bluff Country (As Told by Antonin)

Hello and welcome to a crisp last Saturday of October here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is October 26th. 

Over MEA weekend, we embarked on our 6th Annual Family Camping Trip. We headed south to the Bluff Country in the R.J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest near Wabasha, MN. It was a new destination for all of us and included the requisite topography my missing-mountains husband desires. 

We have a 1998 edition of Hiking Minnesota that we use for inspiration. A quick comment before I hand the narrative over to the Fourth Grader, we also have a 2019 edition of this book and, after this past weekend, we agree that the 1998 edition includes more rigorous and/or out-of-the-way hikes (for example, George H. Crosby - Manitou State Park, which is remote and rigorous and totally worth it) while the 2019 edition emphasizes ease. A couple of pages are devoted to ranking the hikes from easiest to most difficult. Of the six hikes highlighted in the Blufflands section, 5 are labeled as easy, 1 is moderate, and 1 is difficult. In the 1998 edition, 11 hikes are highlighted, 7 are labeled moderate, 4 are considered easy, and none were labeled as "difficult." We agreed that our Bluffland hikes were correctly labeled as moderate in relation to our abilities, and compared to what we've hiked previously as "easy" and "difficult", including that hike in the Crosby-Manitou State Park.

But, I digress. Now, on to the kid.

Okay, okay. Have you hiked before, or have you not? Because I'm going to be sharing about the hikes we did and how fun they were and how bad they were. So be prepared for me to not be entirely optimistic, but some good things happened. So let's head on to our first hike: Kruger Unit.

Kruger Hike - a hike that was supposed to only take 5 miles but felt like 7 because we karate-chopped through the woods on a narrow trail instead of taking the wide, clear path of the ski trail. This hike was hard and long. I liked it because we saw this one family and there was a kid and he talked to me. Even though he didn't know me, he found bullet casings on the trail (for hunting) and he gave me three of them. We found walnuts on the trail. But then, what goes up, must come down, there were the cons of it. And the cons were that we had to walk through the forest because my dad wanted to walk through the forest "to enjoy the nature." But the hike was worth it because I found something that is very hard to find. At first, I was like, "Mom, look! I found a jar in the woods!" And she said, "Honey, that's not a normal jar, that's a geocache." She told me to open it up and write my name on one of the notepads. So I opened it, wrote my name and the date I was there and put it back. There were also a bunch of little trinkets, such as a slinky, a Mardi Gras bead necklace and a little soldier. In the afternoon, we got back to our campsite, looked for wood, and then we went to Red Wing to do another hike.

Barn Bluff - This hike was two miles, but the beginning was really steep. It was right in Red Wing and at the top there were not one, but two, nice and beautiful views. I liked the first view facing the west. We saw the entire town of Red Wing and we saw Wisconsin and the Mississippi River. The east view was so much better than the first one. Even though it was on the other side of the bluff, it was worth it. First of all, there was a really nice guy who asked me if I ever wanted to be a pirate and then he showed me a spyglass. He let me look through it. I saw a lot, for example, a factory, individual people, the river, and so much more. After that, the same guy told us about a bookshop in Red Wing. He said that if you go there for the first time you get to pick one free book. So, thanks a lot to those people. I got a Choose Your Own Adventure book and the second book in the series of A Series of Unfortunate Events. We finished that day with a beautiful fire at our campsite.

Trout Valley Unit - This one was the big boy at 7 miles long and ho, ho, ho, was it something. I guess you could call it fun. We had lunch at a big lookout over the Mississippi Bottoms and we found hazelnuts. Coming down from this hike was hard because there were big rough rocks that made walking immensely hard. We thought these rocks might be geodes, so we smashed them open. What we found instead were grainy chunks that looked like crystals, but not like geodes. The other part that wasn't fun was the Asian beetles that would swarm us in the spots where there was sunlight and no wind. 

Zumbro Bottoms - After Trout Valley we did our last hike. My sister was really crabby on this one because she only wanted to go back to the campsite. But my parents were like, "No, no, no. You're in this family and you're going to do it." So she had a whole dramatic scene. As the brother, I have a right to laugh about that. My mom started singing "If You're Happy and You Know it Stomp Your Feet." My sister was so angry, but after a few verses - stomp your feet, sway your arms, make a crabby face - she started to laugh. We also saw horses on this hike, and an iron bridge over the Zumbro River and tons of hunters. 

At our campfires, we read the Choose Your Own Adventure: Race Forever. The first night we read it, we won the first race, but then became political prisoners in the second race (in the story.) The second night, we won the first race but then got eaten by crocodiles on the second race. I learned in these Choose Your Own Adventure stories that the dangerous options are the better options.

And I can't wait for next year because we're going to the Badlands!

Playing with walnuts with my dad.