Boundary Waters 7/02/18

Northland Camping and RV Park, South Range, Wisconsin

Time to head up to the arrowhead portion of Minnesota, and it’s a clear and gorgeous day for traveling – or anything else for that matter!

What a difference a day makes!
Yesterday, we could barely see the road!

We were going to visit their store yesterday, but parking was down the street and we just didn’t feel like playing in the rain anymore.

There’s the blue water!

You can see the ground under the cell towers today!

This is a HUGE train yard!

We had to maneuver through a series of 5-6 pretty nice tunnels to get beyond Duluth, but it was pretty easy. Easy for me to say, I wasn’t driving. We passed a sign we passed said from Duluth to the Canadian border is 145 miles. We didn’t realize it was that close! We’ll get there eventually! All in good time.

I took pictures of two of the tunnel areas.
Look how nice they are!
And each one has different pictures on it.

There’s a river entering Lake Superior making the water brown. Too bad!
If you look waaay in the distance, you can see the blue.
This was taken just outside of Duluth.

We turned inland today, away from Lake Superior, headed for the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Doesn’t that sound like a fun place? In looking at the potential for going around Lake Superior as a summer destination, we discovered the lake area of Minnesota and decided we needed to spend some time there.

This area is a 1,090,000-acre wilderness (roughly the size of the state of Delaware) within the Superior National Forest (approximately 2 million additional acres) in northeast Minnesota and is under the administration of the U.S. Forest Service.

Here’s a couple of pictures of that part of the State:

The town of Ely where we’re staying is at that black mark on the map.

And now we know why Minnesota is called “The Land of 10,000 Lakes”. I did some checking from the road (I have service this time!) and discovered that there are 11,842 lakes that are 100-acres or more and if you count the ones that are 2.5-acres or more, there are actually 21, 871!

My question is – – who actually counted all these?? An even bigger question? Who mapped them all out??

The scenery quickly changed as we headed north. There were big hills (not quite mountains) and lots of pine trees. And I mean lots! There are bazillions of acres around – even just what you can see from the road – that are undeveloped. It’s beautiful!

The open road!

Nice canoe!

And then we hit the Superior National Forest area and there was nothing for miles but pine forest lined, mostly straight road. At one point we passed a sign for the “Great Lakes School of Log Building”. How unique is that! We traveled for at least 50 miles with no one behind us, and few cars heading toward us.

We have to climb that?

Abandoned property.
As we passed, we could see there was a huge hole in the roof of the house.

We got to an area that was a bit (just a bit) more civilized and the road turned into a mass of “S” curves!

Beautiful!

Hopefully we won’t see any of those while we’re here!

And then, the ever present road work. Necessary to repair the washed out roads.

Blaine chased this guy down until he left the road.
Hey, they’re the ones who told us to go. . .

YIKES!
Who do you think would win in a game of chicken?
Again. They told us to go. . .

How often do they actually change these signs?

112 miles and two and a half hours later, we arrived at our next destination.

Arrowhead RV Resort, Ely, Minnesota

This place has the nicest campground office we’ve ever seen. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s just really nice. They offer several “extras” here, too, like an ice water jug with lemons in it (in the office), free homemade mini donuts on Saturday mornings (who doesn’t like donuts??), and an herb/vegetable garden we’re allowed to pick from. Of course, nothing there is quite ready yet, but there are some small green tomatoes on the plants, and pepper plants growing. Very nice. The other different thing here is, there are no tents or trailers allowed to camp here. We wondered why at first, but since conversing with the manager, we think maybe it’s because there’s a college just up the street. You can gain your own inference from that fact. 😊 And another potential perk of staying here? She said there’s a wolf who comes around into the field across from our coach! Wouldn’t that be a hoot?!?!?!

This evening, we walked into town (which we discovered later wasn’t really downtown yet), checked out the grocery store (but didn’t buy anything! Yeah!), stopped at the Visitor Center/Chamber of Commerce (but it was closed), went to the Red Cabin Custard Stand and had homemade waffle cones filled to the bottom and piled at least 4” over the top with scrumptious Key Lime (Terri) and chocolate (Blaine), and stopped at a canoe rental place (there’s at least 17 of those in this small town!) where we talked to a nice guy named Caleb about canoeing around here. He showed us a map and I made the comment that it seems like there’s more water than land. He agreed. Said it takes a while to get around by car. 😊 He also told us the correct pronunciation of the town. It’s not Ely (EE-lie), it’s Ely (EE-lee). He said it was named for Mr. Ely. When I asked what Mr. Ely did, he didn’t really know. Said it was “probably something to do with the mines”. Now I have to spend time researching . . . .

It seems the town was named after Samuel Partridge Ely, although for some odd reason, no one seems to really know for sure. I couldn’t find hardly any information on him. However, what I did find shows him to be a pretty great guy. As one of the founders (and chairman) of the first iron ore mine in Ely (the Pioneer Mine), he insisted that the Mine be named by a local council of native Ojibwe. And it seems his uncle, Heman (no, I didn’t spell it wrong), founded Elyria, Ohio – near where we’re from! That’s all I got.

These are the neatest flowers. They grow in little clusters. If you look, you can see it.
They’re growing all over the campground and I’ll bet these are what we saw on the side of the road today.