St. Peter's Dome in the spring!

The Mad-English teacher and I decided that we really, REALLY needed to hike.  A stress-relieving, muscle-building, worry-erasing, character-building oops, I mean, day-making sort of a hike.  I think we are characters enough!

View from the top of St. Peter's Dome

So the obvious choice was St. Peter's Dome, which is the toughest by a smidge over the Meyers Beach hike (which we we will be walking sometime this summer) that we have done yet.  Sure there was the possibility that we would be too out of shape to comfortably make it there and back (yay!! WE WERE NOT), but we planned for the day and off we went!  YES FOLKS, we remembered to bring the water AND the mosquito repellant with us!

Bottom of Morgan Falls, shot from across the creek.

We began our day with a light breakfast at the good old Pal Cafe in Park Falls, and were treated to interesting conversation by some of the locals.  And btw, we had a very nice breakfast and then  were on our way north.  Finding the Dome again was pretty easy, especially when your navigator has a good memory- I of course would have relied on the GPS, but that was mostly unnecessary.  We arrived at the Dome sometime around 9:30 and we were delighted to find that we were the only ones in the parking lot!  And the MA will be proud to know that we indeed had our pen with us and were good for the parking envelope.**

Morgan Falls

So we began with a stop at the Morgan Falls area, which is just beautiful.  It had a lot of water this spring, more than the last time, which just added to its charm.  Made it a little trickier to fjord the creek, but we did it.  Ok, so, the Mad-English teacher did it, and then talked me through it!  Rocks and I do not always agree on whether my foot can stay on them, and also my legs are not nearly as long as my companion's..... so sometimes I have to have a literal hand to get where he goes.  I have not found my confidence on those mossy rocks yet at all.

After hiking around and snapping a lot of pictures, we began the journey up the hill.  My Runkeeper tells me that the elevation change (with a little refiguring involved since Runkeeper randomly paused after I took a photo along the way to Morgan Falls) to be around 500 feet.  That is a pretty good hill I think!  The hiking trail is full of rocks and moss and roots and there was a big stretch of all mud.  Though there were a ton of mosquitos around, none were really biting, in an odd turn of events.

View from the top

We made our way up and the view from the top was wonderful! The leaves were just beginning to come out, with enough of the birches and aspen leafing out to give some lovely green and the hardwoods were there for some variation of color.  The day was fairly clear and you could see a long way.

Someone goofing around on the edge!

I mentioned in my previous post that though I was terrified, I had a much easier time with the heights than last fall.  I was still uneasy when Adam was looking over the edge, but I didn't have the stomach churning reaction that I did before.  After many photos and a quick drink of water, we began our descent towards the car.  I did find that I was a lot more confident on the way down, picking through the rocks a little easier, however did manage to slip when we were "off-roading" at one point to look at a hidden lil water fall.  No damage was really done, other than the surprise of being on the ground, which seems to be par for the course this year. (The surprise of being on the ground, that is)

Had we had actual phone reception for the majority of this trip- we could only get service while on top of the hill- there were plenty of tweetable moments that went untweeted.  I wish I could remember some of them!  But alas there is that short term memory thing getting in the way again.

While traveling down hill we encountered many more hikers, and were very glad that we beat them all up there.  It was nice to have the view all to ourselves with no sharing necessary.  At least this time there were no crazy people with bare feet or flip flops..... they would have been very uncomfortable!

Our day finished with a trip up to Ashland for lunch at the Black Cat Coffee House (Red pepper hummus sandwich, anyone?), a quick shopping trip at the Coop and a required visit to Lake Superior. It was SO COLD up in Ashland- 51 air temp, but way colder in the wind.

At one of Ashland's beaches

Nice waves today

It was another lovely Saturday to have an adventure!  And that was certainly a joy!  And just think, one more day of the weekend yet!  YAHOO!!

**so the story behind this and other veiled references is this:  When the three of us amigos went to Morgan Falls last summer, we did not have a pen between us to fill in the information on the parking money envelope.  Which by the way, is a totally unstaffed destination.  Remote one might say.  And to add to that, the metal container was stuffed, as in we had to poke the (unmarked) envelope down with a stick, stuffed.  Anyway, later that day when we got back to my place we **may** have been made fun of by the MA for putting the unmarked envelope in the container.  As in, there was no way for any official to have known if we had actually paid as our car license # was no where to be found.  Implying why did we bother!!  We are honest teachers who believe in the State Park system- HONEY- and we had to pay!  Lol.  What can I say, we couldn't help ourselves.