The Low Adventures: Trekking Superior Hiking Trail Part 1: Introduction

The Low Adventures: Trekking Superior Hiking Trail

Part 1: Introduction

By Tim Krenz

November 29, 2016

Why on god's otherwise even-leveled earth did I spend two or three weekend trips a year, or sometimes 8 or 9 days, climbing trails with a heavy backpack, if those trails always went up and up hills and moutainish peaks, instead of the nice, level ground between them; or walk almost 800,000 steps on the soles of battered, smelly boots; to cover almost 280 miles of trail, sightseeing detours, and spur trails to the car and back; why did I endure warm or freezing rain, snow, and depressive heat that made fog over Lake Superior on hot, sunny, windless days; for what did I trek in total from Two Harbors just north of Duluth, MN, to the Canadian border, and not in a straight line or in any sections of trail that made any logical order or plain sense in the way we did them?

For almost a decade now, I pondered that question: The “why did I do it?” question. What compelled me to challenge my overweight body and my smoker's lungs, my crooked knees, my butt-grabbing pain to literally carry myself over the next step or hill? The severe challenge of the Superior Hiking Trail now rests in a hubristic memory, a feat that I did that which so many others did in much better style, and could do in a few weeks what took me and my worn out body six years to find time to finish.

I swore at those hills that never stopping climbing. I cursed the rain that forced me to eat cold suppers of some dehydrated crap in a metal bag, in my tent, while I wrote the journal of this low, not high, adventure. I know the answer now, to most of my questions, and the “why did I do it?” question. I will admit no guilt, other than accomplice in this particular story of my life. The camping high court of adventure gods would not condemn me for my act of extended temporary insanity. Why did I trek the Superior Hiking Trail? Well, I blame my good friend, Craig.

The story, of course, has its beginning. This story began in November of Two-Thousand-and-One. By then, I had lived in my apartment for over two years, since around the time Craig returned from Africa with his Peace Corps fiance, Jennifer, the daughter of a Kansas pastor. The apartment on main street Osceola, WI, itself possessed many qualities besides spacious rooms. It owed a view from its upstairs window of Wilke Glen and the Cascade Falls, and rebounded the sound of crashing water to white noise me asleep or into relaxation whenever I left the window open

Craig still calls that the ultimate bachelor writer's pad. Aside from the window views from the top of the corner building, downstairs, I could sit on the sidewalk at the coffee shop next door, and I could walk to the public library or the brazier for ice cream, both of those within one block. Most of all, as Craig said, I had a trout stream and the Mill Pond kitty corner across Cascade Street. I lived an idyllic, though rather empty life. Of importance to me, two months before that day in November 2001, I committed to significant changes in my personal and spiritual life, heretofore run rampant in lethargy and slackness. I had barely begun that razor's path of enlightened learning, but I knew fuller, more purposed and even some deliberate living lay ahead.

That November Saturday, Craig brought his family to Osceola to visit his parents, and he stopped by my place alone to talk about Bill Bryson's book, A Walk in the Woods. Then he asked me to trek the Superior Hiking Trail on the northern Lake Superior shore together with him. While I fitfully watched a tense, and ultimately disappointing, Michigan-Wisconsin college football game, Craig talked. And he talked. And, . . he talked. The idea deeply intrigued me. I asked questions, but his answers always came clouded with no certainty as to how many years of weekend camping it would take us to complete the trips. But if anything happened to me, he promised get me off the trail, even if it took several trips (Huh?).

I always enjoyed camping, as a kid with my family, and in Boy Scouts. I always wanted to do long distance backpacking. With my new commitment to more vigorous, actual living, instead of dreaming, I eventually said, “Craig, I'll do it!” I felt enthused, and honored, that my good friend since college years, (we did not know each other in our smallish high school), asked me to go on this great adventure.

“Tim, let's go for ride,” Craig said. “My dad let me take his classic car today, his classic, mint conditioned car. We'll ride in style and talk more about it.” I did not know that Craig's dad had a collector's car, and I knew nothing about hot rods or “muscle cars,” so as the football game entered halftime, we went out the downstairs door and into the garden out the back of the shops.

We walked through the parking lot on that cool, cloudy fall day, and I asked Craig, “Where's the car?”

“Right there,” he pointed, at a classic and mint car. I looked at this immaculately-conditioned white car with a red racing stripe along its length on the side. Craig drove to my place that day in a great looking, flawlessly preserved, Ford Pinto. Although we had to wait for spring to trek the trail, the real adventure just began.