In winter it's easy to capture dramatic photos on any Lake Superior beach. You'll find lots of opportunities along Highway 61 for your own North Shore icy shoreline experience. … read more
Winter is always treacherous on Lake Superior. The 1913 storm recounted in this book still stands as the deadliest storm in Great Lakes history. Called the "white hurricane," it roared for three days. … read more
Our winter snow is finally melting and water is plunging down the fabulous streams of the North Shore. Quiet and pretty summertime waterfalls are now muddy, raging torrents. It’s a great time to explore! … read more
Just in the last few days, the waterfalls of the North Shore, from Duluth to Grand Portage, have shed their curtains of ice and are starting to roar. … read more
It's been an amazing month for skiing on the North Shore. Just when you think a thaw is around the corner, another 5-6 inches of snow comes out of nowhere, the temps drop, and the groomers carve out another perfect ski trail. … read more
The great flood of June 2012 is still receding, and we are just now grasping the full scale of its impact. While most of the attention is rightfully on the washed out roads and thousands of moldy wet basements, the trails enjoyed by North Shore hikers, bikers and nature enthusiasts have also suffered greatly. More details to come in a future post.Five days now after the rains, the first big chunks of debris have arrived on the Park Point beach here in Duluth. It's a tragic treasure hunt, sorting through all this stuff that was, until very recently, someone's backyard … read more
Right now, all that snow that fell onto North Shore ski trails is melting fast and flooding down to Lake Superior, turning trickles into torrents and making the great waterfalls in our North Shore state parks even greater.If you'd like to track just how much water is raging down the North Shore streams, you can check out these web links to real-time gauges on select streams.You'll see a graph looking something like this, the hydrograph for the St. Louis River over the last two weeks. St. Louis River (good data for the raging gorge in Jay Cooke State Park) Knife … read more
It's spring! Time to break out your fish scales. No, not the device to weigh your catch of walleye. I mean the skis you have with the grippy surface underfoot. It's March 1, the start of meteorological spring, and there is still a whole lot of snow on the North Shore. The ski season could go on for at least another month. But it's time to swap speed for sanity...and safety. The main reason people use no-wax skis is convenience. You just put them on and go. You don't have to worry about what kick wax to use. You do … read more
All of you snow lovers to the south of Duluth enjoying your winter bonanza, let me just say on behalf of all of us in frigid, low-snow Duluth: "You're welcome." See, it takes two ingredients to make a good snowfall, and we provided one of them. Without our help, it would have been a rainy day in Minneapolis, not the blizzard of the decade. Snowfall takes two things: moisture and cold. The moisture comes courtesy of the Gulf of Mexico, or if you're in the South Shore lake effect zone courtesy of Lake Superior. The cold comes from the Arctic. … read more
It's February on the North Shore. While all the other lakes in Minnesota froze over in December, big deep Lake Superior had stayed open. For one below-zero morning after another, sea smoke rose from the open water.In the last few days, winter cold finally has the lake in its grasp. What was open water two days ago off Duluth is now a vast field of ice. The satellite maps are showing a ring of ice 20 miles wide around the entire coast.The good news is, the ice is beautiful. A few more cold days, and ice anglers will take the … read more