We began our hike with the short loop around Wirth Lake. As you can imagine, the trails were very wet and not just a little muddy. Shortly after starting out on the trail, we decided to climb a nearby hill and explore above. We came out into a clearing with trees on all sides and started walking. It was a beautiful area and I spotted a grove of pine trees that reminded me of the beautiful parks in Duluth, so we decided to go that way. The photo below is a panorama of this open clearing, with the grove of pines on the left.
As we made our way through the pines, I found the trail to be very reminiscent of Hartley Park in Duluth, MN, a park I hope to add on this blog before the end of the summer. The only problem with this trail was its close proximity to the road that runs through the park. Nevertheless, it was a beautiful area.
After our detour, we returned to the path and made our way around the lake. It was a nice trail and part of it went straight over the lake on a boardwalk. Although I didn't take any pictures of this part, it's very cool because you can see across the entire lake. From there, we found ourselves back where we started, so we decided to cross the road and explore the "highlands" as I referred to them.
This is an area of the park that climbs up towards the highway. The trail forks in many places and we pretty much just went wherever we thought was most interesting. We ended up climbing all the way to the top only to find even more off-shoots and trails going off in every direction. At the top, we found ourselves at the Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden and Bird Sanctuary. Although it was closed because of the season, it looked like a nice little spot for activities in the spring and summer. From there, we walked down the road and found another path that we hoped would lead us to a unique feature of this park: the Quaking Bog.
The path left us in an open picnic area, a spot I thought would be perfect to string up our hammocks. Cat and our friend Chris wanted to press on, however, so I abandoned my hopes of hammocking that day. We crossed the road and found a path leading to even more hiking trails.
When we got into the thick of it, we noticed there were people hiking below us and realized we had found the bog! Getting to it was harder than we thought, as we couldn't find the trail that led directly to it. So, we took a short cut and climbed down the hill, only to find we still weren't in the right place!
Eventually we made it to the floor of the bog. It was about ten degrees cooler in there, but it was a pretty cool sight! It reminded me of the Dead Marshes from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Yep, I'm a nerd), without the actual dead people! It was kind of eerie to walk through, as fog descended down on us as we went. I found some neat graffiti on one of the trees. There was a kind of boardwalk that went through the bog and in places it was completely submerged in the water and muck. In some places, it floated on top of the swampy ground and in others it dipped down, disappeared, and reemerged ten feet away. All in all, a very cool spot!
After leaving the Quaking Bog, we decided we would head back to the car. We were very tired when we arrived back at the car, but very satisfied with our hike. Overall, we hiked about 7 miles that day! Although we didn't get to hammock, I still thoroughly enjoyed our hike! It's great exercise and I slept very well that night!
Starting with this post, I am going to begin rating my hiking destinations. This park is very big and we hiked pretty much corner to corner. It has great trails, although they were icy and very muddy at this time of year. The Quaking Bog is by far the coolest thing about this park and even though we never stopped, I saw some great places for hammocking. The only problem I had with this park was the lack of directional information. The trails aren't marked very well and the map is not very helpful. We ended up using our GPS to figure out which way to go.
Overall, this park is a great place to hike, among other various activities that we didn't get to try. Below are my ratings:
Location: 9 out of 10 - very accessible to much of the greater Twin Cities area.
Difficulty: 5 out of 10 - the trails are not very vigorous, as most of them are flat or very shallowly inclined. There are some places where they get steep, but overall, pretty easy to hike this place.
Accessibility: 8 out of 10 - much of this park is open all year, and there are lots of activities to do no matter what season it is.
Variety: 10 out of 10 - like I said before, there's lots to do here!
Adventure: 9 out of 10 - this category measures how easy it is to go off the beaten path and find new places. This park has a lot of forest area and it's fairly easy to find new places to hike off the main trails.
Overall: 8 out of 10 - this is one of the best parks I've seen in the heart of the Twin Cities. There are great parks all around the metro, but some of them take a bit more time to get to, or otherwise aren't as scenic or expansive as this one.
We had a great hike here! I highly recommend this park to people of all ages. Thanks for visiting my page. Until next time, happy hunting!
~Haley
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