Bonus-Cliff Mine

Perhaps one of the best places for true cemetery afficianados---the Cliff Mine Cemetery up in northern Michigan. No people around, a hike to get here, and, once done looking at the stones, rock piles to go hunt for native copper. Beautiful!

The Trickle that Starts It All

Grey day here, so how about a picture of the headwaters of the Mississippi. So small you can walk across it.

Green

Nice collection of greens from an area Scientific Natural Area.

Another St. Croix River

This one, the Willow River flows into the St. Croix north of here near the town of Hudson. It is another gorgeous river with a state park on it. Unlike the Kinnickinnic, which has the Kinnickinnic State Park on it, you can camp at Willow River. The hike to the water fall is worth it, but for purity of experience, the trail on the north side of the river is the best.

Four Hours Away

I tend to bad mouth the upper Midwest. Not because it is a bad place, but rather because there are no bits of greatness to it, no Grand Canyon, no ocean, no jaw-dropping beauty. I like to use the "Four Hour Rule" as my basis for griping. Take San Francisco. A four hour radius gets you to the Sierra Nevadas, Oregon, LA, Yosemite, etc. Four hours from us, gets you to the Wisconsin Dells and South Dakota. Whooooo-hoooo! The Boundary Waters sits right at the upper limit of the "Four Hour Rule," and while it is not the most incredible thing you will ever see, it has to be near the most peaceful. You will never get quiet like you get in the BWCA. When I took this picture, my daughter and I were alone at the edge of the lake. A slight ruffle alerted us to a deer, about two hundred yards away, standing in the water. It was so quiet we could hear the deer from two football fields away simply standing in the water. Incredible!

Crystal Cave

Just down the road in Spring Valley is the largest show cave in Wisconsin. What you see here is pretty much what you get. Great soda straws and a neat history, but not a lot of huge color, crystallization, or variety of minerals. There are some fossils, and the terrain outside the cave is truly beautiful. Worth a visit if you end up in the area.

Nearing the End

Last week, temperatures in the nineties. This week, butting up against freezing. To those who have never lived in a climate like this, it is hard to understand. We don't get the ridiculously dramatic, like hurricanes or Sierra Nevada snowfalls, but we get big winds in the form of tornadoes and we get temperatures that go from -40 to 100 degrees. We have about two months now where we won't need air and (hopefully) we won't need the furnace either. It is the nicest time of year. Bugs are dead or dying, and we get to see the colors change. It's always fun to watch the squirrels hard at work, too.

Bonus Shot

My eight-year-old daughter was making some griping noises about not being featured on the Kinnickinnic Daily Photo Blog. Here she is with her winnings from a crane machine in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. She owned that machine, feeding in ten quarters, losing only twice. One time, she picked two animals at once. It might be her number one talent. When she loses, it usually means the machine is rigged with weak claws.

Happy, but I still want a new camera.

I am not happy with my digital camera. Yes, it is convenient, and yes, I am happy to not be lugging my old EOS around; but, and it's a big but, I am never happy with the color that my Canon digital captures. Part of the problem is the convenience. I don't concentrate, and I don't spend the time on the shots that I used to. Trade-offs! It is so nice to have the camera close at hand to snap shots of things I never would have normally got, but the color sucks. Here's a shot of a Hemlock Varnish Shelf, Ganoderma tsugae (I believe), where the camera did a mind-numbingly good job. This was exactly the way it looked, and of the shots I took of fungi, this one perfectly captures the way the thing felt, too, leathery and soft, yet, very there-for-the-long-haul.

Mixed Emotions

State fair time across the border in Minnesota (we get nothing but Minnesota news way out here in western Wisconsin, so technically it is our fair). Combining the culinary train wreck that is Spam with the gift of the gods, cheese curds, could be a top ten historical sin. Did not try them, out of protest more than anything. They were probably good, for it takes more than congealed pork fat to ruin manna (depending on your Biblical interpretation, meaning "best choice of foods" in this instance).