Duluth to Sturgeon Lake

 Sorry this post is late - we had no internet connectivity last night.

We started out the day climbing away from Lake Superior heading south.  I am pleased to report that although the climb was steady for the first 10 miles, it was not steep, so I was able to do it with no problems.  Soon after we got out of the city of Duluth we came to the:

This would be our path for most of today and half of tomorrow.  It was one of the nicer trails we have been on, except for the place where the sign said Trail Closed.  We decided to see exactly what that meant.

Not Good!  Some of our group decided to look for an alternative route, others decided to portage the mess.  I had not done a portage since my canoeing days, so I joined that group.  Turns out that a nice detour was marked which means we could have avoided the portage.

Once we got going again on the trail, we saw some new things we haven't experienced on other trails we have ridden so far.  Most of this trail again was old railroad bed, but the significant difference today was that they had to blast through rock in order to get the rails down.  That made for some pretty rock outcroppings.  The other interesting thing I noticed was that in a couple of areas where the rock walls were high above us on both sides, for some reason they painted stripes on both sides of the trail.

I don't know why.  It seems to me that if you get off the trail in an area like this, you might hit the wall, which would not be good, but I think it makes more sense to put stripes on an area of trail where there is a 20' drop off.  That would be even worse.  In any event, that isn't what was done.

The trail ran past a couple of towns, and we took the occasion to stop at a place called TJ's.  I thought of my grandson TJ, but I don't think the place is named after him.  Here is a nice picture of my fellow rider Keith sitting on a live edge bench next to a wooden cut out of the TJ character. 

There were a couple of other interesting features at TJ's, including a train carved out of a single log, huge pumpkins, and an old car with a leaky radiator doubling as a waterfall.

Something I noticed today, that I don't remember seeing before was multiple caterpillars making their way across the trail in front of us.  I am happy to say I didn't ride over any of them, but after seeing 4 or 5 today, I decided to get a picture.

The most interesting thing to me about this is that all of them were going from the east side of the trail to the west.  Why?

I've also talked some in previous posts about bad areas of trail where something is causing the pavement to protrude.  We always are on the watch for this because otherwise it can be a jarring experience.  Today I noticed in some areas it looks like they brought out a grinding machine trying to flatten out these "launchers"

We appreciated their efforts.  Not far before the end of our ride today, we crossed a bridge over a river and got some nice pictures of these rapids.

Overall a pretty nice day on the bike.

48 miles today.