Minnesota Replaces Iceland!!

My friend, Marie King, from Minneapolis and I had planned to go to Iceland in July but because of the volcanic excitement there, we decided to go to another cold place instead---northern Minnesota! After a day in Minneapolis, doing "city" things (a marvelous exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls and a great tiki bar named Psycho Suzie's were two things) we set forth for the northland.

A partial list of interesting features of "Up North" turned out to be:

• a three-way area of continental divide where the water splits and runs to the Atlantic,
  the Pacific and Hudson's Bay
• lots of bedrock! There are areas that look like the backs of whales. Rocks include pink and grey granite, biotite schist, greenstone
• the International Wolf Center at Ely--where we saw the wolves have their weekly meal
• fresh wall-eye on every menu---even for breakfast!
• an iron mine tour: down 1/2 mile at 10 miles an hour and in 3/4 of a mile by train
• a huge open pit iron mine, complete with giant trucks that carry 240 tons!
• short visit to the National Hockey Museum
• Cornish pasties for lunch (originally brought from Cornwall by the miners)
• a walk across the Rainy River to Ft. Francis, Canada
• a tour of a Boise paper mill that makes 20 ton rolls of paper---did you know paper is coated with liquid cornstarch to make it smooth?
• a visit to the headwaters of the Mississippi River where I could walk across it
• a visit to Voyagers National Park where we enjoyed a canoe trip (yes---we paddled!)

We also saw the only gas station Frank Lloyd Wright ever designed:

Viewing the wolf pack was most interesting; our reaction to them was that they are huge and quite beautiful. Here is the white male alpha wolf watching his pack...
Another view of Shadow (the alpha male) observing one of the younger males...

That evening we watched the wolves be fed their weekly meal of road kill. They were each given a beaver (skinned and turned in by trappers); here is Shadow starting his dinner!

This wolf is getting ready to "sleep it off"---they are quite sluggish for several days after eating.

Now, on to the open pit iron mine. Here is one of the huge trucks hauling iron ore to the taconite plant where the ore is formed into small pellets, which are shipped across the Great Lakes to the iron mills of the east. Each truck has six tires that cost about $30,000 EACH!

(Well, shoot, the next picture is my usual sideways one---) Here is Marie standing beside

one of the huge trucks..

Here she is inside the bucket---28 cubic yard capacity!

And. finally, find me dancing down the stairway near the cab of this truck!
Of course no visit to Minnesota would be complete without seeing Paul Bunyan and Babe...can you find Marie and me?
Here we are at the famous headwaters of the Mississippi at Itasca State Park...
Crossing the headwaters where they run out of Lake Itasca and start down the river...

We enjoyed our week in northern Minnesota where we found friendly people, no crowds, and interesting things to do.

PS---almost no mosquitos!