Musings

I walked around the point to catch the sunrise. I checked the timing on my device, and was ready several minutes ahead of what-I-could-see sunrise. The orange went on and on across the horizon—farther than I thought it could extend!

After coffee, we headed up to our favorite jumping off point at the mouth of Hurricane Creek. I’ve never seen it where there wasn’t a sand bar across the mouth diverting the flow one way or the other.

The rollers kept coming in, and made constant white noise, or super-white noise, something always noticeable.

We walked the Au Sable Point Lighthouse trail mid-summer and it was hot and the museum was open. Not hot today! And the only workers we saw were cutting back woody shrubs and trimming trees.

The timing worked that we returned to Grand Marais and had burgers from this food truck that’s parked by the bay. We’ve seen it for years, but the timing never worked for us to eat. Fabulous burgers and hothothot fries; yum.

Posted at 7:53 PM | Comments Off on Water-looking adventures

I went down to walk the beach this morning when I thought it would be sunny. I was wrong, but got to see a soaring bald eagle. This was just after reading how hard hit their population is across the upper Midwest by avian flu. [Unspoken question: will our denizen(s) return next year?]

I walked all the way around the point to the end of our property. This is our almost-bay from the opposite direction from the post two days back.

The water and ice levels have been way too high (there’s a dam just below the mouth of the lake) for decades, undermining trees and washing away the shoreline. The level is now lower than I remember it in decades, the result of a reassessment that should have been done…oh, decades ago. The trade-off to the damage we have along our shore is that the speedboats with huge motors don’t hit the bottom on this essentially shallow lake.

Trees are ever-so-persistent, however, and become sculptures while staying alive.

Posted at 9:34 PM | Comments Off on Shoreline stories

I read that we might see northern lights last night, and we went out at the beginning of the window suggested, meaning a late bedtime for me. The camera caught hints, but we saw nada.

This morning I found a busy carpenter ant (guessing) on the birch stump, but by the time I had my camera, it was too shy to get its soul captured.

The sun sparkle was terrific at mid-day, and the waves were low rollers. Now, the wind is gusting (up to 33mph, my device suggests), and rain will roll in during the dark hours. Such is autumn in the northlands.

Posted at 8:42 PM | 1 Comment »

The lake was close to still this morning, so I walked in my knee-high rubber boots around the point to look at the shallow bay on the other side. We own all the trees and beach you can see in this photo. We are lucky to have this land, yet we rarely spend time here as the access takes an effort.

I saw many tracks in the beach sand. The largest are deer (front and back), and the middle ones are raccoon. There were also delicate bird tracks (not shown).

This one has me confused. It is dog-ish, but is it instead a dog relative? There were odd noises in the night that were not yips or barks, but what made them?

Posted at 9:29 PM | Comments Off on Beach visit

I was too lazy to head to the beach to watch the sunrise, but did get out to see the sun crest the treeline. Nice.

Now this is unexpected: a few lilac blooms in OcTOWber! They do smell like spring.

Posted at 9:34 PM | Comments Off on Expected, unexpected

Nice carpet of beach foam this morning…or only a welcome mat, perhaps.

Posted at 8:46 PM | Comments Off on Free-form foam

No saturation boost; this is what I saw. 🌅

Posted at 8:51 PM | Comments Off on Stunning sun

We finally got out from under the cloud cover associated with Helene, and had smooth sailing under blue skies…very pleasant. We crested a hill, and Eden was marred by a fog-belt. Turned out it was right over Sturgeon River, and when we cleared the valley, we enjoyed unbroken blue skies again. 😎

We dined this evening on a spring green salad with chunks of smoked whitefish…surely five-star dining for this part of the world. The orchard grasses are browning out, but the trees remain overwhelmingly green, with some brown-orange tinges.

Posted at 7:09 PM | Comments Off on Fish tales

I learned that the world’s longest lived vertebrate is the Greenland shark, Somniosus microcephalus. They can reach at least 400 years, and perhaps 500—that’s half a millennium! The latest research (thank you NYTimes Tuesday Science stories), discussed by Jonathan Moens, has discovered that this species has huge genomes, with about 6.5 billion DNA base pairs (humans have less than half that). This makes these sharks more genetically resilient (read the story for the details), and thus likely contributes to their longevity.

Still reeling about the (possibly) 500 year lifespans.

Posted at 9:40 PM | Comments Off on Not my photo

I’m really noticing the daylength getting shorter.

Posted at 8:53 PM | Comments Off on Seasoned