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This website contains pictures taken
during John and Pat Dickinson’s Superior Hiking Trail (SHT) Adventure of
2006. The Superior Hiking Trail is 205
miles long and runs from
It was our plan to through
hike the entire trail taking about 22 days and traveling roughly 10 miles per
day. We started out on September 18th
and planned on reaching the end of the trail on October 10th. Besides the food that we would start out
with, we prepared two re-supply packages that would be dropped off along the
trail on 9/23 and 9/30 by the shuttle (more on the shuttle below) and one
package that we would mail to ourselves for general delivery to the Grand Marais Post
Office. Unfortunately, things do not
always work out as planned.
We hiked in some miserable rainy
weather for four days and got north of
There is a shuttle service http://superiorhikingshuttle.com for the trail
that runs on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from mid May to mid October with
scheduled stops along the trail. We hiked
back to a scheduled shuttle stop on Sunday and took the shuttle back to where
we left the car and returned home for Pat’s rehab
since Minneapolis was only about 180 miles from the start of the trail and it
was less hassle to rehab
at home than to tough it out in a motel up there. The shuttle was still carrying our first food
package so we took that home with us too.
On Wednesday 9/27 we headed
back to the trail. We jumped ahead on
the trail to about where we would have been had we not been sidelined
by the ankle injury. The first couple days were very
low mileage to test Pat’s ankle. Things
went well so we returned to the daily mileage as originally planned. We picked up the second food package at the
appointed spot and continued on with the hike.
The weather was much improved but it was still misting and drizzling on
and off, mostly at night but at least we were able to dry the tent out during
the day and we managed to avoid the rain during setup and take down of the tent
each day.
As we were approaching Grand Marais,
things were going so well and Pat was such a trooper that I thought I would
treat her to a motel night in Grand Marais
when we got there since it would coincide with our 36th wedding
anniversary (10/3) and we had to pick up the food package at the Post Office
anyway. The trail crosses the Gunflint
Trail (Highway 12) about 1.5 miles North of Grand Marais. We left the trail and were walking along the
highway to Grand Marais
to pick up our food package and spend a comfortable night in a motel when Pat
re-injured her ankle! This time much
more seriously than before. She was able
to hobble to town and we got a motel room and immediately started icing her ankle
to see how bad it was. In the mean time,
I went to the Post Office and picked up our food package, did some laundry and
started investigating transportation options if Pat could not go on. As it turn out, the ankle was bad and we
decided that it would be best if Pat would return home and I would continue on
to finish the last 55 miles of the trail alone.
I arranged a shuttle to take Pat back to where we had parked the car and
to drop me off at the trail on Wednesday, 10/4.
Pat would return to
The weather was perfect for the last
few days of the hike. The days were
sunny and the nights were mild and clear with a full moon. Many of the leaves had dropped from the trees
making it interesting to find the trail in open areas of the woods with the forest
floor covered in leaves. Pat and our
oldest daughter Tracey,
who lives in
In summary, the trip was kind
of chaotic with all the shuttling here and there. The weather was a challenge the first few
days but turned out to be gorgeous by the end of the trip. It appears that Pat
completed about 75 miles of the trail and I did about 130. It was unfortunate that Pat got injured and
had to miss so much of the trail and we were not able to complete the entire
trail but that is the way things work out sometimes. Pat’s ankle is fine now and we have the
memories of the beautiful fall colors, amazing waterfalls and many wonderful
ridge top views of
An
assortment of the pictures that we took on our trip are grouped
in various topics. Use this link to access the Topic Menu. From the
Topic Menu, thumbnails of each picture are provided to use as poke points to
access an expanded view of that picture.
Use your browser’s forward and back buttons to navigate through the
pictures and return to this page.
Pat kept a daily hand written diary
and I continued it in her absence. The
Diary has been typed up and is organized by day and can be found by clicking here. The SHT was GPSed in 2003
and GPS data can be found at http://shta.org/Trail/TrailGPS.php. Some statistics and the longitude and latitude
of each night’s campsite can be found by clicking here.
If you wish to contact us you may do
so using the contact information below.
We enjoy answering any questions you may have about our trip. We also enjoy hearing about trips that you
may have taken.
John and Pat Dickinson jrdpad@aol.com
Last revised: October 2006