February Winter Excursion 2007 (Part 6 of 6: The Shore)

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Well we finally made it to the beach for the first time on this trip. crazy, unearthly, beautiful.

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I enhanced the pictures a little bit to correspond to the vivid blues i remember. Photographs can never capture the real thing, unfortunately. The best photographs are always lies.

Here's Pat the Photographer again. Probably taking another one of his amazing photos (the liar).

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Lots of ice and water sprays!

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

A close up of the ice and water trying, desperately, to kill Mike.

(Cropped From Above Photo)

Mike gradually gets more daring ...

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

That would be me approaching Mike. Great View of the Ice Shelves too. You can see how they build up.

Here's another photo of Mike getting wet:

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

Oh wait, I'm in there too. You can barely make me out:

(Cropped From Above Photo)

Mike and Pat get courageous together:

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

And here's a closeup of that bald-faced bravery:

(Cropped From Above Photo - Click To Enlarge)

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Here's me surveying a good spot on the beach...

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

Now, Mike by this time is headed up the hill, cuz he's cold and wet.

I on the other hand decide to catch some February rays. get a good full body tan. Well except i didn't take off my jeans. It's cold out.

(Photo By Pat S.)

After a few hours, i mean seconds, of basking in the radiance of the cloud-covered, February sun, and being satisfied with my new reddish hue - sure to satisfy the ladies too - i put my shirt and hoodie back on.

But wait! What's this i see?

Why, I see Mike running toward me with a fun recreational swimming toy he found. Surely my fun in the sun is not quite over! I have to try this thing out.

(Photo By Pat S.)

Mike tries to throw me the cool floaty thing he found. But it doesn't reach.

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

He tries again...and as i try to grab it a huge wave slaps up against the ice-shelf completely burying my jacket in a thick layer of ice and water, and soaking me and the clothes i'm wearing thoroughly.

There is no picture of this because Pat was daydreaming again. Photographer MY ASS!

We all concluded it must have been fate's way of getting back at me for calling it's bluff the entire trip.

Fun's over thanks to that very, very poor loser "Fate". I'm wet and cold, and quite literally could die from hypothermia if i don't get back to the warm van.

On our way, Mike, responsibly makes sure to put the fun, recreational swimming toy back into it's box.

(Photo By Pat S.)

We got to the van without me dying, and headed south.
We took the scenic road back to Duluth. More snow fall on the way.

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We then stopped at the "Scenic Cafe" right outside of Duluth for lunch.

(Cropped From Below Photo)

We all ate Elk!

(Photo By Pat S.)

I learned that I don't know shit about duct work. And Mike ate Elk.

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We then got to Duluth proper. And proceeded with the previous attempt to acquire CD's from the Electric Fetus. Today it was open. We then all got drinks across the street - it took the barrista about an hour to make them for us.

I also learned that testicles move on their own - constantly. Mike assured me of this fact. I even looked it up - has something to do with the "cremaster muscles" keeping the testes at the correct temperature - like a rotisserie oven.

It was a very educational trip. There are so many things to learn from the last surviving Beaker-people and their peculiar culture. I feel like i haven't even scratched the surface in my studies.

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Here's a picture of my other cat, "Simple" (as i like to call him), greeting me at the door when i finally got home.

He got so nervous while i was gone that he chewed his two front legs off!!!

(Photo By Me)

Just kidding!

He used to claw up the furniture really bad, so i had them surgically removed.

Congratulations. You've reached the...

END OF FEBRUARY WINTER EXCURSION 2007

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February Winter Excursion 2007 (Part 5 of 6: Inside Mike's Mysterious Dark Hole)

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Pat was the first to find him:

(Photo By Pat S.)

He's in some sort of hole. But why is he just sitting there?

(Photo By Pat S.)

As we approached, a type of verse or secret muttering could be heard, a chant if you will. But what was it...those words so elusive to mortal ears, his occult-like murmurs, too cryptic, so indecipherable.

Or perhaps we did not really want to decode those codes for fear of understanding a truth too punishing.

Though we were initially hesitant, we both soon drew near enough to hear. We found strength to approach the unfamiliar manifestation. We grew courage to listen...

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"CAVERNS, CAULDRONS, AND WITCHES!"

"CAVERNS, CAULDRONS, AND WITCHES!"
"CAVERNS, CAULDRONS, AND WITCHES!"

yes caverns, cauldrons, and witches indeed. This is the very arcane mystery we were now witnessing right there in front of us, of which Mike had alluded to in previous conversations about this enigmatic place and which i had dismissed as mere fantasy.

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Yes, he had warned us of this very spot, powerful with dark secrets beyond human comprehension and certainly beyond what i had previously assumed. And there it was before our very eyes. To the uninitiated, it was but a hole in the ground, but to Mike it could not be described in such profane terms. Now i understood why.

But this was only the beginning for me. I still had much to learn about this dark mystery...

I had to enter the hole.

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Something came over me and i don't know what it was.
I started chanting just like Mike had done. "Caverns, Cauldrons, and Witches...Caverns, Cauldrons, and Witches..."

But then something went horribly wrong. I kept chanting but i started mixing up the words.

Or, better said, the words started mixing up ME!!!

(Photo By Pat S.)

"Caverns, Cauldrons, and Witches..."
"Witches, Caverns, and Cauldrons..."
"Cauldrons, Witches, and Caverns..."
"Witches, Cauldrons, and Caverns..."
"Caverns, Witches, and Cauldrons..."

It soon became apparent that the number of combinations in which these three powerful words could be said, were almost infinite. I feared that i would be helplessly in the grips of that dark possessive power, harbored deep within this menacing place, for a very, very long time, quite possibly for minutes.

Well i made it out alive, but fundamentally altered, even unto the molecular level, like my Ribosomal DNA had rearranged itself into metachlorians, altered in ways that i just could not hope to explain to the uninitiated, unfortunately.

Well, we soon left that mystery behind and headed back toward the road.

Destination: Lake Superior.

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Michael walked ahead of us, again leading the way.

And as i pondered this arcane knowledge i had unwittingly and irreversibly attained, and not without shame, Pat took a picture of a tree stump with mushrooms on it.

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

Pretty!

I got Pat to take this next one, a bridge under a bridge (actually there are two bridges under a bridge but the other's hard to see).

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

And here is where we parked. But we weren't going back to the car just yet...

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

To the Beach!

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February Winter Excursion 2007 (Part 4 of 6: The Temperance River)

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MMMM. Coffee.

(Photo By Pat S.)

We went to the "Java Moose" in Grand Marais that morning. All was good except there was just one thing missing from the experience: a Starbucks across the street. Oh well, maybe they'll get lucky one day soon.

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Afterwards we made our way to the Temperance River. We listened to some cool classical shit on the way there and i even riffed a little bit with my beautiful voice - to make that fuckin' classic shit even more kick-ass, fucking beautiful. And it did.

Well, after we parked we embarked on our journey along the temperance river. Not the way i wanted to go however. I wanted to go to the shore, but Mike and Pat had another thing in mind. We would first follow the river upstream.

The following pictures are of a small lake formed by the river. I think you can actually see it from the satellite image of the map i linked to up above for "Temperance River" - pretty cool.

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Michael urging us on:

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

A view from inside the cavern:

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And another view...wait what's this? Looks like Mike and Pat have stumbled upon something interesting...

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Here is what they stumbled upon:

(Photo By Pat S.)

Why it's a cute little baby deer taking a nap in the snow:

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We tried to wake it up but soon discovered it wasn't really sleeping at all!

It was with the angels now. So in recognition of this and as something of a memorial, i had mike make a snow angel next to this cute little snow angel.

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Of course he did so reluctantly but, regardless of Mike's poor attitude, i'm sure the deer-angel, who is now taking sweet naps in heaven, still appreciated the gesture nonetheless.

By the way, in the picture a few up from this one, you can clearly see that mike has the numbers "666" written across the back of his jump-suit (EEEEEEEVIL!).

This explains, to me anyway, why he must have been so resistant to showing respect for the dead.

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Here is a pretty cool panoramic Pat took inside this cavern. The left is the ground, the center is looking directly up, and the right is the ground again.

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

In contrast, here is my sorry attempt to portray where we were:

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Now my camera is pretty grainy - it's not as sharp as Pat's (excuse the pun - for those who know him) - but given even the graininess of my camera, some photos i took are pretty inexcusable. The one below is one example - i would have thrown it out completely - along with others if not for certain elements in it. For instance in this one i was able to capture a snowball mid-flight that Michael threw at me when i was trying to take his picture:

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Here is another glaring difference between our two cameras. the following was taken with my camera:

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And this one was taken with his, In the exact same spot:

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

Well, while I was down there with Pat comparing cameras, consumed with embarassment by my relatively small pic size, Mike has already taken off - remember he was already throwing snowballs at me from above by this point.

So we headed out to go look for Mike...

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On our way out I took it upon myself to test the weight of the earth above me inside a small cave.

Yup, pretty heavy, I can't budge it.

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

And here is pat after taking that photo now reasonably convinced that the ground above me can't be lifted by, even, my mighty strength:

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Here is where we were down below. In fact i took this picture from where Mike was throwing snowballs at me. I was somewhere near the center of this photo. The hole to the right, made by the falls went down to the liquid water that was still flowing about 10-15 ft below where i was standing. I made sure not to slip into that.

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Here's just a cool little bridge that we will soon walk over in our efforts to find Mike.
Not too hard since there are tracks to follow.

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And here is that same place with Pat in the Picture, taking a Picture.

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Now. To find Mike...

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February Winter Excursion 2007 (Part 3 of 6: Oscar Party!)

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By the time we got back to the van from our descent from Look Out Mountain - the climax of our journey - it was already dark. The winds had picked up and obscured the roads with snow drifts. The conditions were getting sketchy. Under my breath i cursed Fate all the way calling it the worst of all possible vulgarities. And it worked. We made it to Anderson Cabins without a scratch. Fate turned out to be a chicken-shit after all, as i expected.

The cabin we stayed in was nice (we were all in agreement that "nice" is a very descriptive adjective on this trip). It had a kitchen, indoor plumbing, and a t.v. I really wasn't supposed to be there as it was a two-person cabin. So we tried to keep our presence as low key as possible.

We turned on the t.v. as soon as we unpacked and low and behold, the Oscars were on. So we watched the Oscars - a very heterosexual activity for 3 men to take part in if i say so myself.

I fell asleep on the recliner. Pat took a little nap too. But Mike, Mike was wrapped in the awards ceremony to be sure.

When i stopped snoring and ended my power nap, Mike and Pat decided to engage in another ritual tradition: The Bonfire.

Now it was cold, and extremely windy, and well, "fuck that shit" i thought to myself. Normally I'm into all that, i love to start fires. But in these circumstances, under these conditions, i figured to hell with them and their damn traditions.

I stayed inside and performed a little ritual of my own in the toilet. A very satisfying ritual it was at that.

Apparently they had a little trouble getting it started.

No shit? in this 150 mph wind, that's hard to believe. But they did, after some time, eventually get it started. I was impressed.

So i joined them outside after they'd got it going. In these photos you can tell by the flames just how windy it was.

(Photo By Pat S.)

Now if you stood on one side of the fire, you'd assuredly catch on fire yourself. If you stood on the opposite, safe side, you wouldn't even warm up.

(Photo By Pat S.)

So here is Mike opting for the unsafe side, because he was, "fucking cold".

Yes Mike had become very upset with nature at this point and after much cursing and ranting, but only after much cursing and ranting, got so fed up he marched up to the warm cabin without another thought of tradition.

There are few times i get to see mike so frustrated and it usually has to do with some sort of natural phenomenon, like horse flies bitting him in the summer time or, like here, the wind chill bitting him in winter. But it's always very amusing. Nature has it's ways of becoming his arch-enemy.

So Pat and Myself stayed out a little while longer and caught up on each other's lives a little.

Then i went in. And Pat proved himself the real man of the bunch by staying out there, like, for another half hour or something.

Inside Mike had already started preparing dinner: not-dogs, and beans, and hot-chocolate soy milk. A dinner made for a vegan king. Here he is preparing the hot-soy chocolate.

(Photo By Pat S.)

I tried distracting Mike from the Oscars by making him watch a Sara Silverman episode i had on my computer. He tried watching it, but every now and then, his eyes would wander from the show to the Oscars on t.v.

After the Oscars were finished, we all watched a little "Mining Today" a very gripping news-ish show about how the mining industry is doing. No just kidding, it wasn't gripping - more like surreal.

The next day we were awoken by some f**k-head shoveling the snow off our porch. We had toast for breakfast. I downloaded a shit-load of music from Pat's cool MP3 player. And Pat went off to pay for our stay at the cabin - again as if only two people were staying there.

Here is a morning panoramic view of the place taken by Pat. Pretty cool. He even got a view of the annoying shed with it's door that kept slamming open and shut for us in the middle of the night. Our cabin was the one next to it on the left.

(Photo By Pat S. - Click To Enlarge)

Here's a better view of our cabin. You can see the fire pit on the very bottom left edge of this crop.

(Cropped From Photo Above - Click To Enlarge)

Then there was this dog. "Molly" i think, was it's name. We knew this from the guest-comments book in the cabin that Mike and I had read.

Everybody seemed to love this dog. We hated the dog. It just sat on the porch all morning like it was expecting us to come out and pet it or something. Who could like such an assuming beast? Those people who wrote those adoring comments must have been retarded.

Pat, who was taking pictures all morning, got a picture of just exactly what this "Molly" thing did all fucking morning.

(Photo By Pat S.)

So after cleaning up a bit and waiting for this stupid mutt to get off the goddamn porch we gathered our things and left.

Here are some photos of us leaving:

(Photo By Pat S.)

Now is that a bottle of water in my lap or am i just happy to be with the guys?

(Photo By Pat S.)

Yes that is us leaving. Where are we going? Why, we're going to go get some coffee...

Care to join us?

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