Day 2: The Road Less Traveled

Bruce and Bill along a two-track south of Munising.

"Zzzzziiiiiip!”

The Army has its reveille, the rest of the world its alarm clocks. On the trail, the sound of “good morning!” is the zipper.

Not any zipper, but the protracted “zzzzz” of a long tent zipper as its owner rips its two rows of teeth asunder.

You quickly learn on the trail about zipper styles. There’s the guy who prefers to open a tent with a string of short, polite tugs – “zip, zip, zip, zip” – in a silly hope that he won’t shatter the quiet of a campground.   

Then there’s the guy who goes for broke and yanks the cord from the tent’s bow to its stern.

“Zzzzziiiiip!” 

It’s akin to the quiet burper vs. the big belcher who rattles a tavern’s rooftop.

This morning’s noise came from the general direction of Bill’s tent.

Stott’s awake, I thought.

I also realized we had survived our first night.

It was touch and go. Sometime during the darkness two animals had circled my tent.  I heard them, and tracked their movement from north to south.

I knew they weren’t bears. I’d been told by Bill that if a bear walks through your camp, you’ll hear much shuffling and telltale snuffling from the bear’s broad nose.

No, these two animals produced muted, discrete steps … cautious yet steady, like sleek predators with long teeth sneaking up on their prey.

Huddled deep in my sleeping bag, I waited … wide-eyed ….

It’s a wonder we saw the dawn.

But now it was daylight, considerably past dawn – a few minutes after 7:30 a.m.  Our plan was to get back on the trail by 8:30 or so.  It was time to get moving.

Although I’m a quiet zip, zip, kind of guy, I learned right away there’s no mannerly way for a stiff-and-sore 60-year-old to emerge from a tent. It’s just not pretty. Except for the age comparison, it’s like a cow birthing a calf. 

I fell out headfirst, tumbled and stumbled to my knees, stretched my back, then looked up to see gray skies and Bill already heating water.

Bill and Bruce at morning camp.

Bill also was starting to pack.

We exchanged cheerful “Good mornings!” and I rose unsteadily to my feet.

I noticed Bruce’s tent was still quiet. Should have heard some zipping by now, I thought.

“I think Bruce is still asleep,” I said to Bill. “Should I rattle his cage?”

We agreed I should.

It’s no small thing to shake a sleeping man’s tent. Men have been killed for less.

But Bruce took it well. Apparently he had missed his alarm. He emerged quickly, vowing not to let it happen again.  (It wouldn’t.)

And so we started what would become our morning routine – wake up, pack up, eat up, ship out.  The plan was to hike about 7.5 miles this day through relatively flat, forested land.

And that night? A stay at a Munising motel, where we could assess two straight days of modest hiking on the trail and decide anew if we were complete idiots to double our mileage – and more – in the days to follow.

***

I mentioned our morning routine. I’m now going to describe a few other things that would emerge as routine or consistent about our journey, no matter the day. They provide important context to what soon would come.

Here goes:

Finger photo:  This sounds stranger than it actually was.

I knew I’d be blogging about our hike, and I knew I wanted to monitor the disposition of us hikers each morning.

Would we be grumpy or cheery? In pain or pain-free?

Would we “Seize the day, boys!” as Robin Williams urged his students in Dead Poets Society?

Or be a trio of long-eared, sad-eyed Eeyores.

“Good morning Pooh … if it is a good morning … which I doubt.”

Photographs, after all, can’t lie. So I knew the best way to take our temperature each morning was to require the three of us to pose for a group selfie as we left to embark on the trail’s next leg.

Better still, for cataloging purposes, we would hold up fingers indicating the number of that day.

And so we did. I quickly learned I couldn’t click the iPhone and also prop up my fingers, so Bruce and Bill did the finger thing. 

Here’s our first selfie, from Day 2:

Fingers up, boys!

Note the different finger-holding styles of Bruce and Bill … Bruce foregoing the standard “V”-for-victory, peace-sign method, favoring instead an unusual backhand approach; Bill using the thumb-and-forefinger technique adopted for generations by American kids playing “bang bang, you’re dead.” (Bill explains this is how they finger count in Europe. Because he has hiked extensively there, I suspect this is true.) 

The photo went well, although it appears I needed my every mental muscle to make this picture happen.

Blue blaze: The Wise Men had their Star of Bethlehem. We three wise guys followed the blue blaze.

The blue blaze ... our beacon.

If you’re a stranger to trail hiking, trails typically are marked with “blazes” – colorful markers painted on or nailed to trees, posts or whatever else seems useful along the way.

We’ve all heard of “blazing the trail.” So yep, it’s that.

The North Country Trail uses a calming blue color for its blazes, which are vertically rectangular in shape. Officially, the color is called “Nelson Boundary (Brush Type) Paint – Blue.” It’s available through the National Park Service.

I wondered who or what Nelson was, so I researched it a bit. The Nelson Paint Company of Kingsford, Mich., has specialized in providing paint for the forestry industry since the ’40s.  Oh, they also are a leading producer of pellets for paintball guns. Ouch.   

If I had to find a blue color comparable in a Benjamin Moore paint catalog, it would be Moore’s “Dream I Can Fly.” It’s a real color. You can look it up.

It makes me wonder if the NPS bought gallons of Ben Moore’s “Dream I Can Fly” as an inside joke on zonked-out backpackers desperate to get home.

The blazes would prove critical for us. Not that we routinely lost our way, but a few times? Yeah, maybe … sort of. But more on that later.

Also, it’s important to know the subtle signaling of a blaze. A single blaze ahead means “walk this way.” Simple, direct. Makes sense.

But right- and left-hand turns are more involved. With a right-hand turn, there are two blazes, and the right one is positioned slightly higher than the left.

Similarly, with a left-hand turn, the left blaze is positioned slightly higher than the right.

As you’ll learn, this distinction would prove pivotal for us atop a spot we dubbed “Mount Baldy.”

It’s also there where I uttered the well-known phrase, “What in blue blazes?!”

Etymologists will tell you this old expression roughly translates to:

“What the hell?!”

Exactly.

Roads: I won’t dwell on this, but I don’t think any of us liked hiking on roads.

Yes, you can go faster and steadier on roads. But in some cases, cars whiz by. In others, you’re slogging through a sandy two-track with little traction.

Give me a hard-packed, root-ribbed path anytime.

The good news is that most of our mileage was along such paths; our road travel was only occasional.

I did find, though, that I fell invariably to third place when we traveled roads, perhaps because my legs are shorter. Not that I minded. It still would have been a trudge at the front or middle.

I also couldn’t get John Denver’s “Country Roads” out of my head. I hate it still.

Leading, following, pace: And this gets me to how we typically traveled, mile by mile, up hill and down.

First, we would take turns leading and following. Usually I started as the front guy in the morning; Bruce would take the lead at the middle of the day; Bill would set the pace for the final miles.

It was a good system, I think. Bill, steady of pace, was the perfect guy to bring us home after a long day. Bruce was consistently strong in the middle. I had my best burst of energy in the morning and grew a bit tired after, so I was happy to follow as No. 2 or 3 by late morning.

We were fairly consistent with our speed. Sweet P kept track of time and distance for us, and we routinely covered about 2 miles per hour. That seems slow, but that included our stoppage times – water breaks, lunch, etc. (Our typical walking pace was 3 miles an hour.)

My role, since Sweet P resided in my pack’s pocket, was to shout out to the others the miles achieved every time she’d let me know.

Letting me know was not a simple thing for Sweet P. She would rattle on:

“Time: 41.2 minutes. Distance: 2 miles. Split distance: 14 miles. Split time: 20.5 minutes.”

Keep in mind that by Mile 14, her cute, bubbly voice sounded like chalk on a blackboard. But I would dutifully then grunt “14!” to Bruce and Bill.

Their usual response, after 14 miles or more, was a grunt back.

You can communicate a lot in a grunt.

***

Bill and Bruce take in water views.

Our travel that second day was uneventful. We expected it would be, since the real action would start the next day, as we ascended Pictured Rocks along the Lake Superior coast.

Still, we enjoyed the walk. The trail was relatively smooth, and we saw our first serious water – a smallish lake after we crossed the Michigan 94 highway, and then Wagner Falls south of Munising.

We chose to have lunch at the falls, and a few folks asked us where we’d been and where we were going.

We’d have more encounters with the public in the days ahead, including other hikers. But we quickly learned that three gray-haired guys with pretty large backpacks seemed an oddity to people, even along the North Country Trail.

I think it was the distance we aimed to travel that surprised them. Maybe they sized us up and figured we’d be dead before Grand Marais.

But they always departed with good wishes, and so left us heartened.

The march into Munising was along busy M-94, so our brief, two-day envelopment in Nature’s quiet and solitude was now shattered. But we really looked forward to a warm bed and hot shower, plus real food.

Doug and Bruce on a different two-track.

It might seem silly that we coveted these finer things so soon after leaving Au Train. But for me, and I think the other guys, this was our first consecutive two days of backpacking in many years despite all of our training. Plus our packs proved heavier than what we’d carried in practice.

(We all vowed not to weigh our packs just before leaving, even though they looked as stuffed as fat ticks. What you don’t know can’t hurt you, they say.)

Personally, my back was aching, my feet bruised and my shoulders numb. So relief seemed appropriate. We also knew we could check in with our spouses and let them know how it was going.

This was an extra-important call for Bill because Munising was going to be his bailout point if his back spasms continued.

All was good, though. We checked into the Superior Motel and Suites, took quick showers, updated our wives, and then purchased the necessary permits from the NPS headquarters for campsite access along Lake Superior.

After that, we grabbed a good dinner at nearby Sydney’s restaurant and retired to our rooms.

Good food found here.

That night, I scratched some entries in my notebook.

About my motel room: “Wall covering with three deer in a snowstorm; deer antlers above the window; pine paneled walls; appliquéd quilt with pine trees, bear, river with ducks.”

We’re in northern-outpost Munising after all.

About my aches and pains: “Big-toe pressure; pain in my heels, hip, shoulder. Apply more tape.”

About my state of mind: “Tomorrow is the big test … 14 miles straight, a lot up. I think we can make it.”

###

Sweet P's Log - Day 2

Next Sunday - Day 3, Life on the Rocks

To see more photos from Day 2, click here.