Cabins & Climbing
3 Minnesota adventure ideas + why I've been lacking motivation lately
I’m currently in the thick of the busiest part of my year, and it’s been a busy year. This past week, I headed up to Lutsen and the Lake Superior North Shore for a few days, then headed down to Interstate State park for my women’s rock climbing trip! Currently I’m spending my Sunday morning wrapping up the last day at camp of my five-day Apostle Islands women’s sea kayaking adventure!
I’ve scheduled this email to send at 9:30, which means (hopefully) I’m getting everyone launched and ready to begin our final day of paddling, and I’ll spend a long evening cleaning gear with my co-guide, Abby! More on how that went next week, but in the meantime…
Rock Climbing in a heat wave
I spend Saturday and Sunday hanging out with a really cool group of ladies at Interstate State Park(s)! Saturday was SO hot and swimming in the river was the best feeling in the world. I think I slept about two hours total that night between the heat and the campground drama (I do love to eavesdrop and we had noisy neighbors), but that didn’t stop Sunday from being super fun!
I run the women’s climbing trips with local guide Mason from Climb Forged! Climb Forged is guide-owned and operated, and Mason is an absolute blast. He does private/custom trips and instructing as well (check out guided trips here) and comes with a five star recommendation from me! This was the fourth trip I’ve hosted with Mason and plan to host more in the future!
Want to join for a trip!? My next day trip is a sea caves sunset paddle on July 12th! Alternately, check out all my upcoming trips for summer ‘25 here!
My favorite part of these trips though is meeting all the people who come out for them — every single time the groups have the best energy and wrapping up at the end feels strange, like leaving close friends not people you met just a day or two ago. This time felt a little extra nostalgic, saying goodbye with the three of us that stayed till the end, me, Devin and Alanna. Maybe we trauma-bonded in the heat, maybe I was just feeling a little extra emotional but I left on Sunday feeling really overwhelmed with gratitude that I get to be a part of trips like that and meet so many cool people, and have this whole network of outdoorsy women anytime I’m looking for a camping or travel buddy. It’s just really, really cool.
Ham’s Haus, Lutsen
Before the heat wave I spent a few days up in Lutsen on the North Shore of Lake Superior staying at Ham’s Haus! This trip was hosted by Ham’s Haus and, fun fact, I spent about two years living in the nearby small town Grand Marais.
Ultimately, Grand Marais didn’t work out for me, but it’s always fun to be back in the area, visit old friends and revisit the places that I used to spend a lot of time.
Ham’s Haus itself is a sustainably-modeled shipping container cabin with gorgeous floor to ceiling windows, a fireplace, and in the summer is just a really wonderful indoor green space.
Hiking White Sky Rock & the Poplar River
Staying up on the North Shore again meant revisiting a lot of my favorite places from when I lived up here. One of my old favorites is the White Sky Rock hike (left below and right below). I didn’t do the distance I usually do, but sitting up overlooking Caribou Lake certainly made me miss my time in Grand Marais.
Back when I lived up here, the hike from Caribou Lake out to the overlook of the Poplar River Valley was one of my favorites and Em, who you might remember well if you’ve been around the blog long enough was a frequent costar in most of my photos on the North Shore, and I hiked this trail at least five times in the two years I lived up there. Hiking it again now brought back a lot of really warm, fuzzy memories and made me miss those two years.
There were a lot of reasons Grand Marais didn’t work for me, but looking back I’m so lucky I had the time there that I did. Grand Marais was hard; I’m still so lucky to have experienced it like that, and grateful for my time and memories there. Sitting on the rock above Caribou Lake, it was really easy to remember being 25 and working three jobs, daydreaming about how maybe one day I might be able to actually work as a writer.
READ: Best hiking on the North Shore
Issues of motivation…
Mostly, I think 25 year old me who wanted badly to do for work what I do now would be proud of me. Twenty five year old Grand Marais me worked three jobs at once — at the sauna, in the shop, and scrappy freelancing gigs on the side. Then, after all that she’d still manage to rally for a 2-7 mile hike most nights. No stranger to hard work, but still, I don’t think at 25 I fully grasped just how much work the job I wanted was and how much of that work was inside.
Stringing together freelance writing projects and my editorial job at Paddling Magazine, I work 60 hours most weeks. Add in guiding a few women’s trips throughout the summer, and suddenly I’ll have spent the second half of June working at least eight hours quite literally every day. I’m writing this at 8pm on monday, after I finished a day of work for Paddling Mag. And I’m not complaining — I genuinely love every aspect of the work I do writing, guiding, and content creating. I am having fun writing this, and editing the photos for it and I had fun at the very hot and humid climbing trip over the weekend, and I enjoy my work for the magazine.
But lately I’ve been so tired that the part of my job that is hiking and being outside has felt really hard. I’ve been getting back into running, because driving out to a trailhead three times a week is a little less feasible now. I’m hoping when things slow down for me in July and August I can find more time and energy to get out and hike for the love of the sport instead of only when it’s part of a work project, but for now it’s been really hard. Getting out hiking and paddling used to be my favorite thing in the world — it’s hard to imagine it being hard for me, but it has been.
Good links
Sydney, the friend from college who I met up with up in Lutsen turned me on to the “Normal Gossip” podcast, which I have since devoured. If you love a good workplace drama story, this is for you.
If you’ve been following my fantasy reading binge updates, this is for you (I assume no one has): after the absolute masterpiece that is the Bridge Kingdom series I really was looking forward to Danielle Jensen’s next series, but unfortunately I think I’m not going to finish book two, A Curse Carved in Bone. The plot is interesting and I think a lot of the twists are well-written, but I just don’t vibe with the main characters and find the magic system to be jarring.
Instead I picked up Daindreth’s Assassin by Elisabeth Wheatley — I loved loved loved her new release Tears of the Wolf this year. Daindreth’s Assassin (DA) is what I read instead of slept when it was 85 degrees overnight last Saturday at Interstate State Park and our neighbors were yelling about their air mattress at 2am until the sheriff came! I wasn’t even mad, because I enjoyed the book! DA is definitely clearly an earlier work compared to Tears of the Wolf, but it’s clear even in her earlier novel that Wheatley knows how to write a compelling plot. Both of her novels that I’ve read have a simple elegance to the plot that I really appreciate; not necessarily predictable, but very satisfying. Never once am I left asking “what the heck did I just read”, the same of which can not be said of many popular fantasy novels.
That’s it I actually don’t have any more links and now my head hurts and I’m think I’m still dehydrated from SWELTERING this weekend anyway thanks for reading I appreciate you!