We made it to Minnesota.
We're a little ways north of Duluth.
And in this video we are exploring the North Shore of Lake Superior.
We are going to show you three amazing state parks that are here along the coastline.
First up is Tettegouche State Park.
We're standing here at the visitor center, and we're about to start our first hike of the day.
It is the Shovel Point Trail, and it's about a mile and a half out and back.
You go out to the cliff face and then along it to an overlook.
Here we go.
We're already seeing some cliffs that are really reminding us of the Apostle Islands
which I guess makes sense because we just left there.
It's not that far away from here, but if you look closely you can see some sea caves down
here.
And then further in the distance is Palisade Head which are the really tall cliffs which
we're going to see before we leave this park as well.
So stay tuned for that.
There are a lot of stairs in some parts though.
We've just gone up quite the staircase here.
Ah we've almost made it I think though.
Up up up.
We found several sets of rock climbing hangers along the cliff edges.
Mountainproject.com calls this area the crown jewel of Minnesota rock climbing, and with
these tall cliffs it really isn't hard to see why.
This area was fantastic.
The views are amazing.
The trail continues, but I don't know how it can beat this but maybe it does. Let's see.
Yet another great viewpoint.
I love these trails that always surpass expectation.
I got to admit I think I was thinking we would go on a short trail here and there'd be like
one nice overlook at the end, but there are so many places to get out here and see the
really nice views over the lake.
It's also a lot of places to stop and get eaten by mosquitoes.
We've reached the end of the trail here.
There's one last platform that kind of comes out on a part that juts out over the lake,
and you get really spectacular views at quite a wide angle.
Just us and Lake Superior.
It's beautiful.
It's worth coming out here.
Don't be fooled by that first beautiful overlook.
It continues.
Come all the way out and back.
We've enjoyed this so much.
After we enjoy this view a little bit longer we will head back and see a couple of stops
on the way back to the visitor center.
On our way back from Shovel Point, we continued past the visitor center.
This trail starts off with similar cliffside views and then winds all the way down to the
mouth of the Baptism River.
It's really neat because you can come down to this rocky beach, and you see these you
know not too tall cliffs but two little cliffs on either side where the river then flows
out into the wide open of Lake Superior.
Let's flip around and show you what it looks like in the other direction.
So there's the river as it comes down out through the park, a couple of bridges above.
And what else is notable about this park is that there are some waterfalls upriver here,
most notably High Falls, which you can take either a three mile round trip hike out to
or a mile and a half.
But the problem is, the suspension bridge that will take you across the river at High
Falls right now has been essentially destroyed.
It's still there, but it's mangled.
It's bent.
It's in no condition for people to use so it's closed.
And if you take the mile and a half hike out to see it from one side of the bank you can
only see High Falls from the top.
You have to take the three mile hike at the moment to see it from the bottom as well because
you can't cross the river.
So we would highly recommend that hike from what we have seen, from what we have read,
but maybe wait until the suspension bridge is up and running again because...
It was part of the experience.
It seemed that way yeah.
But we get to see the river.
We get to enjoy this, and we have one more place to take you but we have to drive there.
Wow Palisade Head is beautiful, but we are just absolutely covered in a swarm of mosquitoes
up here.
So we're doing our best to show you what the view is like, but it's awfully hard to stand
out here with a hundred mosquitoes swarming around your head.
We're really enjoying the view from here.
Great view.
Come to Palisade Head.
It is a short walk from the parking lot.
And now we will see you at our second Minnesota state park tomorrow.
For park number two we are at Gooseberry Falls State Park, and to make up for not seeing
High Falls and the other falls yesterday we're gonna see three here today.
There are various overlooks and accessible trails to take you out to the falls here,
but we are going to do the one mile Falls Loop Trail that will take us around so we
can see Upper, Middle, and Lower Falls.
So it's not hard to see why this is one of Minnesota's most popular parks.
And busiest.
Sometimes we do a little bit of wizardry and it looks like we get to places really fast.
In this case this is literally just a two minute walk from the visitor center.
And we're already here at the Middle Falls.
Exactly.
We are going to continue up this way to try to find High Falls next, and as we circle
around we're gonna get a few more views of this fall.
Falls? Waterfalls? From below.
Here we are at the Upper Falls, and again this one's just another two minute walk from
the last set of falls.
I think I read that this is about 30 feet tall and the Middle and Lower Falls together
are about 60 feet though I don't know what they are individually.
Now we're going to continue around, and soon those people standing over there will be us.
Something interesting, on the way through this last part of the trail we actually saw
not one but two snakes.
One of them was slithering through the woods and then we lost track of it.
The other one came right across the trail.
Nathan and I had passed, and then we heard a hiss.
And then we waited and gave it plenty of space to go across, but it was just a harmless little
snake you know but still it kind of made us jump a little.
We can now see Middle Falls and Lower Falls together here which is really neat to see
them both from one angle.
We're going to continue across the river and find a place to put our feet in the water.
This has been really nice.
We would definitely recommend coming and checking this out.
Do the whole loop.
It's really worth seeing the falls from both sides.
Yeah you need to catch all of them.
If you have a longer day than we do also check out Agate Beach which is at the mouth of the
Gooseberry River where it goes into Lake Superior, and you can search for agates right there
on the beach.
It's also very interesting because the sand bar that's there can either be completely
non-existent or span all the way across the river depending on water flow and water level
and such.
The other place is Picnic Flow which is a really great example, maybe the best on the
North Shore, of a lava flow that's hardened and visible on the surface.
So check out both those places if you can but definitely these amazing waterfalls.
Next we're going to go to our last state park that we're going to visit on the North Shore.
State park number three that we're going to visit today is Split Rock Lighthouse State
Park.
And we're actually not even in the state park yet.
This is a little pull out off the highway that you can see the lighthouse from from
here.
There are multiple places around and in the state park that you can get different vantage
points of the lighthouse.
So we decided we wanted to see it from up high here first before we head into the park.
And this is actually one of the most visited lighthouses in the nation believe it or not,
and it was in service from 1910 to 1969.
You can take tours of the lighthouse itself through the Minnesota Historical Society,
but there's a separate fee for that.
And today we're not doing the tour, but we're going to see it from various locations and
check out a couple other things in the park.
There's lots to see in the park not just the lighthouse so that's where we're headed next.
When you enter the park if you go off to the left that's where the visitor center is and
you can take a tour of the lighthouse.
There's also the fog signal building and three keeper's buildings.
And at the top of the brick tower up a winding staircase is the Fresnel lens and beacon.
And apparently that used to flash every 10 seconds for over 60 years and was visible
over 20 miles out in Lake Superior.
We've driven off to the right into the state park, and our first stop here is Pebble Beach.
And as the name implies it's a nice place to skip rocks and hopefully get another view
of the lighthouse.
This seriously might be the biggest collection of perfect skipping rocks I've ever seen anywhere.
There are some really great views of the lighthouse from here on Pebble Beach.
And it sits up there on a 130 foot cliff looking out over the water.
And actually the reason they built it in the first place was because back in 1905 there
was a big storm out here on Lake Superior that wrecked almost 30 ships.
And we mentioned the beacon earlier and they actually light that once a year still on November
10th to commemorate the 1975 sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald and to also commemorate
the lives of the sailors lost at sea in all of the other Great Lakes shipwrecks.
We heard some frogs but we couldn't find out where they were coming from.
And then we looked down and we saw a tadpoles.
I think this is the nicest view of the lighthouse that we've seen yet today.
Really nice spot right here on the beach.
You can see the lighthouse relatively up close from here, and you can see the entire cliffside
that it's perched on.
We've been sitting here for a while enjoying the view, but if you wanted to you could actually
take the Little Two Harbors Trail all the way along and up to the lighthouse from here.
And it actually meets up with the Superior Hiking Trail that goes all the way from Duluth
to Canada.
It's 205 miles long.
Minnesota's North Shore and all the state parks that we've enjoyed here have been really
nice, and we hope that you get a chance to see one or more of them at some point as well.
We will catch you guys on the next adventure.
Bye.