Duluth, Minnesota, United States
Today was a transit day, from Grand Portage to Duluth, about 150 miles. First, however, we had to sort out breakfast. The casino we were staying in has a restaurant, but it is dramatically understaffed, and they've cut their hours way back. So breakfast didn't open until 9 a.m.--much too late for us. The next nearest restaurant was 24 miles away (and actually, now I come to think about it, might have been in Canada), and the one after that was 36. So that's off the table. So we took ourselves off to the gas station shop across the street. You make do with what there is!
After breakfast, we headed north a few miles to the Grand Portage State Park, right on the river (and thus right on the border with Canada). The ranger at the national monument recommended this--there's a walk out to view the tallest waterfall in Minnesota. This turned out to be very good advice. The walk is easy and quite pleasant, and the waterfall is beautiful. Interestingly, it has not (for some inexplicable reason not given) ever been measured, so they don't know how tall it is.
(How they can then say it's the tallest waterfall in Minnesota, I don't know--except possibly the next tallest one is very short.) The estimate for this one is 100-130 feet tall.
They may not know the height of the waterfall; however, they do claim to know how much water comes over it per second. TOday, it's 446 gallons per second, which, as you can see from the photos and video, is a goodly amount; however, the average since whenever they started recording it (which was before 1934, as the largest amount at 82,500 gallons per second was recorded in 1934) is 3200 gallons per second, so what we say today was well below average. I've posted a photo from the park website that was taken from the same angle as I took one so you can compare side-by-side.
Once we left the park, we drove down to Duluth, and we spent the afternoon driving down the Skyline Parkway, a 26-mile scenic drive that provides a number of scenic views of the city and St. Louis Bay. By sheer luck, we arrived at the Hawk Ridge Nature Reserve just as they were preparing to release two Sharp-Shinned Hawks that they had trapped and banded.
Hawk Ridge is a spot where people gather from August - November to observe and count migrating birds, and there was quite a crowd of bird-watchers there. Seeing the birds released was an unexpected treat.
We got to the hotel about 5:00. The hotel is right at the south end of the Aerial Lift Bridge, an unusual type of bridge which makes way for tall boat traffic by raising the entire road bed to the needed height. We were able to watch the bridge to up for two huge cargo ships.
This was a fun day, with some unexpectedly nice experiences. Tomorrow, we're going to visit the aquarium and the railroad museum here in Duluth, and we move on on Friday.
Skip
2021-09-24
Great hawk. Temperance Liquor??