Thanksgiving Weekend

Hope everyone had a nice Thanksgiving. Martha, Kate, Nick, Anna and I made the three hour drive to Brule, WI on Thursday morning and returned home on Friday afternoon. Martha's parents , Katie and Ade Stormo, live in Brule, or more exactly, between Brule and Lake Nebagamon. They live on the Nebagamon Creek on 15 acres of wooded land that adjoins another 40 acres of land that has been in Katie's family since the early 1900's. Katie and Ade purchased their 15 acres around 1990, and I helped Ade build the first part of what is now their house in 1994. They moved their permanently nine years ago. Martha's brothers (Steve in Colorado and Dave in New Mexico) could not be here for Thanksgiving. It was nice to spend time with Martha's parents and her Uncle Jim and his family.

We all have are reasons for enjoying our time in Northern Wisconsin, buy my highlights are always the Brule River, Katie's cooking, Bonfires, and Lake Superior. I'll touch on the first and last of those highlights here. The Brule River flows north from Big Lake where it begins a 44 mile jaunt into Lake Superior. Interestingly, Big Lake is also the headwaters of the St. Croix River, which flows south into the Mississipi and down to the Gulf. The Brule River is a mix of slow moving water and class 2 to class 4 rapids--nearly all navigable by canoe. It winds through mostly woods and many large stately summer homes dating from the early 1900's. A couple of Presidents have had summer "White House's" on the Brule. Attached is a Times article from 1928 about Calvin Coolidge's first foray into northern Wisconsin. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,881015,00.html. The Nebagamon Creek flows into the Brule and we can hike to the river from Katie and Ade's property. But we really enjoy canoeing and kayaking the river. On July 4th, Nick and I woke up early and paddled for about an hour upstream through rapids. I took some time to snap some pictures of the old boat houses we passed. They will show up posted I hope.

Thanksgiving weekend was too cold to be on the river, and there were too many hunter's in the woods to do decent hikes, so on Friday we decided to drive to the mouth of the river where it flows into Lake Superior. It is about a 20 mile drive through land that is about half farm land and half wood land. The shoreline of Lake Superior east of Superior is called the "South Shore". It is very similar to the terrain between Dungeness and Port Angeles (without the cool mountains in the background however). We saw at least a half-dozen groups of orange clad deer hunters clustered along the road as we drove toward the lake. Wisconsin issues over 620,000 deer hunting licenses, and over Thanksgiving Weekend there were more than twice as many hunters in the Wisconsin woods carrying guns than the U.S. had soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq combined. We walked the beach and found deer and bear tracks. The water was near freezing and the air was just below, so as water lapped over branches on shore it dripped and formed immediate icicles. Very pretty in the sunlight. Attached are some pictures of our group on the beach. Martha's parents and her Uncle Jim and Aunt Joy and their adult children Doug and Pam joined us on our hike.