West Kennedy

 

Today I hiked the section of the Superior Hiking Trail from Highway 1 near Illgen City to the West Kennedy campground. For now I am putting the Tettegouche section on the back burner for several reasons. One reason is it's so long.  11.1 miles is a long hike. Even if I did half at a time it would be 11 miles to the middle and back. The other reason is that the guidebook says this is a challenging section. The section sounds pretty with Bean Lake and Bear Lake and Mount Trudee. There is a section called the "Drain Pipe" which is a rock crevice with 150 feet of rock steps. I will come back to it someday.

This section of the trail is on private property yet it still has camp sites. That is unusual. The private property is the Wolf Ridge Environmental Learning Center. The Superior Hiking Trail Association and Wolf Ridge must be collaborating on the camp sites. If you look across this nice view of Johnson lake you can see one the buildings of Wolf Ridge in the distance. I stayed at Wolf Ridge once a couple years ago on a Master Naturalist outing. The dorms were comfortable and the food was great. I wish my children could have had the chance to experience Wolf Ridge.

There is a path to Wolf Ridge from the East Kennedy campground.

The East Kennedy campground.

Kennedy Creek runs between the two campgrounds.

This is where I turned around and headed back to my car.

I had some views of Lake Superior too.

Near the trail head is a section of thirty year old aspen forest. This area burned in 1990. This part of the forest feels different than the rest. Today I added 2.4 miles making my new total 139.4 miles completed on the Superior Hiking Trail. I have 192.7 left to go.