North Shore- Day Three, Final Day

This is the final day we spent up north.  I woke up early to catch the sun rise on the horizon and it was bright and sunny and beautiful.  Most of the pictures I took on this little trip were taken with my iPhone and some of them were edited using Instagram but most were not, including these ones:

The beers that M and I drank the night before

I went back to bed and then woke up a couple hours later and M and I made breakfast for everyone.  We didn't have much of a plan for the day but decided to drive up to Grand Marais and see what was going on up there.  Since there were six of us, we had to take two cars.

We shopped at the Trading Post and some other small stores along the way.  We stopped at a bar/restaurant while some ate and others had a drink.  We stopped at Sven & Ole's and M and I realized that we will never go back there again because A) the pizza isn't that good and B) the service and timing is horrible.  

It was about 4 pm when the other four decided to go back to the cabin but M and I wanted to continue to explore so they left and M and I went up to Judge Magney State Park.  While leaving Grand Marais, we saw that gas was $4.14 there!  Remember, this was September 15th and gas was probably $3.83 or around there down here in the Twin Cities.

Judge Magney State Park is about 25 miles from the Canadian border.  We went there because we wanted to hike to see Devil's Kettle.  To get to Devil's Kettle, it's a mile or so hike that you keep going up and up and up and more inclines and inclines.

I had a red and white striped shirt on.  Where's Waldo Dana?

You finally reach a set of stairs and then you go down (and eventually up), like 176 steps. (Wiki says 200 stairs.)  (This is the day after almost the same amount of steps at Split Rock Lighthouse.)  We haven't reached Devil's Kettle yet but here's what you see at this point:

Then to see Devil's Kettle, you have to go another 700 feet up and finally, here's Devil's Kettle.

I went to Devil's Kettle when I was a kid but haven't been back since.  M had never been there before.  So what's so special and mysterious about Devil's Kettle?  Here's an excerpt taken from the state park's wiki page:

The Devil's Kettle

The main hike is the strenuous 1.1-mile (1.8 km) walk to the Devil's Kettle and Upper and Lower Falls, which features nearly 200 stairs.^[5] This route is part of the Superior Hiking Trail, which swings through the park and dead-ended here until August 2003, when the northernmost 9 miles (14 km) were completed to the Canadian border.^[11]

The park is best known for an unusual waterfall located on the Brule River 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from its mouth.^[4] The river splits in two to flow around a mass of rhyolite rock. The eastern flow goes over a two-step, 50 foot waterfall and continues downstream.^[2] The western flow surges into a pothole, falling at least 10 feet (3.0 m), and disappears underground.^[11] It is believed the water rejoins the main channel of the river or has a separate outlet into Lake Superior, but it has never been located.^[6][8] Researchers have dropped brightly colored dyes, ping pong balls, and other objects into the Devil's Kettle without result.^[12] There is even a legend that someone pushed a car into the fissure, but given that the Devil's Kettle is wholly inaccessible by road, most commentators dismiss this as hyperbole.^[5][13]

Not only is the outlet unknown, but there is currently no satisfactory geological explanation for the Devil's Kettle.^[7]:57 Certainly riverbed potholes are known to form from rocks and grit swirling in aneddy with such force that they eventually drill a vertical shaft in the bedrock. How the flow is conducted away laterally, however, remains enigmatic. As geologist John C. Green writes:

One [theory] is that, after dropping down the pothole, the river runs along a fault underground, or as a variant, that it enters an underground channel and comes out somewhere under Lake Superior. Both of these ideas have one valid aspect in common: they recognize that water must move downhill! But the main problem is creating a channel or conduit large enough to conduct the impressive flow of half the Brule River! Faulting commonly has the effect of crushing and fracturing the rock along the fault plane. This could certainly increase the permeability of the rock - its capacity to transmit water - but the connected open spaces needed to drain half the river would be essentially impossible, especially for such a distance. Furthermore, there is no geologic evidence for such a fault at the Devil's Kettle. Large, continuous openings generally do not occur in rocks, except for caves in limestone terranes. The nearest limestone is probably in southeastern Minnesota, so that doesn't help... Maybe the Devil's Kettle bottoms out fortuitously in a great lava tube that conducts the water to the Lake... Unfortunately for this idea, they are not the right kind of volcanic rocks! Rhyolites, such as the great flow at this locality, never form lava tubes, which only develop in fluid basaltic lava. Even the basalts in this area may not be the "right kind", being flood basalts that spread laterally as a sheet fromfissures, not down the slopes of a volcano. No lava tubes have been found in the hundreds of basalt flows exposed along the North Shore. Furthermore, the nearest basalt is so far below the river bed, and even if it did contain an empty lava tube (very unlikely after its long history of deep burial) the tube would have to be both oriented in the right direction (south) and blocked above this site so that it isn't already full of debris. And there are no reports of trees or other floating debris suddenly appearing at one spot offshore in Lake Superior. The mystery persists.^[7]:57

And then we had to climb up those stairs.  For whatever reason, after the last stair and being winded, I just start jogging and continue to jog the trail back and then I hear M starting to sprint behind me and then I start sprinting and we race until we see a couple and we stop.  Overall, I think we worked off our pizza. 

The last stair!

While on our hike, we saw what we think is the same bald eagle in two separate places.

We drove back to the cabin and it was dark already and they had eaten dinner and already had a fire going on the shore.  This time we had the fire by Kim and Greg's cabin and it was a mellow evening, turning in around 10 pm but not before lighting some more Chinese sky lanterns, listening to some music, drinking a beer or two and enjoying our last evening at one of the best places in this entire world.  

Sunday morning and it's time to go home.  Until next time, Lake Superior.