Okay … the one time I went to the peak of “Eagle Mountain” in Minnesota, was on a weekend getaway with my sister. My son was young enough to miss me for the weekend, so it must have been about 8 years ago. Laura and I were actually heading to Sleeping Giant park in Ontario, so the trip to the top of Eagle was a spur along the way. We headed straight up the gravel road from near Grand Marais, and got there in record time (when my sister is in a hurry, she’s in a hurry). I think we sprinted up that boulder- and windfall-strewn trail to the little curlicue in the trail that marks the steeper part of the climb. I had an elevation map at the time, and we tracked each 100 feet. As we rounded one of the turns, there was dense forestation in a few places and the trickle of water, and staccato of mossy bogs dripping from one level to another of the rising trail. It reminded me, mood-wise, of the Peter Weir film, “Picnic at Hanging Rock,” which was one of my faves in college. In the film, some young boarding school girls in Australia go for an outing at Ayers rock. During the outing they get a little audacious and misty and swoony, as young girls do. A few of them break away from the group to go up this little rock pass, and they simply disappear off the face of the earth—a true mystery. I look for that feeling sometimes when climbing or hiking up high, that swoony, otherworldly feel, as if you could simply disappear into the landscape, into a hidden dimension. And that’s what it felt like hiking with my sister on the Eagle Mountain trail, in a few places. I think there was even some mist near the top. But also, I was running and panting to keep up with my hyper sister. At the top was a giant granite boulder with a plaque on it. We took the photo op and got a few pictures. Then sprinted down again, and made it to Sleeping Giant by nightfall. The end.

Except we had only made the journey for me, because I’d made the trip and tried to make the climb a few years previous to that, and I really wanted to complete the peak. I had joined a hiking club when I first moved to Minnesota, and went on this “winter camping” trip with two folks, and the guy had said he would bring all the gear for winter camping. I learned a lot from him—mainly how unprepared I was and how great fleece is for warmth and how crazy but okay it is to sleep in a freezing van with two people you barely know and four giant dogs. He had his skijoring dogs with him, and they needed a lot of attention, including walking. If you ever want to know how it feels to be a piece of Gruyere when it’s run over a grater, all you need to do is walk a few sled dogs on an icy trail strewn with boulders the size and shape of skewed living room furniture. But there was a wonderful, dreamy display of northern lights that night, blues and greens all cirrus-y. And I completed the peak a few years later.