It's time to officially announce the trip I have been planning for the past 6 months.
I will be solo snowshoeing the Superior Hiking Trail southbound from Jan. 3 to 17, 2009. As of this post, I have about 8 days to get everything wrapped up.
The trip is inspired by Andrew Skurka's Icebox '07 trip, where he hiked northbound from Duluth, up the SHT to the Border Route Trail to the Kekekabic Trail and ended on Snowbank Lake about 18 miles outside of Ely. The whole trip was essentially right in my backyard. As far as winter experience, I have been staffing a winter camp in central MN since the winter of 2005 and spent spent a week on Snowbank Lake about this time last year. I thru-hiked the trail in May and have been on the trail in various locations for multiple weekends.
I am estimating traveling about 15 miles per day on snowshoes with a base weight of about 19 lbs. I will be taking two resupplies – one in Grand Marais on day 4 and one in Finland on day 10.
Unlike Skurka's adventure, I am hiking southbound and the North Shore has not experienced a brown Christmas – the snow has been flying in recent weeks and I will not need crampons to deal with ice-coated trails. I am also not hiking the Duluth section of the trail.
As always, the last week before a major trip is always a quick one. I am picking up food on Monday, packing sending resupply packages, testing fuel consumption and finalizing my stove choice and a hundred other miscellaneous tasks that can only be done in this time frame.
If you're in the area during that time, let me know here and we'll see if we can meet up. I am definitely stopping in Duluth on the way home to decompress and chow down at Pizza Luce.
Everything else about the trip is posted on my blog, crazyrunnerguy.blogspot.com. I am working on getting a gear list into PDF form and linking it on my profile. So far, I have been unsuccessful.
