Back in October, I went to Jay Cooke State Park with my dad to go hiking. We planned on hiking around five to seven miles and then heading back to Duluth to watch the U of M Twin Cities and UMD hockey game.

Things definitely did not go as planned…

There’s what we actually did, and yes, that does in fact say 112 floors.

Now that you’ve seen the aftermath of that adventure, here are some of the pictures that I took.

So right around this point on the hike, we went a little off trail. I then sent this picture to my stepmom…

And captioned it “guess what dad did…” Her immediate guess was that he had fallen and hurt himself because the last time we went hiking that’s what my stepmom did. But in reality my dad just decided to ignore the map and took us down into a giant ditch that we had to climb out of.

I don’t think you can really tell from this picture but that’s a hill, and that’s what we had to climb up to get back onto the trail.

Eventually, we stopped for lunch and ate at this really nice overlook.

Then came the “fun” part of the hike. We decided to follow the loop around Upper Lake Trail and promptly started the too long trek that by the end of it I was definitely contemplating just rolling down the hills. (I actually would have done this if I could have gone back to my dorm to change before dinner and the hockey game)

One of the highlights of the trail was how pretty the trees were. Absolutely gorgeous. I had forgotten my memory card for my camera that day so unfortunately all I got were iPhone pictures but I still think they turned out pretty great.

There’s a panoramic view from the top of one of the numerous hills on the trail.

On our way back to the parking lot we found this porcupine just hanging out in a tree. It was really cool to see one so close up.

And there it is, the final picture. Me standing on the swinging bridge after this insane hike. My dad took the picture and immediately after we walked as fast as we could to the car so we could finally sit down. I had actually brought a change of shoes and was overjoyed to be able to put on fuzzy slippers and just sit down. I don’t think I got out of bed more than three times the entire next day.

I hope you all enjoyed my pictures from my very interesting hike through Jay Cooke State Park. I’ll talk to you soon.