Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from Mike and I at Rockwood to all of you! Thanks for all your cards and notes - we love hearing from you. Here's hoping the roads are clear wherever you wish to go this holiday season, safe travel, great fellowship, and a wonderful Christmas!



The Gunflint Trail got about 4 inches of snow yesterday and overnight, so Mike's been out blowing the driveway and thinking hard about his snowmobile. He hasn't gotten it started yet this year but now there's probably enough snow - not to mention winter fishing opener coming up so he's got that on his mind!

Getting ready for Christmas

The Christmas tree is up and decorated, yet another year when Mike and I just couldn't stand the thought of cutting down a real one. Guess we lived too many years in a new subdivision located more or less in the middle of an Iowa beanfield - trees take too long to grow for us to cut one down! I've gotten a little sentimental about our artificial tree, anyway - we've had it a long long time. And it's fun to look out the window past the tree and see how nature has decorated the trees outside with snow! We're starting to feel pretty "Christmasy" around here right now!

The lottery for 2010 BWCA permits is open, and we'd be happy to help you with yours! It's the same website as last year - www.recreation.gov . Lottery results will be sent out around January 18.

Snow at home

We're back! We had a wonderful, wonderful Thanksgiving week - saw all the family, enjoyed great dinner, great fellowship... and we're also greatly thankful to be home again on the Gunflint!

The weather was fantastic almost the whole trip, traffic wasn't bad, our truck cooperated - everything was fine. On the other hand, Mike had a little trouble sleeping because of all the noise from cars driving by our relatives' houses, I missed my "pet" grouse and there sure are a lot of yard lights in southern Minnesota, all of Iowa and most of Missouri!

We knew we were getting close to home when we started to see deer along the road near Lutsen, knew we were getting closer when we got to Grand Marais to see a dusting of snow, and were sure we were almost home when we started up the Gunflint Trail in a minor blizzard with the road 100% covered in new snow and no vehicle tracks! There were a LOT of fox and snowshoe hare tracks to welcome us, not to mention a long string of moose tracks wandering down the middle of the road. This morning there's a nice coating of new snow on the lake ice. It must have been warm while we were gone, since there's a bit of open water along the shores of Poplar Lake but we're obviously in winter mode here!

Frosty morning

We woke this morning to beautiful blue sky, lots of sunshine - and a frozen lake! The new ice is like a mirror, almost as clear as still water, but I guess this means the end of fishing until it gets thick enough to walk on. We got a dusting of snow over the weekend and there's still a little in shady spots - winter is definitely headed our way!

We have been helping a neighbor to net, pickle and smoke whitefish this past week. The smoked fish taste pretty darn good but we have to wait awhile to try the pickled fish. Tonight we're going to learn to make fish cakes. Other than that we're pretty well settled in for the winter, waiting for thicker ice and snow for winter activities!

Virginia!

Well, we took advantage of fair weather last week and hauled a load of canoes over to Spring Creek and sold them. Lin got her annual shopping trip to Virginia - several of her favorite stores have branches there - and Mike got his annual trip to L and M Fleet. So we're pretty well stocked for the winter with new jeans, flannel shirts and odds and ends. Also - we got ourselves out of Cook County for the first time since the food show in Duluth back in April. Cook County is a beautiful place and we love living here, but it was nice to see some different scenery for a change.

We met a man at the day-old bread store who was stocking up with four loaves of bread and explaining that he had to plan his shopping because he lives so far out in the woods. He looked at our cart full of bread and said "You must have a deep freeze? That's really stocking up!" We weren't sure he believed us when we told him we really live "in the woods" - thirty miles from town!

Mike celebrated the last day of trout season by taking his pole and his one left over crawler and walking in to Birch Lake. He came home with a limit of trout. There aren't many places where you can take one nightcrawler on a fishing trip and come home with a limit of trout!

The weather the last several days has been great. Mike's gotten some painting done and Lin's been collecting pine needles for her baskets. The cool, damp summer apparently meant that the pine needles got more water and they're unusually long this year - say six or seven inches instead of five or six. The longer needles make basket weaving easier, so there's at least one upside (besides having no campfire restrictions) for a damp summer!