(no subject)

I finally got through downloading and organizing all my vacation photos, so I will be posting a bunch of them over the next day or three. :-)





This is Star Island! It is the largest island in Cass Lake, Minnesota. (The others are Cedar Island and the Potato Islands -- Cedar is southeast of Star Island and the Potatoes are northwest, in Allen's Bay. There are technically three Potato Islands, but since the third is basically a sandbar and only an island during low water periods, people generally only count two.) Star Island is part of the Chippewa National Forest (here is the official Forest Service website, FYI). While some cabins (particularly on the north and south shores) are on private land, most are on Forest Service land and are thus leased rather than owned.

Star Island is notable for its history (examples here, here, and here) and for Lake Windigo, the lake at its center, which is thus a lake within a lake.

The first picture is of a USGS survey map made from aerial photographs; the second is a print of an old hand-drawn cabin-and-trail map which an awful lot of islanders have hanging somewhere in their cabins. The cabin owner names are no longer accurate in many cases, since they have been either sold or inherited, several more cabins have since been built (particularly on the north shore), and the marked trails are only a fraction of the ones that actually exist, but it's pretty and it's historical, so we keep it around. :-)

My family's cabin is on the east shore, which faces about three miles of open water. The southern half of the east shore is a tall bluff, though it flattens as you near the east portage and O'Neil's Point (aka Anderson's Point) has little truly high land. (Ah-Nung Point, aka Starr's Point, to the south, is definitely up on the bluff.) The south and north shores are low and sandy, with beaches at least five yards wide; the west shore has no beach; the northern east shore has a beach one to three yards wide; and the southern parts of the east shore only have a narrow sandy fringe in VERY low-water years. Much of the southern east shore has been reinforced with a collective riprap project to counter erosion caused by the Forest Service's previous policy of maintaining relatively high water in the lake; this was particularly damaging in winter when the lake froze over and ice gouged into the base of the bluff. That policy has since been scrapped, but the riprap remains.

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If you pay attention to the maps, you can easily see why I said the south portage in to Windigo is only a portage if you are feeling masochistic... and/or if you have an ATV and a trailer, I guess, though getting those over to the island in the first place would be a bit of a trick. The east portage isn't very long, but it's pretty narrow -- basically a forest path -- so it's best for canoes. If you want to bring a rowboat or an actual motor boat into Windigo, you use the north portage.

Proof:

( cut for large photographs )

wherein plants become food!

One pepper picked! As you can tell by the weird brownish coloration, it hadn’t finished ripening, but since bell peppers are more often eaten green than ripe, I don’t think it matters much.

I gave this pepper to my parents, who stopped by to have lunch and retrieve their second car, which they’d left in my possession while they were away on vacation. The other two bell peppers are still ripening on the plant, but I have stir fry supplies (onion, summer squash, spinach, chicken, and Italian salad dressing for flavor and oil) so come Tuesday evening, they are getting picked, cleaned, and damn well cooked whether they’re completely ripe or not. :-)

(FYI, those are my mom’s hands, not mine. You can tell by the watch and the wedding ring.)

Star Island pictures: trail maintenance edition

Trail maintenance near the east portage, two sets of before-and-after photos:

( overgrown boardwalk )

( rotting plank bridge )

Context: the Forest Service laid a boardwalk over some occasionally swampy land right at the edge of Lake Windigo. That was fine for a couple years, but in 2011 a giant hole developed right at the end of the walk. My family duly built a makeshift bridge, because we’re awesome like that. *grin* Of course, wood laid directly over water has an unfortunate tendency to rot (particularly when it wasn’t in great condition to start with), so this year we had to replace one of the boards. So it goes!

(Also, a random point of interest for any Homestucks: yes, that is an actualfax crowbar lying on top of the hammer in the fourth picture. They are quite useful for prying up stubborn construction nails and attached pieces of wood.)

NFE blather time again

I caught up on my NFE comments again, huzzah! I keep falling behind, to my annoyance, which I am quite sure is a direct consequence of my iffy and inadequate sleep patterns, but today I had free time and was also capable of coherent thought, so I knocked them off in one fell swoop.

On that note, I would like to remind people that the Narnia Fic Exchange 2013 is still in progress over at narniaexchange. One fic will be posted every day until every participant has a story. Go! Read! Comment! All the authors could use more love. :-)