Continuing our end of August North Country Trail blitz, we went with our hiking group last Sunday to hike the segment of the NCT that runs through Old Victoria just to the west of Rockland. It was near this spot that the famed Ontonagon Boulder, a giant piece of float copper now in the Smithsonian, was found by missionaries. Reports of this discovery helped spur mining interest in the region. We met up with our fellow hikers at the Victoria Dam just to the southwest of Old Victoria and walked up to the trail from there.
The trail comes up along the poor rock piles from the Victoria Mine which operated primarily at the beginning of the 20th century.
The trail leads up to the ruins of the hoist house where it goes in one door and out the next…the only such place over the 4,800 miles of the North Country Trail!
The trail then winds down to where the housing for the mine site is located. You pass quite a number of foundations before reaching the handful of cabins that have been restored.
As we finished up the rest of this hike, we passed through an area with a good deal of mushroom growth. We came across this giant puffball below that was larger than a bowling ball!
You can see my GoPro video from this hike on the Remote Workforce Keweenaw YouTube channel at this link:
On Monday morning I had coffee with Shannon Vairo from Michigan Tech at Camp Coffee in Houghton. We discussed collaborating on a networking event for both remote workers and the partners of incoming MTU faculty. We will be holding an event on October 12th from 4 to 7 p.m. at the Rozsa Center sponsored by the College of Computing. We are very excited about the opportunity this will present for better connecting these individuals with each other and with the community! More about this in future issues!
On Tuesday morning, I knocked out the minutes from the Keweenaw Nordic Ski Club annual meeting and got those distributed to the board in advance of the evening’s board meeting, then Julie and I headed back down to the North Country Trail. Now that we were over 89 miles toward our #hike100NCT, we were bound and determined to close the gap. We picked up the trail at the Canyon Falls roadside park on US 41 south of L’Anse and headed eastward for a quick 3 mile hike along the Sturgeon River. It was warm, but there was a total lack of insects which made for a very pleasurable hike!
It would have been nice to have spent more time along the river, but I needed to get back for the board meeting that evening! You can see my GoPro video from this hike on the Remote Workforce Keweenaw YouTube channel at this link:
Do you embrace winter and have the ability to work remotely? Would you value living in a place with ubiquitous natural beauty that has NO congestion and lower crime? Consider locating in the Keweenaw where you will be surrounded by amazing places! Learn more by visiting the Remote Workforce Keweenaw website at https://remoteworkforcekeweenaw.com.