Visit to Northern Minnesota

We are home in IA again, but before we left our WI property for the summer, we traveled to northern Minnesota to visit Sandy and Will. More than a year ago, they bought a piece of property there, which is nestled alongside a lake deep in the Superior National Forest, quite close to the Boundary Waters Canoe Wilderness, and only a few miles from the Canadian Border. Driving to the property involves the Gunflint Trail, several National Forest Service roads, and about two miles of very rugged and sometimes very hilly road into Sandy and Will's place. Did I mention "very rugged?"

The property itself is beautiful. There are lots of woods, as you would imagine, and the lake is picturesque. (It is also full of lake trout. Will spent about two hours giving Kathie and me a chance to try catching one, but we had no luck this time. Perhaps we will try again on a future visit.) Unfortunately, the prior owner of the property had made a very poor attempt to build a house, which by the time Sandy and Will bought the place was already beginning to fall down. There were a few other structures too--a sauna, an outhouse, and maybe a simple shed or two for storing wood. Will has blogged extensively about the work that they are doing to claim the property for themselves. If you click here, you will be at Will's blog, and if you examine some of the past postings, particularly the November, 2006 archive, you will get some idea of what they are dealing with.

Kathie and I had not visited this new property until this trip, and so we had not had a prior chance to lend a hand with any of the work. Through the summer, Sandy had been rebuilding a deck that was to one side of the "house" (note the quotation marks). She had done a terrific job putting down the new decking, which created a wonderful spot for them to set up a gazebo-style tent for dining and evening visits.



Will first assigned me to help Sandy with the construction of a railing around the deck. You can see some evidence of the results in one of the pictures above, as well as in this shot that looks out form the deck toward the lake.


Sandy has become a master with the power tools. Here she is cutting some of the railing pieces that we needed. You might remember a similar picture that I took of Betsy when we built her gardening bench. I'm seriously considering making a 2008 Women With Saws calendar. I'm missing shots of Kathie, Jessica and Carrie with saws, and I'll have to find seven more candidates for photos, but you might want to get your orders into me soon. I'm sure these will sell like hotcakes.


Later, we built a bench for the deck, but unfortunately, I forgot to take a picture of that.

While I worked a second day on the railing and the bench, Kathie helped Sandy clean out the lower level of the old house and helped Will remove most of the second floor of the "house."






In the last shot above, Kathie is obviously loading scrap and debris into our pickup. We were pleased to learn that the pickup could be so helpful to Sandy and Will in terms of moving waste to a burn pile (which has become immense and which will be ignited evidently sometime in the dead of winter when there is little forest fire danger, according to Will).

Those are all of the pictures I have to share. I wish I had taken more. We really like what the kids are doing with their place and can imagine that it will be a very restful place to visit in the future. They already have a very nice little (maybe 10x12) cabin that they built for their visits there, and they are thinking about the possiblity of a bigger cabin at some time in the future.