Along Echo Trail

Along Echo trail, Minnesota (June 2, 2013)

Mayli meeting is only starting on Tuesday, so we spent the day driving along one of my favorite forest roads, the Echo trail. It starts just a few miles from Ely, and then cut across a corridor in between the bulk of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and a smaller portion of it to the southwest. Only

A beaver on Vermillion lake (Jun 2, 2013)

paved for the first few miles on the Ely side, it is a beautiful drive through forest, river crossings, trail heads and portages. We drove the whole of it, stopping along the way to take pictures at some of the many lakes along the way. The trail ends at the eponymous Echo lake. Since it was still early when we arrived there, we took Crane lake road to, you guess it, Crane lake. Really close to the Canadian border, the Crane lake road end in a touristic village (an island of 3G network good enough to do video chats with our families in Italy and Venezuela, from the middle of the wilderness). You can find there a nice pub where to get a late lunch based on burgers or fried walleye. Restored, we then drove back to our cabin in Ely, following back Crane lake road until it hits route 1 to Ely. We still stopped a few times along the road, though: many lakes to see and photographs, including one where an unperturbed beaver (see photo on the left) was having a snack just a few feet from the shore.