Tag: RV camping

Sunsets and chestnuts

Through no wishful thinking or design on our part, others’ plight transformed into our delight as the red sun slipped toward the shores of Lake Superior. I walked the 30 feet from our camper door to where the water danced on the shoreline rocks of Chequamegon Bay, my camera in hand. I was not the only one. Half a dozen folks were being pulled to the lakeshore on this early evening in mid September, pulled by the show across the water on the western horizon.

The sun was settling down and taking on a complexion of orange and red, the color more intense as the horizon neared, belying the sun’s soft manner and silent slide at this moment. Filtered through smoky haze we could not easily see or smell, the pretty hue of the sunset was nevertheless the result of wildfires ravaging the West, nearly 2,000 miles away.

How could this be, this peaceful, pretty byproduct of the fiery destruction so far away? I felt guilty. “Did you get a winner?” a woman asked as I clicked through the images on my camera. Perhaps, but that sunset told a tale of tragedy. Nobody wins. The sun slipped away. 

Night came and so did the stars. Upon arrival at the campground I had taken a reading on directions, using my phone. I noted North, but now at night I wanted the stars to reaffirm it, for if I ever have to choose, I will take the stars over my phone. From the same spot I stood in the afternoon, I found Polaris, the North Star, with pointer help from the Big Dipper. Technology and the heavens were in perfect accord. Lights of a harbor town flickered across the bay; campfires flickered around us.  

The water was choppy the next afternoon as the wind picked up. The brisk breeze was from the west—no doubt carrying more smoke our way. My wife and I took the walking trail lined with trees and bushes that hugged the shoreline and hindered the wind. I turned my attention to the vegetation along the path. Soon I had a collection of plants and flowers in my mind and on my camera, including bur marigolds in yellow, touch-me-nots in orange, crown vetch in whitish pink, and milkweed, still holding green pods this far north.

From one small tree I picked its round fruit, the hull olive-colored and spiky. Later I split the hull open to uncover two dark brown, shiny nuts inside. The tree was a horse-chestnut, according to the resources I called upon. A new discovery for me. 

We returned to the campsite and began cooking outside. Another clear evening on Lake Superior, another sunset across the big water. Later, around the campfire, I stared into the flickering glow, thankful for flames that provide reflection, not destruction. 

Trails to new nugget

There’s plenty of comfort in knowing where you’re going in life, short term, long term, figuratively and literally. But in my summer of intensified camping I’ve had to look beyond the comfort of my two or three favorite campgrounds.

Not that I want to, for my favorite spots are where it’s easy to pull in or back in the fifth-wheel camper, where the windows and chairs face the lake, and where I get a clear view of the stars and planets at night while at the same time it doesn’t feel like a bear is ready to join my wife and me at the campfire.

So when my brother-in-law said he had made reservations at Nugget Lake County Park in Pierce County in western Wisconsin, and would we want to get a site there also for the last weekend in August, well, I didn’t know if I wanted to. It’s not on my “favorites” list, never mind that it had never even been given the chance to make the list.

But I was forced, no, that word’s too strong, persuaded to pick up the phone. We got Site 32, right across from my brother-in-law and his wife in Site 33. So we were headed somewhere different—translate out of my comfort zone—among the fields, hills and creeks between Plum City and Ellsworth, about 10 miles from the Mighty Miss.

In the days leading up to the Nugget Lake trip I eased my apprehension by making light of our destination, calling it Nutsy Lake and recalling scenes from vacation movies where everything can and will be wrong and go wrong. Boy, was I wrong.

This isn’t a travelogue blog, but I can tell you that I’ve added Nugget Lake County Park to my favorites list. The back-in wasn’t as hard as I thought—my brother-in-law trucker made me do it myself because I “need the practice”—the sites are large and wooded just enough to provide some privacy, and there are clean bathrooms/showers and a park staff patrolling and helping.

But what sold me were the miles of trails cut into the woods and meadows all through the park, neatly-mown 6-foot wide grassy paths right up my trail running alley. Foot bridges cross over Rock Elm Creek, and one outing took us to Blue Rock, a massive rock of dolostone that is part of the Rock Elk Disturbance. That wall of jagged rock, which has both underview and overview areas, was formed by a “cataclysmic explosive event,” in other words, a massive meteor impact, say the geologists.

To think of the shock wave that formed this 470 million years ago and then see a group of kids playing beneath it in Rock Elm Creek catching crawdads as their mother and dog watched in the afternoon sun was truly bringing the past and present together in this special geological spot.

We were also surrounded by the yellow hues of goldenrod and Jerusalem artichoke, the purples of blooming Canadian thistle and the orange of touch-me-nots in the wetlands. As I gazed on the sprawling, rising meadow in front of me, I thought of how a few weeks earlier I was not excited to touch this Nugget Lake campground just because it wasn’t on my comfort list. It is now. Like the Blue Rock, this spot had an impact on me. A new nugget.