October 11 - Norway, Michigan

The weather was still sunny and clear, if a bit cooler, so we went ahead with our plan to walk the Volksmarch in Norway, Michigan, in the morning. Norway is a smallish town east of Iron Mountain on Route 2, so it was easy to drive over there after breakfast. Appropriately enough, we found a sign in the shape of a Viking ship at the city limits that claimed Norway was the “Town of Trails”, which was encouraging.

The registration box was at the Americ-Inn just inside the city limits, so we signed up and started to drive a couple of miles north to Fumee Lake Park where this Volksmarch actually started. Along the way I spotted an artesian well bubbling down a cairn of rocks, which caught my attention because the weather had been quite dry and I would have expected most wells to dry up. When I stopped to investigate I found a sign explained that exploratory drilling for a new mine had tapped an aquifer from the hills above, producing the artesian spring. The cairn was nicely made in the CCC style of cemented rocks and the water was gleaming in the morning sunlight, a very pretty effect that we enjoyed for a Moment before continuing to the park for our walk.

The Volksmarch at Fumee Lake starts, appropriately enough, in the parking lot for the park that surrounds most of the lake. The basic 11-kilometer trail is a loop around the shores of Fumee Lake, but a extension to 14 kilometers is offered that broadens the final leg out to the park boundaries before returning to the parking lot. Since the branching point is near the end, we decided to delay the 11 vs. 14 kilometer decision until we were at the point where the trails diverged and could assess how tired/thirsty/aching we were.

The first leg out to Fumee Lake led us past a smaller lake called, predictably, Little Fumee. Well, that sparked the poetic streak in me and I composed:

By the shores of lit-tle Fu-mee,

By the shining lake-side wa-ters,

Walked a pair of re-tired wal-kers,

Walking in the au-tum co-lors.

What can I say? I’m a poet, and I know it, and my feet show it, they’re Longfellows! (Sorry!—apologies to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and everyone else!). Seriously, did you ever try buying shoes for a 12½ AAA size shoe? But that’s another story. Where was I? Ah, yes, the autumn colors were absolutely gorgeous and we had many “oh that’s so pretty” Moments. When sun was shining thru a canopy of brilliant yellow leaves and also reflecting from a yellow and red leaf-covered trail, it was if we were walking in a golden tunnel—a truly stunning effect.

Partly because it was so beautiful, I suppose, and partly because we weren’t dog-tired, we did do the 14-kilometer extension. That bulge in the loop marched us up a hill and back down, but fortunately the grades were quite gradual. Also, I was stopping often enough to take pictures that we had quite a few brief rests. The scenery was nice along the hill with evergreens interspersed among the blazing deciduous trees, but there weren’t any points that overlooked the lake so I didn’t get the lake shots I was hoping for. The final leg downhill to the parking lot was an easy, gradual descent all the way back.

All in all, this was a very nice woods walk in any season and particularly spectacular at the peak of the fall colors, which happened to be the time we were there. The path around Lake Fumee is quite flat and the trail is nice and wide, so I’d give it a 1, but if you take the extension up the hill you will climb about 200 feet total and that would bump it up to a 1+ or a 2. The trail surface is a fine gravel on the parts that follow an old railroad bed and otherwise compacted dirt—we tripped over some exposed roots on the latter sections but really didn’t have any other footing problems so you could probably do it in regular shoes.

We returned to the Storheim’s frozen custard shop for, we felt, a well-deserved lunch. I saved some fat calories by having the grilled chicken. The sandwich was quite good, but the real reason to have it was that it allowed me to split a delicious apple-caramel sundae with Monika. The sundae topping combined apple chunks in what I think was a brown sugar and cinnamon sauce with some caramel and I was surprised at how well the flavors blended together. Maybe I’ll try making something like this from my homemade applesauce because it also features chunks of apple combined with lots of brown sugar and cinnamon. But boy was that sundae big; I seriously don’t see how single folks can cope with these large desserts. We split the sundae between us and were still both completely satiated when we finished.

After lunch we stopped off for bread on the way back to our campsite where we found we were both tired enough to take a short nap. Then I mended my pants pocket while Monika selected pictures for the journal on the computer. When I was finished sewing, I took over the computer to write another day’s journal entry while Monika played the dulcimer. That’s the one disadvantage of having only one computer with people like us—we have to time-share who gets it when, but it is still a heck of lot better than not having one at all. I can just imagine trying to instead carry a typewriter, calculator, and the dark room equipment to develop color pictures instead of our little laptop—what a mess that would all make!