Pincushion Mountain

It looked like a relatively easy hike, about a 400-foot climb and a mile up from Minnesota Highway 61, a spur trail just outside the door of my motel room to Pincushion Mountain. And the first quarter of a mile and 100 feet was fine, if a little-used trail. But as I got further on, the trail became less defined, and I began to have to search for it. In a couple of places tree-fall had blocked the trail, and I had to steer around the fall and find the meager trail again. But when I got up to about 300 feet I ran into granite outcroppings and clearings of grasses of red and gold and funguses of gray and green, and few hints of where the trail might be. Searching around, I would find a cairn, or a brief depression indicating the trail. I also began to look back to where the trail entered a clearing of outcroppings and grasses in order to be able to backtrack down the mountain. But at some point I’d clearly lost the trail altogether. But I saw what I at first thought might be a deer run, but after a while realized was ATV tracks. But I figured at least those tracks would keep me on some sort of relatively civilized path. But after a couple more clearings and outcroppings, I realized that I was way off the track I was originally on, and wasn’t going to make it to the mountain peak. So I decided to head back down. But before long, my landmarks were no longer there, and I was wandering around the mountain, lost. At the uppermost clearing, I kept coming back to a fire ring that I’d used as a marking, but I couldn’t, after at least three meanderings around the area, find the trail. But finally I did, nothing more than a dark depression in pines, and thought all was well. But soon back down I again lost the trail, and again searched and searched for my landmarks. Finally, I just gave up and decided to point myself down the mountain to the highway. I could hear the traffic on the road, and after a while I could see it. So I pushed through a stand of pines and came out at the back of some residences above the highway/lake, and found a path of a phone line that I’d seen at the beginning of my hike, and followed it to a driveway, then down the drive to the 61, and when I looked up the road, saw the sign to my motel. It wasn’t at all the hike I’d expected. But it was an adventure of sorts. With all the climb and loss, wander and worry, it finally was nothing more than a walk up the mountain, a walk in the woods. And awhile of being lost, of maybe losing a few moments of where I just might be.