Photos from Biking Across Minnesota
This last week, I completed a 10-day, 625-mile bike trip across northern Minnesota. I started in St. Vincent (Pembina, ND actually) and finished in Silver Bay on Lake Superior. It was a great solo bicycle trip.
Route Background
The route I took was on the proposed MNDNR Border to Border Touring Route. While the route is over 800 miles when all the various branches and loops are accounted for, I selected a route that was a direct route from the western border to the eastern border. My selection ended up at about 600 miles. The extra miles I rode were from getting to campgrounds and grocery stores. I also bought gifts in Blackduck and used General Delivery at the post office there to send myself a resupply box. I sent the gifts home from Blackduck using the post office. It was a convenient town.
The route was conceived as an off-road vehicle (highway-licensed vehicles only) route across Minnesota. In 2015, the legislators passed an appropriation that required the DNR to designate an off-road vehicle (ORV) touring route, and that’s where the impetus for the route came from. The route hasn’t been without controversy and several counties, including Cook County where I live, rejected the route for various reason including budgetary and environmental reasons.
I’ll make a short comment about this because I’m from Cook County. I think it was wise that Cook County rejected it for several reasons, but the two that are most compelling to me are this: 1) Lake County and Silver Bay specifically can benefit greatly from additional tourism dollars whereas Cook County is already facing overtourism situations, and 2) While the vast majority of ORV drivers follow the law, I saw plenty of illegal and damaging situations across the entire route. Consolidating the route into fewer counties will allow the local government units in those counties to develop the specialties that are needed to clean up the problems that the small number of bad users cause.
Mainly, I’m really happy for Silver Bay. They are the eastern terminus of the route, and I hope that works out for them and helps them grow and diversify their economy and create new businesses and jobs based around this touring route.
The Ride Statistics
For the most part the ride was great. My favorite section was everything east of Blackduck. It was 300 miles of great gravel, forest service roads and ATV trails. I’d ride that section again in a second! I’d love to turn this into a bike loop that started in Silver Bay, looped up to Ely and then to Blackduck and came back on the Border to Border Touring Route without using any of the same roads.
Anyway, here are the statistics for those are that are into this kind of thing:
Milage: 625
Feet Climbed: 14,958
Days: 10
Shortest Day in Miles: 32.1
Longest Day in Miles: 79.9
Riding Time in Hours: 57
The Gear
I have thoughts on the biking and camping gear I used, but I’ll spend time on the photography gear that I carried.
For camera gear, I brought the following:
Nikon Z 7II (lighter and smaller than my Z 8)
Z 24-120 f/4 S lens (I only wanted to deal with one lens and this covered about everything)
Singh-Ray Filters: 3-stop soft grad, 3-stop Reverse grad, and LB Neutral Polarizer (a light filter holder for the grads that isn’t made anymore)
Kirk L-bracket
Waterproof Case for extra memory cards: 1 x 64GB, 2x128GB (I didn’t use any of these extra cards. I only ended up taking 954 photos during the trip and they all fit on one 128GB memory card.
Rugged Gear Filter holder: this held all the fiters, filter holder and the memory card case.
Sirui AM-225 tripod: This worked great as an adventure tripod — that is a tripod for taking on human-powered, multi-day adventures, such as bikepacking, backpacking, and canoe tripping. It weighs under 2 pounds with the Sirui ballhead. While that weight might look great for a general travel tripod (or day hike tripod), I wouldn’t recommend it for that. It has too many compromises. Those compromises are something that I’m willing to accept for human-powered trips, but for travel where I can’t carry my big tripod I’d recommend the next bigger tripod from Sirui. The Sirui AM-254 with their ballhead is excellent for travel. The price is great, too.
2 spare Nikon batteries
10,000mAh battery pack and two wall chargers with three output plugs, 3 USB C cords and a USB C to USB mini adapter. I was mainly powering bike computers and my flashing rear light/radar system with this stuff. I used 1.5 Nikon batteries on the trip.
On these types of trips, you need to decide whether or not it is a photography trip or a biking trip. In this case, I was riding from sunrise (around 7:30am) to near sunset (around 6:30pm). I also had to cook and setup camp and takedown camp. Without other riders on the trip, I had to setup a tripod and ride by it many times to get any riding pictures. That usually took 15 to 30 minutes out of the day.
I had little time for dedicated photography.
In retrospect, I could have carried only the polarizer (and only its small case) and maybe a much lighter tripod (the AOKA 28in/1.1lb Lightweight Compact Carbon Fiber Tripod which has a whole bunch of compromises, but it would have been fine for this trip). I could have stored the memory cards in a ziplock with the chargers and batteries and they would have been fine. That would have saved me some weight (about two pounds) and hassle of packing the Rugged filter holder bag.
The following photo of a sunset over Upper Red Lake from Big Bog State Recreation Area was one of the few times that I had extra time to photograph during the ride. Instead of riding 70 miles on this day, I took a short 32.1-mile day so I could hike the trails at Big Bog. I’ve always wanted to visit this area. I figured that I may never get back, so I needed to spend time at the park.
The Ride
I still need to think about and digest the entire trip before I can write completely and thoughtfully about it, but one thing that I did notice of the trip was that many mailboxes and yards and stores and towns had quirky fun displays. It was also October and near Halloween, which is a holiday that I love. Halloween displays were everywhere. Those were fun to photograph.
Here are a few shots of fun quirky displays that I saw along the trip.
Towards the end of the trip, I ran into peak fall color. It was really amazing riding through the bright yellows on forest service roads. I’m a sucker for tamaracks in fall color, so I really wanted to spend time photographing the trees. I only stopped here and there to get a few handheld photos.
There’s so much more I could share from this trip, but I need to think about how to share it. Maybe I should do a presentation and slideshow about it?
In the end it was a great ride.
Until next time
I hope you enjoyed this short (longish) telling of my bike ride. I’ll see you again in two weeks.
So, when I do any ride I just use my Pixel 6. Why did you decide to take your Nikon and not just use your Pixel (maybe you have another cell phone now).
Awesome thanks for sharing