Answering the call - 4,600 miles on the North Country Trail
The call of the trail. Everyone who hikes or backpacks knows the feeling, especially this time of year. It’s looking at maps, reading guidebooks, planning trips - trails just seem to call to you.
I’ve had many trails call to me over the years. I’ve hiked the Kekekabic and Superior Hiking Trails in their entirety. I’ve even knocked-off each Hiking Club trail in every state park in Minnesota. Recently, the Border Route Trail through the BWCA and the Greenstone Ridge Trail on Isle Royale have been calling my name. They are calls I’d love to lace-up my boots and answer.
Luke Jordan is a young man who knows the call of the trail very well. But the trail that is calling his name is not just a little five-mile state park loop, a hearty forty-mile hike like the Kek, or even a grand 300-miler like the SHT.
On March 27, Jordan left Lake Sakakawea State Park in North Dakota on a 4,600-mile adventure. He plans to end his hike in early October in Vermont. His goal is to join an elite group of three people to thru-hike the North Country Scenic Trail.
I met Luke last summer during a Superior Hiking Trail volunteer work weekend. We were part of a group who repaired the Encampment River bridge and built a new quarter-mile of trail between Duluth and Two Harbors. During that weekend I learned that Luke had been on many of these volunteer trips and he was an enthusiastic and hard worker.
Then, while sitting around the campfire, I learned of his ultra-ambitious hike. My first reaction was, “Holy cow! That is so crazy!”
A split second later, it was, “Holy cow! That is so awesome! I wish I could come with you!”
Another volunteer had hiked the entire 2,184-mile Appalachian Trail - perhaps the most famous footpath in the world. Throughout the evening, Luke would page through that hiker’s photo album, soaking-up the photos with reverence and awe. I could see the other hiker’s adventure building the excitement in Luke for his own hike - still over six months away.
The North Country Trail is a national scenic hiking trail administrated by the National Park Service. Established in 1980, the NCT is really a network of smaller trails all connected under the North Country banner. Highlights include The Kekekabic, Border Route and Superior Hiking trails in Minnesota, the Penokee Mountains of Wisconsin, Porcupine Mountains and Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan, the Buckeye Trail in Ohio, the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania, and Finger Lakes Trail of New York which enters the spectacular Adirondack Park. Home of 5000+ foot peaks, Adirondack Park is a mostly wilderness area larger in area than Yellowstone, Glacier, Yosemite and Great Smokey Mountains National Parks combined. The eastern terminus is a few miles east of this vast wilderness at Crown Point State Historic Site at the Vermont state line. Plans are currently underway to extend the trail into Vermont and connect to the Appalachian Trail via the Long Trail.
Separately, these places can occupy a lifetime of a hiker’s daydreams. All together, it becomes the trip of a lifetime.
As a youth, Jordan’s love of hiking was instilled in him like so many of us - by our parents. Like me, his parents took him hiking at many of the incredible state parks of Minnesota’s North Shore. If that’s not a place to get a kid hooked on hiking, no place will.
When he was 14, he discovered the Superior Hiking Trail and found himself exploring the high peaks of the Sawtooth Mountains which surrounded his family’s land near Finland.
By the time he was old enough to drive, he set-off to hike the entire Superior Hiking Trail piece by piece - a goal he is eager to complete during his current hike.
The summer after he graduated from high school, Jordan signed-up for the Forest Service’s “Passport In Time” program in Twin Lakes, Colorado doing historic preservation work. The project was located on the Continental Divide Trail where he met other hikers and heard their trail tales from around the world.
Later that year, he decided to answer the call of his hometown trail by helping the Superior Hiking Trail with trail building. Over the next several years while attending college at Saint Cloud State University, he would head-up to the SHT as much as he could, venturing-out on multi-day backpacking trips and helping-out with trail work.
Graduating from college in December, Jordan knew it was now or never if he was to complete his dream of completing the NCT. After months of planning, he is now setting forth upon his grandest adventure.
Last week, I caught up with Luke by email to ask him some last minute questions about his trip. His excitement was infectious. But underneath his gung-ho enthusiasm I could see that he has put a lot of planning into this serious expedition.
His planning has been so meticulous, in fact, that he already made a trip to Michigan’s Mackinaw Bridge last Labor Day - the only day it is open to pedestrian traffic annually. After making the crossing he had to hightail it back to Minnesota since classes started the next day.
Jordan plans to keep his pack weight under thirty pounds as he has found that it starts to get uncomfortable at 35. That will allow for extra pack room if he needs to carry extra food or gear for any reason.
As far as food goes, he plans to carry enough food for roughly eight days at a time before resupplying at predetermined mail drops. He also plans eat “on the road” about once a week to lift his spirits and get some extra calories.
But back to the excitement. Jordan said he was anxious to start and very excited about the northeastern Minnesota section as well as Michigan’s upper peninsula and New York’s Finger Lake region. Each section of trail has its own unique character and he’s looking forward to every inch.
But to complete a 4,600 mile trail in six months, you can’t do a lot of casual sightseeing - you have to move pretty fast. Apparently, that shouldn’t be much of a problem. During a family trip to the Northwest Angle region of Minnesota, Jordan inherited his trail name when he was asked to slow down because the others could not keep up with his long strides. He has since been known on the trail as “Strider.”
We’ll be following Strider’s journey through the next several months here at Minnesota North Outdoors. We’ll provide a link to his web site www.stridernct.com where you can see photos, read his journal and sign his guestbook to offer encouragement.
Here’s to a great hiking season to Strider and to all of us who answer the “call of the trail!”
In : Hiking
Tags: hiking backpack bwca "superior hiking trail" "north country trail" "luke jordan"
Zach Johns is an alpine skier, backpacker, paddler and all-around nature lover who lives on Minnesota‘s Iron Range. Originally from Osceola, Wis., Johns attended the University of Minnesota-Duluth so he could ski every day and be close to the trails of his beloved North Shore. There, he earned a degree in Communication and was editor of the student newspaper. However, the real education he gained at UMD was in honing his outdoor skills. He took courses in subjects such as backpacking, winter camping, rock climbing and canoe tripping. By the time he graduated, that was all he wanted to do. In January of 1997, he moved to the Range where he met a group of die-hard skiers dedicated to making turns at Giants Ridge every single day of the winter (when they weren’t out skiing the big mountains of the west.) Throughout the late nineties he built a very impressive ski resume, taking several trips to Utah, Montana, Wyoming, California, British Columbia and Alaska. During the off-season, he took to the hiking trails. In 1997, he hiked the entire Superior Hiking Trail during the single season (what had been completed until that time) and in following years, took trips to Yosemite, Glacier and the Grand Canyon. He also made two attempts to climb King’s Peak, the highest mountain in Utah, but failed to summit both times. In 1999, he attempted the infamous 43-mile Kekekabic Trail through the heart of the BWCA and limped out after only ten miles with a hernia. He did finally complete the Kek in 2005, during one of the hottest weeks on record. Besides hiking, he also continued dabbling with paddling, making several canoe trips to the BWCA and became an enthusiastic (yet very novice) whitewater kayaker. He is now a father of two sons, Nick and Jackson, who accompany their father on nearly all his adventures. Both were skiing fairly soon after they could stand and from 2006-2011, the three hiked in every state park in Minnesota, 195 miles of hiking in 65 parks. Since becoming a dad, Johns has suddenly realized that you can’t just be out there skiing, hiking, paddling, etc. without also working to protect the very things you love. With that in mind, he founded an adventure club at work to get co-workers outside who might not otherwise be inspired to go. The club has gone on hiking, paddling, winter camping and cycling trips and annually go on a trash pick-up hike to celebrate Earth Day. He believes that once you get people out into beautiful wild places, the more likely they will be to protect them. He has also done a lot of volunteer work for the Superior Hiking Trail Association including adopting a backcountry campsite which he and the boys maintain twice a year. It is of extreme importance, he believes, to introduce children to the outdoors early. Not only is it good for them, but they will be the ones protecting these places once we are gone. Future plans? There are a few local goals to check-off including hiking the Border Route Trail in the BWCA and Isle Royale. Mostly, it’s just to take the boys hiking and camping in more of our national parks, skiing the big western mountains, and more of their usual seasonal cycle: Giants Ridge in the winter, Superior’s North Shore in the spring, South Shore in the summer and back to the North Shore in the fall.
