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Kate Crowley and Mike Link are authors of multiple travel books, including a recent regional series for grandparents and on Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Minnesota’s North Shore and Isle Royale.2 of 7
Full Circle Superior: Kate Dances in the Rain
Mike Link recorded wife Kate Crowley dancing in the rain to the tune of Tina Turner's "What you get is what you see," as they trek around the shores and roads of Lake Superior. Go to www.fullcirclesuperior.org for updates on their trek.
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Mike Link and Kate Crowley first appeared in Lake Superior Magazine after their wedding on a sailboat at Madeline Island.4 of 7
Jennifer Johansen
Nearing the Finish
Mike and Kate practice walking the final stretches of their round-the-lake hike along Duluth's Lakewalk.
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Jennifer Johansen
Mike Link and Kate Crowley
Mike Link and Kate Crowley will appear in the next issues as we follow their walk around the Lake.
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Mike and Kate's wedding story
Mike Link and Kate Crowley first appeared in Lake Superior Magazine after their wedding on a sailboat at Madeline Island.
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Jennifer Johansen
Kate and Mike on a Walk
Kate Crowley and Mike Link are authors of multiple travel books, including a recent regional series for grandparents and on Apostle Islands National Lakeshore and Minnesota’s North Shore and Isle Royale.
Full Circle Superior is a six-month expedition during which Kate Crowley and Mike Link will walk as close as possible to the shore of Lake Superior by trail, beach or road for a rare experience of Lake Superior and to publicize their concerns about protecting this Lake, the Great Lakes and fresh water. Lake Superior Magazine will carry their stories about their journey throughout this year. Link to their website at www.fullcirclesuperior.org.
by Kate Crowley
It’s hard to remember just exactly how the idea took shape. Like most conversations between husband and wife, there are always two versions. Here is mine.
It was a summer day and we were on the Superior Hiking Trail, talking about the day when Mike would retire as director of the Audubon Center. I suggested that on his last day, he literally ‘walk away’ by heading down County Road 27, getting on the Munger Trail and keep walking north until he reached Willow River where we live.
Mike suggested that he could just keep walking up to Duluth. I can’t remember now who said it, but one of us jokingly suggested that we could just continue to walk around the Lake. It was a wacky, farfetched idea, but the more we talked about it, the more we liked it. Why not walk around Lake Superior? Had anyone done it before? Wouldn’t it be a grand adventure for two people who had had so many other great adventures during their life together?
The results of this playful musing evolved into a real plan and a real expedition that will begin on the morning of April 29, 2010 - our 24th anniversary - on the waterfront at Canal Park.
It is called Full Circle Superior, not only because we plan to circumnavigate the lake, but because in some ways it represents how our lives have come full circle, too.
Twenty-five years ago we fell in love on and with the Lake. In fact, we wrote an article for this very same magazine in 1986, “Wedding With A Ketch.”
We were married on a sailboat that Mike captained for three years, at the dock on Madeline Island. Since then we have led adults, college and high school students on ecological learning adventures along the Lake Superior shores and on its islands.
Now we plan to experience the Lake in a way we never have before. So how does one plan for a hike that will cover 1,800-plus miles and may take six months to complete?
Our goal is to stay as close to the shore as possible, and we’ve discovered that trying to find the trails or roads closest to the shoreline is challenging. We use maps and people from each region for our resources.
A trip like this requires sponsorship and financial support. Lake Superior Magazine is one such sponsor, as are Granite Gear in Two Harbors, Minnesota, Lake Superior Trading Post in Grand Marais, Minnesota, and Piragis Outfitters in Ely, Minnesota. Most donations we’ve received so far are gear and equipment. We have set a financial goal of $30,000 - based on living expenses, a stipend for our support person and the cost of renting a Class C RV if we cannot find someone willing to loan or donate one for the trip. These are difficult times to raise funds for expeditions, but we are committed and will find a way to do the trip with or without that funding.
There will be times when we will backpack through national parks, both in the United States and Canada, and we will camp out, carrying all our gear with us. The RV is needed for lodging on most nights and as a ‘base camp’ for the research and education component of the trip. (This is not an extreme sport exercise for us, but a personal journey.) Amanda Hakala, our support person, will handle logistics and make presentations in parks along the way.
As two people in our 60s, the weight of a backpack and just the distance we plan to walk raise concerns for our physical beings. One of the trip’s goals is to see just what a walk of this scope will do to our bodies. We believe we will be healthier and more fit at the end, but we’re not sure. We have both seen our physicians and told them of our plans. Mike has a knee that will probably cause him pain on the trip, but he is doing lots of special exercises to strengthen it.
We are both spending a great deal of time preparing physically, walking daily from 2 to 14 miles, and doing yoga and other forms of stretching and strength training to prepare our joints and muscles for walking an average of 15 miles per day.
Mike set a goal for himself to walk 1,800 miles before we begin the actual hike and as of late January he had reached 1,500. His Keen walking shoes are nearing replacement. Our shoes and socks are keys to our success, and we continue to review liners, socks, styles of shoes and question whether conditions will demand a few pair or many different shoes in our support wagon.
Because we are naturalists interested not just in adventure and discovery, but in educating others, we decided that another component of this expedition should be research. Who better to record the flora and fauna that exists around the lake at this point in time than those walking through it?
This sort of information was gathered more than 100 years ago when the land was first surveyed, but since European settlement there have been great changes in the landscape and, with climate change, there will be more changes to come. The information we gather in 2010 can be used as a baseline for scientists and researchers 50 years from now to compare our observations with theirs. Who knows, maybe one of our grandchildren will decide to retrace our steps.
For this research of observation to happen, we set out to contact institutions of higher learning all around the lake. Currently, we have affiliated with the University of Minnesota Duluth (Minnesota Sea Grant, Lake Superior Streams and the Natural Resources Research Institute), Great Lakes Aquarium in Duluth, Michigan Technological University’s Center For Water and Society in Houghton, the Invasive Species Research Institution at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, and North House Folk School in Grand Marais, Minnesota.
As naturalists and educators, our love for the Lake is personal and profound. We know all too well the potential for the disruption and despoilment it faces in our increasingly populated and industrialized world. We became grandparents about the time this idea for Full Circle formed, and our concern for the future was heightened by this change in status.
We not only want our children to inherit a healthy environment, we want the generations that follow them to have the same. We hope to share our personal observations and the data we gather with the many people we meet on this walk and in the talks we will give. We want to share and discover ways in which they can become more involved with protecting this vast freshwater sea. This is our inspiration as well as our responsibility.
So, are we crazy? Some of our friends think so, but we don’t.
Will it be very difficult? Yes.
Will we make it all the way?
Stay tuned.
What if instead of walking 1,800 miles around the shores of Lake Superior, Mike and Kate walked 1,800 miles …
• south from Marquette, Michigan? They would reach Cozumel, Mexico, an island off the coast of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula.
• north from Nipigon, Ontario? They would be in the center of Devon Island, part of Nunavut Territory and the largest uninhabited island on Earth.
• west from Duluth? They would be swimming in the Pacific Ocean, about 300 miles off the coast of Washington state.
• east from Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan? They would be in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean, about 700 miles off the coast of Prince Edward Island.