Escape to Lake Louise

We had hoped to take a little trip to Lake Louise in the Canadian Rockies this summer, but the challenges of getting across the border proved to be so great that we headed south instead, to Lake Louise, Minnesota.

This small lake is actually a reservoir created by a concrete dam that was built across the Iowa River to power a grist mill before Minnesota became a state. The area later became a municipal park for the nearby town of LeRoy, current population 933. And in 1962 seventy acres of the park were given to the state to form the nucleus of a state park that is now many times that size. But still not all that big.

To be honest, we chose Lake Louise because we'd never been there, it was only two hours away, and it was one of the few parks I checked that seemed to be largely empty on Sunday night: sixteen of its twenty campsites were open.  

The fact that it was out in the wide open corn-growing spaces of Mower County also gave it a certain appeal. We might spot a few prairie birds, and we'd certainly be able to find a dark locale open to the northern horizon from which to view the Neowise Comet.

And to top it all off, the Shooting Star State Bike Trail runs right through the park.

We headed south on Interstate 35 across rolling hills past Faribault, veering southeast along highway 218 to Austin. Yes, we drove by the Louis Sullivan bank in Owatonna, just to make sure it was still there. And we also took a spin through downtown Austin, past the Spam Museum (which was open; never been there) and the Hormel plant on the east side of town. On our way out of town we picked up some sandwiches at the Subway on Main Street. Workers wear masks in this part of the state, but for the most part, customers don't. (We did.)

A half-hour later we were having a picnic at the beach at Lake Louise.

We set up camp and spent the rest of the afternoon biking the Shooting Star Trail, which was more attractive than I'd anticipated. Not merely an asphalt path along a highway, it runs for a long ways through the park, and has been planted with a generous buffer zone of native species once it heads out across the fields for an additional ten or fifteen miles. 

Oswego Tea was blooming everywhere, along with various coneflowers and black-eyes susans. The wooded margins were often thick with tall American bellflowers displaying a subtle shade of color somewhere between bright blue and periwinkle. More exotic were the white culver's root and the rattlesnake-master, a white, mace-like globe as weird as its name suggests.

The clouds were dramatic, the sky an almost unbelievable deep blue.

Early on, in the woods just north of LeRoy, we spotted a red-headed woodpecker and watched him for several minutes as he made his way through the trees. That was a thrill.

A few minutes later we encountered a man heading down one of the park's many foot trails. He was wearing binoculars so I mentioned the woodpecker.

"They're around," he said. "I see them sometimes in the trees west of the horse camp."

"How about cuckoos?" I asked.

"I haven't seen any, but I hear them—the yellow-billed cuckoos."

"I don't know that call. How does it go?"

"Well, the black-billed just keep saying cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo, but the yellow-billed sort of ..." He made a couple of sounds somewhere between a gurgle and a groan.

"Ah, I can't do it," he said.

"No. That sounded great."

He told us he'd recently retired and was looking forward to having a good birding year, but he suffered a heart attack in January, and was three months recovering. By the time he got outside again, some of the ducks and shorebirds had already passed through.

A half-hour further down the trail, looking out across a flooded field, we saw a solitary sandpiper knee-deep in water, poking around in the mud. As we passed the same "pond" on the way back an hour later a lesser-yellowlegs landed right in front of us, maybe a hundred feet away. Or was it a greater yellowlegs? Hard to tell when there's only one.

Then Hilary said: "Look. There are some sandhill cranes on the far side of the water."

We got back to camp, sat in our chairs for a while looking off into the woods, then set off on foot to explore the south side of the river. The air was getting cooler, the colors richer. 

At one point a dramatic hawk passed directly overhead with very dark flight feathers and a light brown head. I had to look it up later. A Swainson's hawk.

It isn't often you see a bird that's very easy to identify that you haven't seen before. Swainson's hawks are common out west. Many are sighted in Alberta, maybe even above Lake Louise. In Minnesota, not so often.

Our final thrill of the day took place at nightfall, when we walked out to the trailer dumping station, which has an unimpeded view of the sky. The fields to the north were twinkling with fireflies. And with the help of binoculars, we soon spotted Comet Neowise just below the cup of the Big Dipper. At first it looked like a pale smudge. As the minutes passed and the sky grew darker the tail emerged. Twenty minutes after we got there, we could see it with the naked eye.

The pictures you see make it look more spectacular than it is. But when you actually see it in the context of the earth, the fields, and the night sky overhead, it looks "real," which is much more awesome than any photo.

We stood there for quite a while, and another couple who were camping down the way came out to join us. By way of conversation, I pointed out Jupiter, just east of Sagittarius in the opposite direction. It's "in opposition" right now, and it was VERY bright and also enormous, though it was no match for the comet. The comet was getting brighter, the tail longer, and if we'd stayed out another twenty minutes I'm sure it would have been more dramatic still.

On the other hand, it had been a long day, and there were others paths to explore in the morning.