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On my second day I planted my tent at the end of a wooded serpent mound in Minnesota after crossing Michigan’s western land bridge to Wisconsin. The prehistoric ice also stopped near here and left the sinuous esker as its calling card. The land also bears the scours, traded in a seesaw of the land removal and deposit during glaciation. West of the Missouri, the landforms become more weathered and old than these Pleistocene mounds but it will be another day of riding before I can study them.
The wind had steadily increased through the day and it is practically a gale by the time I got my tent up. I wasted little time relieving my fatigue with sleep. For the second consecutive day, I logged over 900km (almost 600 mi.). The wind continued its tantrum throughout the night. The loud "creak" of the state bird, sounding like someone standing on a wire fence, filled the early morning silence as I awoke with the rising sun. Filtered through the dense brush it cast a TV blue glow on campground. I soon discovered the campsite was nearly empty. Most of the canopies and sprawling bungalow-sized tents had been blown down or packed up with their owners and disappeared. My trusty tent survived the night as it had its inauguration on an arctic island and many wilderness trips since. |
