Minnesota River Ramble 7/14

After pushing myself too hard yesterday, I decided on making this day a shorter trip and then turning back downriver and deciding where to go from there. Initially, I was actually planning on just returning to Redwood Falls and staying overnight in the campsite, which in retrospect would have made my experience much nicer.

I filled up my water bottles (with ice!) at the hotel and headed out. Redwood Falls itself seems like a nice town; I didn't stop into any of the local businesses at the time, since I thought I'd be coming back, but I'd visit again. The real attraction, though, is the parkland on the northwest edge of town. There are actually two waterfalls: one on the Redwood River, and one on Ramsey Creek, a small tributary. You can get great views of both of them on the parkways and trails.

Heading out of town, there were two spots upriver I wanted to check out. One of them was an old bridge, that I later realized I had actually read about in the Star Tribune here — as pointed out in the article, it is not considered structurally sound, so I decided against making the detour since I couldn't cross the river there. I wish I had gone to see it. Continuing on, I crossed the river and made it to the other spot, which turned out to be in Vicksburg County Park. It didn't turn out to be anything particularly notable, but the park was nice so I decided to stop for lunch. It ran right alongside the river, at the bottom of the valley.

I didn't have much of an appetite, but I got some oatmeal and dried fruit down and plotted out my next moves. At the time I was feeling alright, but didn't want to push myself. Looking at my maps I realized if I just stayed at the campsites there, I could have two 30-mile days back to New Ulm, which felt reasonable. This park did not have much in the way of facilities, and there were no nearby towns, but it had a water pump and a bathroom, which is about all I need. With the heat rising I decided to settle in.

As the afternoon went on, I started to regret this. The water from the pump had what looked like clay suspended in it, and it tasted awful. Cell service was very bad. With the mounting heat I didn't feel like moving much, and I ended up lying down listening to the radio and trying to catch any semblance of a breeze. I only had so much water from the hotel, so I tried to conserve it for drinking while using the park's water to cool myself down on the outside, which sort of worked. I was feeling pretty miserable, though. Somehow, the bugs weren't terrible, at least.

I didn't end up making myself anything to eat until the sun was pretty low in the sky and the edge was just starting to come off the heat. I had some sautéed vegetables with canned tomato (when packing food, one thing to keep in mind is that canned food in a sense "packs its own water" — here, this worked to my favor), and eaten with quite a bit of bread. I ended up saving most of my higher-protein food for the days to come.

As it got dark, I crawled into the tent and lay down for the night.

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