Minnesota January 2007

(I'm back-posting photos from Midwest road trips, partly inspired by an essay on the Midwest I found through Marginal Revolution. Here's a post about a road trip through the Grand Tetons, Black Hills, and western Nebraska.) And if you're curious about why the population drops off west of the hundredth meridian, I think we figured it out here.)

You'll have to forgive the quality of the photos, but it was 2007. And in January of that year I and a number of other hearty folks had the good fortune to be invited to Minnesota to go ice-fishing. If you have never tried this, you should, it's a blast. It remains the only time I've driven a snowmobile (or driven a car out onto a lake for that matter), and I think half the fun was going out to the middle of the lake (Onamia) where it looked like the ice age had returned. Besides the fish that we didn't catch, I got to a boreal forest preserve where I saw some elk and there was a bald eagle perched on an island out in the middle of the lake. Again the transition zone interests me, but the true boreal-prairie line is far to the north of the U.S.-Canadian border. Not pictured here: frozen Minnehaha Falls on the Mississippi in Minneapolis (poor quality.)

Also, state and federal safety laws require that I advise you of the following: do not drink a huge amount, then wander back to land at midnight, spell out a curse word with firewood on someone's lawn, then wander back out onto the ice, only them dimly realizing you have no realistic way of finding the ice-fishing house in the freezing darkness.




Some people forsook the actual real honest-to-goodness snowmobile outside the hut, to play winter sports **video games**. Society is too weak to survive.



Below: there are squares cut out in the floor for the fishing lines. On sunny days the sunlight penetrates the ice outside the hut and comes glowing back up through the holes. Of course we didn't catch anything.