Hiking Tours
Tours in Minnesota.

North Shore Adventures runs guided sea kayaking, hiking, and ice climbing along Lake Superior's North Shore from a base in Grand Marais, the historic harbor town near the Canadian border. Summer trips paddle the basalt sea cliffs of Tettegouche State Park and the Palisade Head headlands, where billion-year-old volcanic rock from the Midcontinent Rift drops vertically into the largest freshwater lake on earth. Backpacking itineraries cover sections of the 310-mile Superior Hiking Trail across the Sawtooth Mountains and the boreal forest of the Cascade and Temperance river valleys. In winter the operation pivots to ice climbing on the frozen waterfalls of Gooseberry Falls, Tettegouche's Illgen Falls, and the Sandstone Ice Park, with full WI3-WI5 instruction and rental of tools, crampons, and screws. Grand Marais sits at the edge of the Boundary Waters and the Grand Portage Ojibwe reservation, and most trips draw on the deep Anishinaabe and voyageur history of the Lake Superior coast.

Sax-Zim Bog Wildlife Tours runs guided birding and wildlife photography tours in the Sax-Zim Bog — a 300-square-mile patchwork of black spruce-tamarack peatland, sedge meadow, and aspen upland northwest of Duluth that is a globally significant boreal birding destination. Winter is the headline season, when great gray owls, northern hawk owls, and boreal owls hunt from spruce edges along the bog roads, and black-backed and American three-toed woodpeckers work the burned and beetle-killed pine. Resident pine martens, fishers, ermine, and the occasional Canada lynx round out the mammal list, and irruption years bring Bohemian waxwings, common and hoary redpolls, and pine grosbeaks down out of the boreal forest. Guides know the Admiral, Owl, McDavitt, and Arkola Road circuits intimately and time tours to the dawn and dusk owl windows. Summer trips shift to LeConte's and yellow-rail meadow specialties, Connecticut and mourning warblers, and the bog's carnivorous plant flora — pitcher plant, sundew, and bog laurel — across the floating sphagnum mats.