Spring Thaw and Moose Poop

Note: this is an old essay I found in a notebook that had been stored for years. That notebook was from back when I first started PaddlingLight (called Nessmuking at the time). It’s paddling adjacent. I write a lot of these personal essays, but I don’t have a place to post them. So, you’re getting it here.

In northern Minnesota, many Forest Service and lake access roads are left snowed in for the winter. So, when spring hits it feels almost like a treasure hunt to try and get back into places with a car. Every year starting with the last week of March, I’ve driven up the Gunflint Trail in search of access to lakes. Mainly I’ve done this to see the starts of the ice melt on the rivers and lakes. I’m a paddler, and I can’t wait to hit the water.

On this trip, when I went in search of water, I journeyed up to the South Brule Road which is just past the South Brule River, which, I might add, was flowing nicely with clear, cold, brown-colored water, but I passed the river to head down the road and was aiming for Twin Lakes to see if any ice remained. On the way, I found deep snow patches that I needed to rev up my engine to get enough speed, and my car slammed through leftover patches of warm wet spring snow still covering the road.

The most impressive thing that I had to drive over wasn’t snow nor the water gushing over the road from the overflowing ditches, it was the massive number of moose turds.

Yes, moose turds.

It would seem that when the snow in the woods gets to be 3- or 4-foot deep, the moose would rather be postholing on a road instead of in the woods where they’d have to worry about trees and blowdowns hiding under the snow in the woods. I know the feeling, I’ve maneuvered through the woods on snowshoes in the deep snow, and, let me tell you, it ain’t the easiest thing to do. It ain’t the easiest thing to do especially when you hit a patch of soft snow and the front of your snowshoe sinks under a tree and as you step forward you realize too late that your snowshoe is caught, and you go flying face first with your heavy backpack pushing you faster into the same snow that tricked your snowshoe into getting caught in the first place. If you thought getting one snowshoe unstuck was hard, you should try getting one body unstuck with nothing to hold onto except snow, which by the very nature of soft snow is soft, and soft doesn’t give you anything to grip on.

Don’t get me wrong, if you forced me to say that snowshoeing is fun, I’d say that snowshoeing is fun. But I can think of a 1000 other activities I’d rather do, like lying under an umbrella on a Caribbean beach being served some fancy drink, than snowshoe, but when you live in the Northwoods you do as the Northwooders would, it seems. But I typically don’t have the option of heading south for the winter anyway, plus the south is too hot.

And just like me, moose don’t have the option of heading South, nor do they have the option of strapping on snowshoes, so when you examine said moose legs, you’ll notice those legs are the “perfect for plunging to the bottom of the snowpack on every step” machine. It’s no wonder that they walk on the road and it’s no wonder that you see so many moose turds in the middle of the road every spring.

I remember the first time I ever saw a moose turd. I was hiking in Maine on the Appalachian Trail when I looked down which was almost the first thing I did when I stepped onto that trail (because I don’t think Mainers realize that the trail means a path through the woods that you clear and make walkable, but, at least, they understand that more than the people who built the Appalachian Trail in Pennsylvania). You have to constantly look down to avoid being tripped up by logs, rocks, roots, snails, or even newts crossing the trail…

And there it was: a moose turd!

Maybe you would qualify it as a flock of moose turds. I didn’t count but I’d say 30 to 40 round ball-shaped moose turds. There they were on the ground on the Appalachian Trail.

I thought to myself, “Man, I wouldn’t want to be stuck in a dark alley when one of those giant rabbits cornered me.”

All day I went on believing that a moose turd was a giant Maine’s backwoods rabbit turd until I mentioned to my buddy, “Hey, did you see that pile of giant rabbit turds? I’d hate to see the rabbit that let those out.”

After an embarrassing flaunting that has been ongoing since 1996, I got the idea that it would be funny to collect said moose turds, pack them into the ziplock, stuff them into an envelope and mail them home to friends as perfect Christmas ornaments. Much to my surprise they all ended up silver-dollar-sized pancakes instead of round like a superball. And so much for that idea. I stopped sending them home, but now that I think about it, I could use a box.

Hmm…

…

OK, I’m back after collecting some to mail out to my sister.

Anyways, as I drove down the South Brule Road, I made two observations about the moose turds and the first was that there are a lot of moose turds which means that: a) there are a lot of moose or b) the same moose took a dump every day on this road in many different places. My guess is the first is true, but you can be the judge for yourself. The second observation was that the moose tend to go at about the same place other moose go, because I’d be trekking along going through the snow and then there would be a patch of moose turds. I could tell that they came out of different moose because they would be many different color patches in the batch, like brown, light brown and dark brown. Or more likely some were older than others.

After a while I took up the game of counting the colors and then dodging the turds, and then running over the turds, and then dodging the turds on the right, running over the turds on the left, and counting the turds in the center.

Finally, I dreamt up the best dodge, run-over-a turd-while-counting game I could imagine, and I ran into a massive snow patch with a literal river of water running through the center of it. Now this is back when I had a Toyota Corolla, and it could get down many of the roads, but it couldn’t swim. It would need to learn how to swim before getting through this snow patch and down the rest of the road. So I turned around and went back toward the Gunflint.

My sense of disappointment at not being able to get to the lakes and see if the ice was gone was so profound that I ignored the moose turds on the way back. I hit some, missed some, flattened some, saw some red ones, saw some brown ones, but mostly ignored them.

I guess trying to get to the lakes, and I guess hoping the ice will be off in the middle of April is a little wishful thinking. It doesn’t hurt to dream and try, especially if you’re a paddler. And hey, if you want to send moose turds as a gift to your friends, I know where you can find them. Just drive down any Minnesota Northwoods road in spring. Don’t forget to send them in a box and not an envelope, unless you want pancakes, that is.