GNESEN TOWNSHIP — Walk past the wooded nature playground, beyond the heavily treed disc-golf course, and soon you're into a forest of red and white pines, some up to 13 feet around and 250 years old.
Deer use the land here, along with red squirrels, chipmunks, chickadees and ruffed grouse. There’s a recently-abandoned coyote den and, if you come in winter to snowshoe, you might see fresh bobcat tracks.
Gnesen Township neighbors put the finishing touches on a 1.4 mile interpretive nature trail over Labor Day weekend, the culmination of three years of effort by local residents and University of Minnesota Duluth students.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been involved in a project that had so much collaboration; that brought so many people together in their own community,’’ said Ken Gilbertson, a Gnesen Township resident and volunteer on the project.
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Gilbertson also happens to be the UMD professor in charge of the Environmental and Outdoor Education department who is molding the next generation of outdoor recreation leaders and environmental educators, the perfect experts to plan and design an interpretive nature tail. So that’s exactly what they did here, both graduate and undergraduate students. Gilbertson’s UMD students in the past have helped craft visions and plans used to develop city parks, several Minnesota state parks (including Tettegouche and Lake Vermilion), Hartley Nature Area, the Great Lakes Aquarium and more.
The new trail starts at the old Gnesen School (on Howard Gnesen Road, of course) a 1924-vintage building that now serves as the town hall, community center and emergency shelter. The trail winds through a narrow sliver of land, 30 acres that appears to have mostly been missed by the axes of early loggers and the plows of the Polish immigrant farmers who settled this area just north of Duluth.
It’s not just big pines along the way. The trail uses 500 feet of hand-built boardwalk to cross a textbook example of a black ash wetland, this one part of the headwaters bog of the Lester River. There are also patches of balsam fir uplands and some aspen-birch patches that already are turning yellow for fall.
There’s well-spaced old-growth woods adjacent to stands of broomstick-sized balsams growing just inches apart, a microcosm of northern Minnesota forestland. On the ground, princess pine, ferns and wildflowers dot the route, with interpretive signs to explain what you are seeing and why it’s growing there.
“The great thing about this trail is you have so much forest diversity in such a small area. It’s going to make a great learning tool for kids,’’ Gilbertson said. “We designed it as a nature trail, but it’s really going to be a classroom, too.”
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Some homeschooled students already have come to study the flora.
Of course the trail — entirely built by volunteers, most of them who live nearby — is open to anyone, free, and already is getting used by local residents and Duluth residents alike.
"It was getting used even before we finished the boardwalk and got the signage up,’’ said Jon Nelson, a Gnesen Township supervisor and town board chairman who lives next to the new trail. “Every time I’ve come over there, there are kids in the nature play area and people playing disc golf … But we also have people just looking for a quiet walk in the woods.”
There’s a shorter, 1-mile loop, too, and a short hard-packed gravel trail accessible to wheelchairs.
Gilbertson’s UMD students not only laid out the vision and mapped the trail but also wrote the grant application that secured $56,000 in Minnesota Department of Natural Resources grants that paid for the whole thing.
“We had to put up the same amount in matching work, but we had no problem doing that with all the volunteer hours we had,’’ said Nelson, who put in many hours of construction work on the trail himself. “I think we had a dozen Gnesen families out here working on it at one time or another."
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There will be no horses or ATVs or skiing or fat-tire bikes here, only walking on the trail, some heavily wooded and challenging disc golf and kids horsing around in the children's nature play area.
"There's so much information out there now on how important this nature play is for building resilience in kids; for developing their decision making and risk taking skills,'' Gilbertson said.
It’s not a wilderness, to be sure, but a short jaunt into wildness. Cows are grazing on nearby properties. Old deer hunting stands still can be seen, falling apart, in big trees. There’s still some rusted metal cans and glass bottles where a farmer must have dumped his trash decades ago, more of the human story of the area and left intentionally where they were found. (There’s one place where an old still is rumored to have operated during Prohibition.)
“There’s a lot of human history out here, too, and we wanted to keep as much of it as possible … We told the local guys that, if they want to keep hunting deer out here, that’s fine. We’ll just tell people during hunting season,’’ Nelson said.
Still, the narrow walking trail has the feel of a Boundary Waters portage in places, mostly just a dirt path winding between trees. Be careful of the roots; there’s been little manicuring and no trail cover added here. If it wasn't for well-placed trail markers, it might be easy to get lost.
“That’s why this project has so much support, because it was a collaborative effort across the community,’’ Gilbertson said. “Nobody told them (Gnesen residents) what was going to be done. The township asked people what they wanted ... And the students turned that vision into a plan.”
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If you go:
The 1.4-mile Gnesen Community Interpretive Trail is free and open to the public. It's a relatively easy hike on uneven ground and boardwalks. It's located adjacent to the town hall/community center at 6356 Howard Gnesen Rd., about 10 miles north of Duluth. There's also a free disc-golf course and a forested children's playground.
