Obstacle to Opportunity: An Unexpected Pivot to a Fantastic Midwestern Fall

Eagle Harbor, Michigan

Upon returning from a month spent reveling in the European Alps (said reveling included a fair amount of sitting inside sulking as it poured rain), the plan was to revel in the brilliant fall colors as the aspens turned gold in Colorado, then drop down to Moab and slowly work our way south back to our winter home base of Tucson.

That plan lasted about a week.

Sometimes in life, you have to do things that you didn't want to do initially. Sometimes, life's circumstances mandate that you have to adjust course. Sometimes you have to pivot and deal with challenges and obstacles that you didn't anticipate. The question isn't "will obstacles arise?" but rather, "how will you meet the challenge?" "How do you view the obstacle?" "What opportunities does the obstacle present?"

The obstacle itself isn't particularly important here, but what is important is that we scrapped our entire fall travel plans and instead hit the road to the Midwest.

As we negotiated said challenge in the Midwest, we did our best to open our eyes to what opportunities those challenges provided.

Obstacle into Opportunity: Exploring Trails in the Midwest

Copper Harbor, Michigan

Two long days of driving to do airport drop-offs in Minneapolis posed a pretty substantial challenge. But instead of dreading the 6-hour round-trip jaunts, I used those challenges as an opportunity to check a box that has been on my to-do list for years: explore some of the best suburban mountain bike trails in the Minneapolis metro area. Turning these obstacles into opportunities allowed me to explore the singletrack at Lebanon Hills, Murphy-Hanrehan Park, and Theodore Wirth Park.

Further north in Wisconsin, I was able to check off a handful of trails in the CAMBA trail system that I still hadn't explored. From tasting some Dirt Candy to revisiting the Rock Lake trail roughly 15 years after I first rode it, CAMBA offered up fantastic riding and great van camping opportunities.

From there, we found ourselves with a week of vacation that we had originally planned for Moab. What to do, what to do?

Copper Harbor, Michigan

I had long dreamt of an epic road trip through the Upper Midwest hitting Cuyuna Lakes, Duluth, CAMBA, Copper Harbor, and Marquette... but without traveling frantically, there would be no way to hit all of those stops in a single week. So we set our sites on Copper Harbor.

I grew up visiting Copper Harbor to ski the steep, technical lines at Mount Bohemia, but I had never had the opportunity to take my bike and explore the singletrack on the Keweenaw. What a fantastic stop it was! The incredible beauty of Lake Superior, professionally-built singletrack trails, and superb van camping opportunities were just what the doctor ordered.

From there, we hit Houghton, Bayfield, CAMBA again, dropped through Neillsville to see family (with a requisite pilgrimage to Levis Mounds), and then headed on south.

Fall Brilliance

Mount Ashwabay, Bayfield, Wisconsin

While this wasn't the stated goal of our midwestern exploration, we were able to stretch our experience of fall brilliance through the entire month of October in Wisconsin—long after the aspen leaves had fallen to the ground in Colorado. We even got lucky by spending time along the shore of the massive Lake Superior.

The lake effect weather makes the fall colors last longer close to the shore, even when the gray arms of the trees rise baren into the sky just 5 miles inland. It's unclear whether the moisture from the lake or the moderated temperatures cause the fall brilliance to last longer along the shore, but we couldn't help but soak up the incredible colors from Copper Harbor to Bayfield, and everywhere in between.

Mount Ashwabay, Bayfield, Wiscsonin

As we continued to head south into Arkansas and Texas, we continued to stretch fall along well into December. While we've been talking for years about crafting just such a trip on the East Coast, the same strategy of chasing fall south works just as well in the Midwest!

The Next Phase of this Column

This is a short article to sum up an entire month of exploring through the Upper Midwest. This article doesn't do those incredible destinations and experiences justice, but it feels like it needs to be written this way.

Here's a personal meta-level writing discussion, which is probably a bit unprofessional. These are the sorts of discussions that normally happen in a private journal, but I'm choosing to include some of these thoughts here.

At the time of this writing, it's mid-November—already a month and a half after we departed for the Midwest. By the time this article sees the light of day, who knows—it might be Christmas. I also just finished editing a piece about travels that we took in August, which won't be published until about the end of November.

I've been working to identify the exact tone, style, spin, and pacing that I want to bring to these van life travelogues. I don't think I've quite landed on the perfect style yet, but I know that writing about travels that we took over 3 months ago, and publishing that content about 4 months after the fact, doesn't really make sense. I don't want to skip over any major sections of the trip, though, and so I feel the compulsion to catch this blog up to the present day, and then transition it to the next thing, the next phase.

As I now edit this article in early December, it appears that my original estimate of publication around Christmas was accurate. So I still haven't managed to catch this blog up to present day, although I think that will be the goal going forward.

While I'm not totally sure, here's what I think the next phase looks like. I think the next phase of these travelogues needs to be a bit rawer, a bit more rushed, a bit more visceral and timely. Ideally, I'd write 2-4 articles per month, chronicling our adventures from the previous week or two in each piece. That seems a bit overly optimistic, but it would fit more with the pace of our travels, and the sense of time elapsing that I want to elicit.

So stay tuned: the next phase of the #VanLife column is coming... sometime...

PS As always, you can find the most professional version of my writing on FATMAP.com and in the FATMAP mobile app on iOS and Android. To stay apprised of the latest guidebooks that I’ve published on FATMAP, be sure to subscribe to the Outside 365 newsletter—roundups of my most recent guidebooks are routinely sent out.