Fall in Grand Marais

This time of year, you really feel the remoteness and wildness of the area. The streets are pretty much empty--even on the weekends. But, the lake is beautiful; the clouds make a magnificent backdrop to it. When the sun shines through them, it is more a painting than real. The street we take to walk to Joel & Renee's house has a wonderful view of the harbor, Artist's Point, and the lake.

We went for a hike last weekend with some friends on the Superior Hiking Trail--actually a spur off of it; there are lots of spurs : ) It took us to the top of a hill that overlooked the lake in one direction and the boundary waters (BWCA) in the other. Breathtakingly beautiful. The leaves were mostly gone, so you had the stark white of the birch, the black of the deciduous, and the dark green of the spruce and balsam. So beautiful it almost made you hurt--like it was a foretaste of the new heavens and new earth. And here I feel a mixture of what C.S. Lewis said about paradise and Bonhoeffer's writings about the foretaste of glory. (If that isn't a weird mix of theologians!)