blissful hiker ❤︎ inspiring you to hike your own hike
Long-distance backpacker Alison “Blissful Hiker” Young has logged more than 14,000 miles across six continents, tackling iconic routes such as New Zealand’s Te Araroa, Europe’s Pyrenean Haute Route, South Africa’s Drakensberg Traverse, Nepal’s Great Himalayan Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail in the United States.
An award-winning professional musician and syndicated American Public Media host, Alison approaches storytelling through a deeply attuned ear. Her series of intimate personal essays — coupled with field recordings gathered on trail — trace a path of self-discovery as a middle-aged, titanium-reinforced cancer thriver. They reveal the often unglamorous but essential truths of empowerment, inviting listeners to find the courage to blaze their own trails on the journey we call life.
blissful hiker ❤︎ inspiring you to hike your own hike
Art of the State (Parks): Summer at Grand Portage
“Portage” means carrying a boat and its cargo between navigable waters. Thick forests once made overland travel in Minnesota and lands north slow and punishing, so lakes and rivers served as superhighways of the north. But moving from one lake to the next required hauling everything, canoes included...
Part two in the series takes us on a short hike in Grand Portage State Park revealing the forces that shaped the land as well as the enduring human respect for that land which has long dictated travel, history, and preservation along Minnesota’s North Shore.
1. Gichi-Onigaming is the "Great Carrying Place," a nearly nine-mile portage around Minnesota's highest waterfall, the High Falls, where the Pigeon River plunges 120 feet over over billion-year-old basalt cliffs on a mad rush to Lake Superior.
2. The mist-filled viewing platform under a permanent rainbow is easily accessed by a paved trail and boardwalk, crowded on this hot summer's day with tourists.
3. A more rugged five-mile trail heads deep into forest to Middle Falls, another obstacle on the river which separates the United States from Canada.
4. Grand Portage State Park was established in 1989 and is the only state park not owned by the state. Rather it's a cooperative effort with the Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, shared stewardship, shared history, and shared reverence for the land.
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Alison Young is a fiscal year 2025 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature; and by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
