Carley, Mystery Cave, Lake Louise, Oh My!

I recently spent a weekend in Southeastern Minnesota, in one of my favorite places in the world: Winona.

We spent the majority of our trip exploring nearby state parks – or at least, parks within a 90-mile radius of Winona.

My good friend and adventure pal, Kaysey, joined me, and our first stop was Carley State Park.

We took a short jaunt to one of the lookouts, which was pretty cute.

It was a standard Southeastern Minnesotan lookout – built on stilts into the side of the bluff-like landscape.

Nothing to write home about, in comparison to other Minnesota State Park lookouts, but worth the short little hike.

Then we made our way to the stepping stones in the park. This was the one area I really wanted to see, because I’m obsessed with water, and thought the stepping stones looked like fun.

However, a week’s worth of rain was against us, and the stepping stones were pretty flooded.

You could walk out onto the third stone (barely), but the final three stones were completely uncrossable. The river was rushing too hard over them, and once you made it to the island in the middle, there was another set to take you completely across the river – and that set was entirely flooded.

So, Kaysey and I stepped out onto the third step, river water rushing across our (thankfully waterproof) boots, and took in the scene, before making our way back to our car.

We didn’t get to spend as much time hiking at Carley as would have been ideal, but we did get to check out the two things we wanted to see, before heading back to Winona for plans we’d made. One of our pit stops in Winona included a music and arts festival on 3rd St., where Kaysey and I found this amazing jewelry vendor, Ellel. They created jewelry using raw crystals, which looked incredibly beautiful, and reminded me a lot of my grandma, who is very much a rock and crystal enthusiast. I had to buy a few pairs, and Kaysey bought one too, which will come into play later. Kaysey selected a pair of phosphorite earrings that were a pretty lime color; the shop-owner told her that the earrings would actually glow in the dark, which we thought was pretty cool.

Definitely go check their shop out – they’re a team of two young female entrepreneurs, and they create great products. Here’s a link to their Etsy shop. Enjoy!

Forestville/Mystery Cave State Park

The next day, we had our sights set on Mystery Cave State Park.

This park is linked with Forestville State Park on the passport system – however, due to time constraints, we spent the majority of our time in Mystery Cave. I’d like to return to the Forestville side someday to see more of what the park’s about!

Part of the reason we were working with limited time was because we got lost.

Well, technically, we weren’t quite lost. We knew exactly where we were, and we knew a handful of different ways to get to the park – we just kept choosing the wrong routes.

Our GPS first took us to one of the roads leading to the park – however, when we arrived, the road was chained off, and there was no access. We also had no data, and therefore, no GPS at that point.

So I broke out my old faithful Minnesota State Map, and we improvised.

The red dots signify State Parks I’ve already been to, so that’s pretty exciting.

We were within five miles of the park, but it took us an hour to get there. After we re-routed ourselves, we took paths down two separate roads that ultimately ended up being blocked off, as well. We finally got a moment of service, in which I Googled the park, and found that it’s home page says you cannot rely on any GPS or electronic maps to get there, as there was only one route you could take. They then included a link to that route’s map, which I could not open, because we lost service again.

So, we ended up taking every road possible to get there. before finally arriving. The park ranger informed us that there was only one tour left for the day at 4 p.m. It was only 3 p.m. at that point, but she advised us to hurry over to the Mystery Cave section of the park to purchase our tickets, just to be sure. Since it had taken us so long to find the park in the first place, we took her advice and rushed over.

It was good we did, because as we approached the building, we saw a ranger leaving with two women for the 3 p.m. tour. When we got inside the building, the ranger stationed there told us that if we wanted to, we could catch up with the 3 p.m. tour, otherwise we could wait an hour until the next tour at 4 p.m. We decided to hop on the 3 p.m. tour.

The cave was pretty nifty. It made me feel a bit like I was in National Treasure, as most caves do.

Definitely a lost templar treasure in there somewhere.

It wasn’t the craziest cave tour I’ve ever been on (I once saw a skeleton of a 2,000 pound mammoth sloth in a cave in Arizona. That’s right. A mammoth sloth.), but it was still pretty cool to see that we have caves like this in Minnesota.

Our tour guide told us that this cave pre-dated the dinosaurs, which was a mind-blowing concept that I had difficult wrapping my mind around. Imagine standing in a cavern below ground and having someone casually mention that the space you are in is so old that not even dinosaurs had been alive to see it. Definitely no mammoth sloths there.

There were some skeletal remains of aquatic animals throughout the caves, however. There was one thin gap in the cave that we walked through, and our guide pointed out a fossil that began on one side of the wall, and continued across the hall-like gap we stood in, to pick up on the other side.

It’s a giant squid! This portion of the fossil was on the wall to our right, and on the wall to our left, it’s tail threaded itself through layers of packed limestone.

We made our way to the section of the cave that I had been looking forward to seeing the most: the pool. I have yet to see a large body of water underground, and as you know, I’m pretty obsessed with water, so I was excited.

Unfortunately, all pictures make the pool look bigger than it actually is.

Some photos I’ve seen have made it look like you could hop on a boat and ride across this pool. It’s definitely not that big. The ceiling also comes down pretty far, which makes it seem a little smaller.

While we were down by the pool, our tour guide told us that if we wanted to know what it would feel like to be in total darkness in the cave, she could turn all the lights off in the area. We obviously did, so she flipped a switch, and just like that – we were in the most absolute darkness I’ve ever been in.

Suddenly, one of the other tour attendees spoke up:

“Uhmmm…somehow you’re glowing?”

I turned to see two bright glowing green dots emanating from the general area Kaysey had been in. We almost doubled over in laughter as we realized that her earrings were glowing, just as Ellel had told us they would. We explained to everyone else in the cave that Kaysey was not, in fact, a member of X-Men, but was simply wearing phosphorite crystals on her ears.

Here’s an example of what Kaysey’s earrings looked like – this was taken at the entrance of the cave, where it was dark, but still pretty well lit, so you could safely walk up and down the set of stairs leading into the cave.

I’d say the cave tour is well worth the $12 it costed to roam around a pretty sweet Minnesotan cave. It’s certainly not the be-all-end-all of caves, but it’s a pretty unique state park.

Since it was getting pretty late, Kaysey and I hastily made our way to our final park for the day.

Lake Louise State Park

We didn’t spend much time at Lake Louise, but it was beautiful.

We hiked down one of the trails, and checked out the trees during the infamous golden hour.

There’s just something beautiful about a line of trees.

At this point, we were starving, and Kaysey happened to know of a delicious pizzeria not far from Lake Louise, so we decided to get dinner and call it a day!