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I wanted to start hiking a trail I could do during some week night evenings with a buddy or two. I still have 2 small kids (2yo & 7mo) so getting away for bigger hikes is still far and few between. (I can't wait to some day hike with them though) The Luce Line trail seemed like a pretty good idea as I live in the NW metro and it was pretty close to me. I mapped out a section, the first 'official' stop is Stubbs Bay but I thought that might be a short night at 7 miles... so I mapped out to CR110 which came out to be just under 10 miles.
My two buddies and I ended up dropping off a car at the end point and back tracking to the trail head to start, official start time on the trail was 6:36PM... The start of the trail off Vicksburg in Plymouth was pretty well traveled it seemed with a decent amount of people on the trail at the time, I imagine so because its right off Parkers Lake which I know is a popular running/biking area.
We stopped shortly after CR101 right around 7PM at a bench and and pulled out my Jetboil to cook up a beef stew backpackers pantry meal for the three of us. We did this mostly out of novelty because we thought it'd be fun more so than serving a practical purpose, but hey... 'big kids gotta eat' right? We probably wasted a good 20-30 minutes cooking and eating before we were back on the trail.
After eating we ended up going right through the Wayzata country club and this is where the trail traffic really died down and we started seeing fewer and fewer people (which personally, I liked). Soon after we crossed a bridge going over CR12, the bridge looked pretty old but was very well restored and had beautiful craftsmanship. I don't know if the bridge was original or not but it really added that 'railroad' touch to the trail.
There is a lot of history to the Luce Line trail if you read up on it, the track started in 1908 but actually ran out to where the current Target center is. This particular section we hiked on this trip was built during 1913-1916. I guess the Electric Short Line Railroad Company (owners of the Luce Line) went under in 1947 when the St. Louis Railroad company took it over and it was operated until the late 70's. The DNR started to acquire the land in the 80's and has since been during it into a multi purpose (hiking/biking/etc) trail for public use.
We saw 4-5 deer during the hike, many squirrels and gophers and even a fox. In my opinion the wildlife was still pretty abundant even though a lot of the trail backed right up to peoples homes a good portion of the trail. I imagine the farther west we go the more rural it'll be and the more wildlife we'll see as well. The bugs weren't too bad, we did stop around sunset and put on some bug juice but after that they weren't an issue at all.
Turns out 7 miles would've been a good hike that night, by the time we reached Stubbs Bay it was already dark. As I had planned on hiking into the night I told everyone to bring headlamps. The moon was out and the sky was pretty clear so most of the time after the sunset we could still hike without the aid of any lighting. Soon we reached our end point destination around 10:45PM, according to the GPS track log total hike was 9.72 miles and time was 4 hours and 9 minutes again factoring in we stopped to sit and eat for almost 30 minutes. All in all, I think it turned out to be just the right amount of distance to cover... I was sore but not in pain, could feel I put in a good hike that night.
As you can see from my GPS track log below and the elevation map, the trail is pretty darn flat. The entire section that we hiked was limestone and well kept. There weren't any sections that were over grown or anything like that, overall a very nice trail. I look forward to completing the entire trail over a couple trips by the end of the summer.
