Feeling Superior: Experience a thru-hike of the Superior Hiking Trail in special series

To call stepping foot on the Superior Hiking Trail a walk in the woods is epic understatement. Because to Minnesota's far northeast sits a path that is so much a part of the big water it straddles — Lake Superior, whose beginnings read like gripping adventure, full of fire and ice and prehistoric upheaval. The Superior Hiking Trail is equally wild and alive, 310-plus miles of water, rock, forests — and possibility. Writer Melanie Radzicki McManus and photojournalist Brian Peterson set out in early June to take on the trail, hiking south to north and its terminus on the Canadian border. Today, and over the next six weeks, they tell their journey, but, too, the trail's story: a rich, beautiful amalgam of North Shore wilderness and the people who are part of its fabric.