Minnesota, Part 6 - Temperance River State Park [240624]

At Temperance River State Park, we learned that "potholes" aren't just in roads.

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While at the campground showers Monday morning, we got a phone call / voicemail back from the park office confirming what the Camp Host had told us the night before:  despite the sign, the water in the park was now safe to drink again.  So we felt comfortable enough to refill our fresh water tank after dumping our waste tanks on the way out, like we normally do.

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Our next stop was just 20 miles southwest back down the road at Temperance River State Park, to see the falls there.  The remnants of a once much larger glacial waterfall, the current waterfalls are recessed and flow through a gorge filled with "potholes".

Walking the trail up into the gorge leads to a chain of the aforementioned "potholes" - rounded holes cut into the surrounding bedrock by loose rocks swirling around in turbulent water.

According to the somewhat sketchy trail map, the hike should've been a mile each way.  But we ended up hiking 2.3 miles in the end, because we didn't realize that the last fall was really the last fall (they weren't labeled, or anything useful like that) and ended up hiking farther than we needed to.

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Continuing our backtracking, we stopped another 20 miles back down the road at the Tettegouche State Park (which we had visited/hiked three days ago) parking lot to have lunch.  From there we finally broke new ground as we headed 80 miles west-ish to Virginia (the city, not the state 😉)  where we dropped into Harbor Freight and Aldi to do some shopping before heading another 4 miles west to the Walmart in Mountain Iron, where we'd be staying the night (our ninth "Wallydocking", for those of you keeping track).  It was our first Walmart stay since we picked up our new Amazon-ordered router in Michigan, and we were thrilled to find that in repeater mode the router did enable us to pull in the Walmart WiFi from the far end of the parking lot, as we had hoped it would.

Apple Weather originally had forecast thunderstorms to start around 1 a.m., but the storm moved in much faster than expected and a massive thunderstorm (with hail) started around 10:30.  We stayed up well past midnight watching the lightning and listening to the thunder, hoping that the forecast was correct that the storm would pass through by morning...