Photo I.D.

From time to time, people have asked me about the photo that's used in the header of this blog. The most common question, as you can probably guess, is "Where is it?"

The truth, of course, is that I don't know. When I started this blog, I had an idea in mind of what sort of picture I wanted to use for the header. I decided against using a spanking photo of any kind. I thought a nature picture would be better--something that sort of showed off the state of Minnesota.

I entered "Minnesota" into the search engine and started looking. It didn't take me long to find the above photo. It was pretty much what I envisioned for the top of the blog. Unfortunately, the photo I found didn't identify the exact location. That was fine with me--I wasn't looking for a particular place, just a particular kind of picture.

I was surprised when a lot of people starting asking, "Where is that, exactly?" I had no idea, so I told people I thought it was probably a stretch of the Mississippi river and let it go at that.

Well, one of my readers decided to take matters into her own hands. She did the same search, and obviously she was much more thorough than I was. She found the photo in her search, and she found a caption for it. So I can now finally reveal the location of the photo! Here's the caption that she found:

"The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a paddler's paradise. Some 1,200 miles of motor-free water trails span the lakes and rivers of this million-acre wilderness."

The BWCA is in northeasern Minnesota and located within Superior National Forest.

So, a big "Thank you!" to reader Marie for finally solving that mystery. Now when people ask, I'll be able to give them a correct answer. And I especially like the part about it being a "Paddler's Paradise". Of course, I tend to think that of Minnesota in general.

Although, to be honest, I think I liked it better when I thought it was part of the Mississippi....