DULUTH, Minn. _ On a warm July evening, a solitary runner heads toward the pine plantation in the heart of Duluth's Hartley Park. Elsewhere a family watches its dog splash in the shallows of Hartley Pond. Later, as dusk settles over the park in Duluth's Woodland neighborhood, a woman and her dog walk along a piece of single-track trail.
But late last July, any of those evening jaunts would have all been impossible. The powerful July 21, 2016, windstorm that swept through Duluth ravaged the 660-acre park, toppling tall pines and mature aspens, leaving a tangled mess that choked trails.
"Hartley was far and above the worst-hit park," said Jim Shoberg, project coordinator for the Duluth Parks and Recreation Division.
The storm, with recorded winds up to 100 mph, dropped hundreds of mature trees across Hartley's ski trails and multiple-use hiking and biking trails. It destroyed a yurt at the Hartley Nature Center.
"In those northwest hills, I saw a piece of boardwalk (caught) 10 feet up in the air," Shoberg said.
A year later, all of the park's trails are cleared and open, except for a mile-and-a-half segment of multi-use trail in the northwestern portion of the park that had to be abandoned because the damage was so severe, Shoberg said.
The work to clear the park's trails began almost immediately after the storm and continued for months. Volunteers with Cyclists of Gitchee Gumee Shores (COGGS) cleared 700 trees from multi-use trails in and near the park, said Waylon Munch, COGGS chair. A crew hired by the city of Duluth cleared 643 trees from 3 miles of cross-country ski trails in the park. A Superior Hiking Trail crew cleared 93 trees, two-thirds of them within a few days of the storm, said Larry Sampson, a trail maintenance supervisor with the Superior Hiking Trail Association.
The storm's aftermath is still raw and visible throughout the park. Visitors duck under leaning trees that never quite reached the ground. They hike and run past still-fresh cross-sections of once-giant pines. They walk and bike beneath open skies where a dense forest canopy once splashed shade on the forest floor.
It has taken a lot of getting-used-to.
In the northwest corner of the park bordering county tax-forfeit land, the blowdown damage was so severe that city and county officials are concerned about fire danger as the trees dry out. The county plans to clear that corner of the park of downed trees in conjunction with a nearby logging operation on the west side of Howard Gnesen Road, said Jason Meyer, deputy land and minerals director for St. Louis County. The work is planned for this coming winter, but it will not be a clear-cut, Meyer emphasized.
"We are leaving the longer-lived northern hardwoods _ the oak and maple and basswood that are undamaged," Meyer said.
While the storm took its own toll on the park's landscape, it came on the heels of a logging operation in the early summer of 2016 that thinned areas of Norway pines. The logging was more extensive than many park users had anticipated, based on a number of my conversations with them in the past year. Under the park's mini-master plan, 60 acres of invasive buckthorn also were removed, leaving open understory that had once been dense with foliage.
All of this _ planned changes to the landscape along with the windstorm damage _ has left the park a changed place.
"To me and others, this was hard to see," the city's Shoberg said. "Initially, it was a shock. It was rough. There was no understory vegetation because we had removed 60-plus acres of buckthorn, and we had removed trees."
But since that time, the city has begun to reforest open areas by planting 3,500 trees _ spruce, pines, oaks and other species. Nearly four acres of so-called "pollinator meadows" will be planted in the next few weeks, Shoberg said. Even now, as summer sunlight penetrates to the forest floor, native plants are coming in.
"Before you know it, the openness is going to be so thick from natural vegetation we've planted, it will be impenetrable again," Shoberg said. "We're getting to see natural ecological processes that we've never gotten the opportunity to see. It's a huge learning opportunity."
Tom O'Rourke, executive director of Hartley Nature Center within the park, has been a daily witness to all of this change _ natural and man-made.
"I think in the short-term, for a lot of people, it's visually disturbing," O'Rourke said. "In the long-term, we'll have a more beautiful, ecologically healthy park ... "
Most of us, as O'Rourke says, aren't accustomed to taking a longer view of natural systems.
"But that's what we're trying to do ... " he said. "We're trying to nudge some changes in a positive direction and be good caretakers of the place."
Several other park improvements that are part of the mini-master plan are at or nearing completion, Shoberg said. Old Hartley Road has been reconstructed with a crushed rock surface, along with a loop trail from Hartley Nature Center to Hartley Pond and back. The road and trail are accessible for people using wheelchairs and strollers, and for people with mobility issues, Shoberg said.
New or renovated parking lots were built at four park entrances. Cross-country ski trails were realigned in several places. New interpretive signs are set to go up at several places in the park.
Through all of this change, those who have come to love the park keep returning to hike, run, bike, ski, walk dogs, watch birds and expose kids to the outdoors. We visit the park seeking silence and solace, green spaces and natural rhythms. For a year or more now, some of that has been hard to come by.
But day by day, in small increments, we can see the park rebounding. The heavy equipment is gone. Seedlings reach for the sky. Buttercups and orange hawkweed bloom where buckthorn once choked out everything else. Some day, perhaps, monarchs will flutter over woodland meadows.
Hartley Park is coming back.
And the rest of us will keep coming back to witness the change.
