Pike Island: Almost to the bridge!

 

We have slowly been working our way, through blogpost after blogpost, to our three hour tour of Pike Island. Over the course of the last several hundred essays we have finally, painstakingly, bit by bit, made it to the Fort Snelling parking lot. 

There we took one inconclusive, blurry picture of an extremely rare Snowy Owl.

Will today be the day where we finally make it to Pike Island and I can start to show you all the amazing pictures I took there?

I wish.

No, today we walk all along the front side of the old Fort Snelling. We take a pip over to the Fort Snelling Chapel, we go down the big hill (really big for Minnesota, and steep), and, just as we're about to come in sight of the beautiful Pike Island, the lights go out for the day because we are telling this tale on the installment plan.

Questions?

Did you get any nice pictures of the fort, or the chapel, or anything, on the way to the Island?

In short, no. 

All the good pictures are on or of Pike Island. This means you have a lot to look forward to! But that doesn't mean I didn't take some warm up pictures on my way to the Island!

And so I will now show you the not at all great pictures I took, in a desultory manner, on my way to Pike Island. 

Think of it as a kind of limbering up to prepare you for the emotional power of the pictures to come over the next several hundred days.

Here is a red door in the outer wall of the fort:

Here is a crow in a field next to one of the fort buildings:

Here are some shadows on the wall of the fort.

Here is a Lincoln plaque from the twenties in honor of Union Veterans of the Civil War:

Here is the chapel which has the characteristic round towers of the fort, but that I suspect was built a fair bit later:

Curiously amid the great stone fort, this is the back of another memorial of some kind, made of pink Italian Marble, possibly in honor of Italian veterans:

To be honest these pictures were all pretty uninspiring, so I got a little bored and made up this one, not that it made me feel much better, but at least we're finally almost there: