GRAND PORTAGE—A weekend on the North Shore during the peak of the fall color season can be a daunting experience for those of us not used to the madding crowds.

The traffic is often terrible, the state parks are jammed, and there’s a line at every decent restaurant at least as far north as Tofte.

It’s enough to make you want to just stay home— or to look for those out of the way places where the Twin Cities refugees never go.

My wife Jodi and I found just such a spot way up at the tip of Cook County, near Grand Portage. As we’ve discovered over the years, any place north of Grand Marais is generally safe from the big crowds, and that was certainly true this past weekend, despite the riot of fall color on the maple ridges a few miles inland from the lake. We walked a good chunk of the Grand Portage, and trekked to the top of Mount Maud, where vast swaths of fiery oranges and reds extended to the north and west. After some searching, we found the road to Partridge Falls, and hiked in the quarter mile from the empty parking lot to what is certainly one of the state’s most spectacular waterfalls. We climbed down the rough trail to the base of the falls and watched the spray hurl itself in sheets through yet another in a series of deep gorges along the Pigeon River. I tossed a rock to the Canadian shore.

We drove to McFarland Lake near the end of the Arrowhead Trail and hiked about four miles of the Border Route Trail— a repeat for me, since I had hiked the entire length of it 33 years ago, when the trail was first built. It was much as I remembered, a rolling, sometimes barely visible trail, through lowlands of dense white cedar and uplands of old growth red pine. Much of the trail follows high escarpments that, on occasion, offer dramatic overlooks spanning miles of rugged wilderness.

It was all a marked contrast with the highly-developed, and frequently overrun, tourist destinations down on the shore. Between Saturday and Sunday, we hiked close to 20 miles, and never encountered so much as a single other hiker the entire time. There, at the tip of the Arrowhead, we had the amazing autumn woods all to ourselves.