I’ve been looking for a place to practice night photography where there isn’t much light pollution. I used a dark skies website to learn locations that would work for me—this is a good spot, with limited pollution from the Twin Cities and Duluth as well as other towns. Given our summer schedules, we had to go soon after a full moon, but we were able to figure things out to get some pretty good photos--we were able to capture photos of the Milky Way and just a few photos of meteors for the annual perseid meteor shower, which will be peaking during the new moon next weekend.
Beyond the night skies, we had great internet access (one of us had to work for the first day we were there and had no problems). We also went out to a couple of great MN State Parks (Banning/St. Croix) for some nice hikes and had some good down time reading books.
It was just what we needed.