She's hiked hundreds of trails. Here's her favorite in Minnesota.

MINNEAPOLIS - Stephanie Pearson started hiking on the Superior Hiking Trail with her parents in Duluth as a child.

Over the years, she turned her sense of wonder about the outside world into a career, writing stories for Outside Magazine and National Geographic. Those stories took her from the Falkland Islands to see colonies of penguins to the mountains of Nepal. Earlier this year, she published “100 Hikes of a Lifetime U.S.A.” chronicling the country’s “ultimate scenic trails.”

The best one in Minnesota, she says, is the one she grew up on: the Superior Hiking Trail. It’s the state’s longest, stretching 300 miles and running parallel to the shoreline of Lake Superior. The rugged trail has a steep elevation change and goes through the volcanic formations of the North Shore Highlands and Sawtooth Mountains, lakes, rivers, bogs and boreal forest, according to her book.

“I just love that sense of wonder and that sense of discovery that hiking can lead to,” she said. “A really great day can be up in the Boundary Waters [Canoe Area Wilderness] or Quetico Provincial Park where you’re exploring lakes that you’ve never seen.”

In this edition of “How I Get Outside,” we asked Pearson, 55, who lives in Duluth, more about her outdoor travels and how it all started in Minnesota. Her responses have been edited for clarity and length:

Q: What’s your favorite outdoor activity? Why?

A: It’s very seasonal-dependent. I love to cross-country ski, both classic and skate ski in the winter. So if there’s snow, that’s definitely what I’ll do in the winter. I’m also a mountain biker, but I like to mix it up with hiking just so that I’m using different muscle groups.

Q: How did you get into hiking?

A: I remember very distinctly as a young child having to put on, you know this was in the ‘70s, layers of warm clothes to get out in Duluth, and then my dad would be at the front of us skiing and my mom would be at the back, and then we would be rewarded with a breakfast out on a Saturday, which was a huge deal for us. If we didn’t ski, we couldn’t go out to breakfast. They made it a fun outing, and we did the same with hiking. We would, especially in the fall, spend our Sundays outside, and at first it was sort of hard as a small kid. I was like, “I’m hungry, I’m cold.” But then I just realized as I was getting older that that’s really where I found my peace, and it’s all because I grew up that way.

Q: What have you learned about yourself from hiking?

A: I’ve learned that I can’t be too far away from a trail. I’ve lived in bigger cities, and I realized I need to be in some close proximity to wilderness or some pretty uncrowded trails.

Q: What was your best day outside?

A: I lived in New Mexico for about 20 years when I worked [full-time] at Outside Magazine. So I think one of my favorite days was when I went alpine skiing at Taos [Ski Valley], on a bluebird day [a day with blue skies and sunny weather] with fresh powder; that was a pretty awesome day.

Q: What was your worst?

A: When I was a kid, my dad loved to sail. This was really scary, actually. My dad loved to sail, and he got a small little daysailer with a little day cabin. We went out on Memorial Day because he was so excited to sail it, and he flipped the boat and turtled it, which means it went straight down. I got caught in that little cabin, and I got twisted in some of the sheets and the lines for the sails. That was really scary because it was so cold in the water, and I just couldn’t get out from under there. So that was probably my scariest.

Q: That sounds really scary. How did you survive?

A: I was disoriented. I couldn’t quite figure out how to get out of there, and it probably didn’t last more than a total of a minute or two, but it was a very, very scary thing. Somebody helped me out. I think my dad got all the other kids out; I had four siblings. I don’t think we were all there, but I seem to recall that I could see somebody’s hand trying to pull me out.

And then where we were [on Gull Lake north of Brainerd], it was a windy day, and so we didn’t immediately get rescued because somebody had to come from shore, and it was early in the spring, so there weren’t a lot of other boats. I remember being just extremely cold and very terrified, but I’m glad that ended well.

Q: What’s your favorite place to be outside in Minnesota?

A: There are many places ... but I love doing a new route, like into the Quetico. There’s some routes you can take from the Boundary Waters into Quetico, where there’s fewer people. Some of the lakes just have those high, rocky cliffs bordering the water, and they’re just gorgeous.

Q: What’s an outdoor activity you wish you knew how to do?

A: Sailing is a sport that always intimidated me because it can go wrong, and there’s a lot that you have to think about when you’re sailing. I’ve sailed with my dad through a lot of storms, and it’s something that I never was able to get really proficient at, and I wish that I had taken the time to learn how to sail.

Q: You’ve been given the chance to go on your dream outdoor adventure. What is it, and what three people would you bring with you?

A: I’d like to have the time, you know. So many of the things that I do are time-restricted because I work full time, and so I have to fit them into a schedule, and it would be nice to have the time to be out there, whatever it is, whether it’s hiking or mountain biking, and to do sort of a long push. Whether that’s like the Continental Divide Trail or do more trekking in Nepal and just be able to really spend a lot of time out there rather than always feel like I’m having to pack it into a specific amount of time. I think that would be awesome.

I would definitely take my partner, Brian, because he’s fun. And I would take some combination of my family and friends.

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