Photo: Katie Mumm

By Scott DCamp, Sports Editor of The Thief River Falls Times - November 25, 2020

The morning of Nov. 9 was a life-changing morning for Thief River Falls native Katie Mumm. That morning, the 2013 Lincoln High School graduate captured a rare photo of three bull moose foraging. The photo has garnered a lot of attention for Mumm, who was featured on both WCCO and KVLY.

Photography has always been a hobby for Mumm, but it became much more shortly after she moved to Grand Marais in 2017.

“I've always liked taking photos,” Mumm said. “I moved here in the winter of 2017 and the spring was my first moose encounter.”

Mumm saw a cow and her two calves. She was hooked.

Grand Marais is a northeastern Minnesota town in Cook County (population of 1,351 at the 2010 census) located northeast of Duluth on the north shore of Lake Superior. It is also the starting point of the Gunflint Trail National Scenic Byway – a 57-mile paved highway that connects Grand Marais to Seagull Lake of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

“Everything I do is along the Gunflint,” Mumm said. “I spend all of my time looking up and down the Gunflint Trail.”

Fifty-seven miles of paved highway and plenty of unpaved sideroads cut through thick forest. There are several locations that have produced good photos. Much like hunting, the key is patience and persistence.

“I just drive … I drive the Gunflint Trail and other spots along the trail. I check all my different spots,” Mumm said. “I will go days without seeing anything. This week, I’m on day eight of driving. I put on 530 miles in the previous seven days.”

Mumm’s patience continues even after she finally sees a moose, fox or other wildlife that she intends to photograph.

Sometimes when I see a moose, it’s not the best picture,” Mumm said. “The good photos I’ve gotten have been because I waited and was patient.”

Katie Mumm.  Photo: Facebook 

Mumm has amassed quite a collection of wildlife photos. She gets close enough to her subjects to produce detailed images and avoids getting too close and spooking the animals.

Her most famous image is a photo of three bull moose foraging. It is rare to see three moose together, let alone three bull moose.

“For the bull moose photo, I watched for five minutes,” Mumm said. “I took hundreds of pictures to find ones that were good.”

Moose may have been the animal species that sparked Mumm’s wildlife photography career, but fox have proven to be the most prolific. Some are quite photogenic. “There’s one fox who comes when I call him,” Mumm said. “He must get treats. He’ll sit and look at you and give you different looks.”

Mumm is always on the hunt for her next photo and she’s after something that has proven to be even more elusive than moose.

“Definitely number one thing I want to photograph is a lynx,” Mumm said. “I’ve seen them at night up here but never during the day.”

Mumm is a self-taught photographer and she credits YouTube for helping her improve her craft. She uses a Canon camera and a 75-300mm lens that is on the short side in the grand scheme of camera lenses. Timing is everything in photography and for wildlife, and that typically means being ready to shoot well before sunrise.

“Right now, the sun is rising earlier,” Mumm said. “I leave the house by 6 or 6:15 every day. I try to beat other traffic, so [the wildlife] aren’t spooked.”

It also means being patient and trusting the process. Mumm spends more of her time driving and looking for signs of wildlife than she does actually taking photos.

She’s never encountered an aggressive moose, but she doesn’t take that for granted.

“I try to keep my distance,” Mumm said. “I’m always in my car. This one, I got out a little bit, but pretty much every photo I’ve taken has been from the window of my car.”

When Mumm moved to Grand Marais in 2017, her first job was at a resort called Bearskin Lodge – a place with sentimental value due to that fact that both her grandparents and parents had their honeymoons at the resort.

Mumm has since moved on. She is currently employed at another resort, Skyport Lodge, and she also works for a gift shop called The Big Lake. She loves life on the North Shore.

“I have no plans to leave Grand Marais,” Mumm said.  I want to get bigger and better gear. It would be awesome to be a professional photographer one day.”

She took the next step toward achieving that goal with the recent launch of her website, katiemumm.com. Through the website, customers can purchase a 2021 calendar filled with Mumm’s photos of wildlife along the Gunflint Trail, individual paper prints, wall art or keepsakes, such as coffee mugs or refrigerator magnets. Mumm’s work can also be found on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/kemofthenorth/.


To see the original story and see more outdoors reports, follow this link to the Thief River Falls Times website.  https://trftimes.com/uncategorized/15545/life-on-the-gunflint-trail