It’s a triumph of mind over bog near Brainerd

Timing is everything in the world, so news that volunteers have proven humans are smarter than giant bogs comes with a measure of restrained celebration.

The bog, I’m sure you know by now as it’s the world’s most famous hunk of floating peat, made landfall last fall on the beach of a popular youth camp and wouldn’t budge.

In the last few weeks, volunteers have been hacking it up with cables and chain saws and on Sunday, it finally worked.

The Brainerd Dispatch has video to prove it.

Everyone’s learned a lot about bogs in the last few months. This one is estimated to have weighed 4,000 tons, which explains why the initial plan to use boats to pull it off the beach made for some bog chuckle.

“There were people who said, ‘You’re not going to get that moved.’ All the companies with their big equipment said, ‘Oh, we’ll do it, we’ll do it. It will take us a few weeks, but we’ll do it.’ We were able to do it with the mindset: ‘Let’s come together,'” Randy Tesdahl, the state adjunct/executive director of the Minnesota American Legion, tells the paper.

Alas, there’s that timing thing. Last week, the camp announced it was canceling all the programs for the summer because of the bog.