Isle Royale

Daughter Number Two has been off on an adventure.  With a small group of friends who’ve gone camping together for years, she’s been camping on Isle Royale.  Isle Royale is the main island in an archipelago of some four hundred fifty islands in Lake Superior.  Although the archipelago is closer to Minnesota, it sits within the state boundaries of Michigan.  Also, it’s a national park.

     D#2 and friends arrived on the island by ferry, a two-hour ride from where they picked it up in Minnesota.  You can ferry in from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan as well, but the trip takes a lot longer.  No matters which ferry you take, though, the boat only carries people and gear; you can’t take your car to the island.

     The party of intrepid backpackers hiked to a campground and were delighted to find that, on the first-come-first-served system the park uses, they could have one of the shelters and, thus, didn’t have to put up their tents.  An Isle Royale shelter has a roof and three walls.  The fourth wall is screens.  The shelter was great news.

     Less great were the park colder-than-expected temperatures, even on this well-planned trip.  Night-time temperatures dipped to the low forties and, the group suspects, sometimes the high thirties.  Even with the shelter, the campers did a lot of shivering.

     In addition, there were storms.  One of them set up a pattern of storm surges, starting about three o’clock one morning.  Sheltering in the campground, the campers would hear a mighty roar, like a train coming.  This heralded the arrival of a whole lot of water rushing up the creek from the lake.  A while later, there would be another mighty roar, and just as much water rushing back down the creek and into the lake.  The cycle continued every twenty to forty minutes for two days.

     Once the campers were confident the rising water wouldn’t reach the shelter, they enjoyed the phenomenon.  So did the Canada geese on the creek. 

     “They’d hear the roar and turn their backs to it.  Then they’d surf the wave to the end,” says D#2.  “And, not too much later, they’d come surfing back.”

     A stick traveled up and down the creek on the storm surge, too.  The group named it Wilson.  Then another storm blew in, and Wilson disappeared.  D#2 says, “We thought he was a goner, but he came back!”

     Wilson and the geese weren’t the only visitors to pass through the campground.  When everyone was in the shelter, “a little girl moose came walking up the creek,” climbed out of the creek bed, and wandered over to where the campers were.  Shortly thereafter, a large bull moose sauntered up the creek and strolled to the near vicinity of the shelter.

     Whereupon, one of the men became so excited that he took temporary leave of his senses.  “Look!” he shouted.  “It’s a moose!  A really big one!  Right here!  I can’t believe it!  A huge male moose!  So close I could touch it!”  The other campers tried to get the man to be quiet, but to no avail.

     Moose are large animals.  This one sported the set of hooves that come standard with moose, and had popped for the antler option as well.  A moose that feels threatened—say, by someone shouting at it—is apt to get ticked off and aggressive.  A brochure available on the island says the best defense against an attacking moose is to keep a tree between you and it.  There were no trees in their shelter.

     D#2 didn’t say whether hands were actually camped over the shouter’s mouth, but the group did quiet him down before the moose came into the shelter after them.

     While on the island, our daughter’s group didn’t see or hear any wolves.  “We saw a wolf print, but just one.  It was big.”  The friends went on lots of day hikes, saw and heard birds they couldn’t identify, and saw lots of flowers, including orchids in the woods.

     The island is beautiful.  It is, after all, a national park.  D#2 says that perhaps the most gorgeous view they had was on one of their hikes.  They climbed about three hundred feet up, and found they could see trees, what looked like a puddle and must have been an inland lake, and more trees, almost all the way to Lake Superior.

     What did D#2 like best about the trip?  “The fact that I did it,” she says.  “I backpacked in, I backpacked out, and I checked Isle Royale off my bucket list.  Also, I saw a fox.  And a bearcub in Wisconsin.”

12 July 2024