Ehmann Family: Lake Superior

We didn't know what to expect from our upper Great Lakes trip through Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Lake Superior has a forbidding reputation and on the map our route looked like a lot of driving through a lot of lakes. While it was a lot of driving (1639 miles!), but the kids behaved and the lakes (big and small) and surrounding countryside surprised us with swimming, history, and fantastic food.

But first let's start with a quiz

1. How many states border the 5 Great Lakes?

2. How many provinces border the Great Lakes?

3. How many states border Lake Michigan?

4. How many border Lake Superior?

5. Which 2 Lakes are not separated by a river or locks?

6. What is the name of the strait between these lakes and how is it pronounced?

7. What lakes do the Soo locks connect and why the name Soo?
8. Detroit is located on a) Lake Erie, b) Huron, c) Michigan, or d) none of the above?

9. The native people's name for Lake Superior was a) gichigami, b) meche sebe, c) mukluk, d) michilimackinac

10. Together the Great Lakes contain what percent of the world's above ground fresh water? a) 5%,b) 10%, c) 20%, d) 30%

Answers:

1 = 8 states (MN, WI, IL, IN, MI, OH, PA, NY)

2 = 1 province (Ontario)

3 = 4 states (WI, MI, IL, IN)

4 = 3 states (MN, WI, MI)

5 = Michigan and Huron

6. Straits of Mackinac, pronounced Mackinaw

7 = The Soo locks connect Lakes Superior and Huron, and the name comes from their location in Sault Ste. Marie (soo-saint-mare-ee)

8. None of the above. Detroit sits on the Detroit River, which connects Huron and Erie

9. Gichigami

10. 20%

The Detroit airport gave us deja vu from Erin in 2021

to Erin back in 2010

We flew into Traverse City, Michigan, in lower Michigan on the east coast of Lake Michigan

Airport art

First stop, Sleeping Bear Dunes, named for a native Ojibwe fable about a mama bear whose cubs died crossing the lake, leaving the mama to sleep alone on the high dunes overlooking her cubs.

We've seen a few of these Jr Ranger displays

but never a display of Park Site brochures

The Dune Climb. Once again, we failed to find the geriatric spice melange. Might have seen the Kwisatz Haderach, or maybe it was just some blue-eyed dude.

That's the view east towards Traverse City. The western view of Lake Michigan required a 3-hr hike through the dunes - no thanks.

Just north of the dunes was a beach for our first Great Lake swim (second overall counting Lake Erie, which we swam in from Sandusky back in 2019. The water temp was probably low 70s - clean and refreshing!

We brought our butterfly nets and caught 2 wild monarchs at Sleeping Bear Dunes. We installed our Monarch Watch stickers and we'll see if they make it all the way to Mexico

Display from the local CVS on Lake Michigan. Going into this trip I was really worried about the bugs. Pictured Rocks even has a website devoted to "what's biting you" that lists the possibilities: mosquitoes, black flies, horse flies, deer flies, no-see-ums, and stable flies. Even in August the flies can be fierce, but during our trip the area was under a drought and I escaped the entire week without even a single mosquito bite. Climate change is wreaking havoc all over, but here it might be making the Great Lakes a little greater for summer vacations.

I love this photo. A highlight of my summer has been Caroline joining me on morning or evening jogs. Here it's dawn in Mackinaw City at the tip of the Lower Peninsula. Behind us is the bridge to the UP across the Straits of Mackinac, the mixing zone between Lakes Michigan and Huron.

The Algonquian people's name for this area was Michilimackinac and Fort Michilimackinac dates to the French missionary presence in the early 1700s

Our hotel was carefully selected to be on the Lake Huron side of the peninsula

and what better way to greet the day

than a dip in lovely Lake Huron

The Mackinac Bridge is the largest suspension bridge between anchorages in the Western Hemisphere

Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore spans an area on the south-eastern coast of Lake Superior (near Marquette on the big Lake Superior map further above). The rock cliffs are colored by mineral deposits and best viewed from tour boats in the summer or by ice trekking in the winter. We were saving our sea legs for the Isle Royale trip and hadn't planned a boat outing. Good thing, too, because the wind was up when we visited and all the tours were cancelled.

After a delicious lunch at the Falling Rock Cafe and Bookstore in Munising Falls we hiked a little before hitting the beach.

The ranger said that the water could be rough at Sand Beach, but we found perfect conditions with water in the 70s. Lake Superior: 4th Great Lakes that we've swam in. Next up: Lake Ontario!

I didn't get a photo, but further along, there were oodles of sand bars that were a blast to play in. It was one of our best days at a beach, ever, and on Lake Superior

We stayed overnight in Houghton, MI, on the Keweenaw peninsula (see map further above). Historically this area was the center of huge copper mining operations from the late 1800s to mid-1900s. Now it's home to Michigan Tech, holders of the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest snowball (33 ft circumference), as well as the Ambassador Restaurant, where you can take home a solid copper mug.

Dawn run in Houghton

It's cool to see history from the -drome era. Back home we go to a bowladrome dating to the 40s, but I've never heard of an amphidrome.

At Keweenaw National Historical Park, the highlight is the remains of the Quincy Mine. As they chased copper veins deeper into the bedrock, the engineers had to design bigger hoists to haul up the rock. This is the enormous drum that held the cable for the hoist in Shaft #2. The engine is the largest steam hoist in the world and was used to pull cable cars up the 55-degree angled shaft that went 1.75 miles into the earth.

We got to ride a small tramcar down the mountain

to the Level 7 adit, or horizontal entryway, that accesses the main shaft

The adit was cold and wet, and reminded us how miserable conditions were for the miners. Apparently in the deep sections of the mine the temps would rise to the 90s while the men worked and then in winter they'd ascend to the top and face subzero conditions to get home.

An example of the extremely pure copper found here

The girls were happy to leave

The rise of copper mining coincided with the electrification of America and then the military needs of the 2 World Wars

The pasties at Roy's Pasties and Bakery in Houghton were amazing and then it was on to Wisconsin

The tuft of islands at the top of Wisconsin are the Apostle Islands. We appreciated them from the shore in Bayfield.

Here again Lake Superior was showing off her beauty

The Great Lakes are surrounded by great waterfalls. This is Amnicon Falls State Park in Wisconsin

We visited the Duluth Aquarium

Ever think about where the oxygen in our atmosphere came from? Credit to the Duluth Aquarium for giving a shout-out to stromatolites, the columns of underwater bacteria that created the conditions on Earth that allowed multicellular life to evolve. Billions of years ago, these photosynthetic cyanobacteria consumed carbon dioxide and expelled their toxic waste, oxygen, into the water, causing the first mass extinction event, known as the Oxygen Catastrophe. It destroyed most anaerobic forms of life but enabled aerobic metabolism to take off and spawn new kingdoms of life. The other side effect of oxygen in the oceans was to oxidize all the dissolved ferrous Fe(II) iron to insoluble ferric Fe(III) iron, causing it to precipitate as banded iron mineral deposits. Here in Minnesota those 2 billion year-old Precambrian deposits are the ore of the Mesabi Range, home to today's iron mines that ship through Duluth to steel mills throughout the Midwest.

Besides iron, can you name the next 2 biggest commodities that ship through Duluth? Coal and wild rice. Coal, well we've seen coal production in the western US and it makes sense that coal would ship on barges, but wild rice? Yep, Minnesota is the home of wild rice in the US and it is harvested from shallow lakes around Lake Superior. We saw it and it's the least artificial form of agriculture that I've ever seen.

I've been swimming in the epilimnion all these years and didn't even know it

Lots of aquariums have touch tanks for stingrays or horseshoe crabs and the like, but here in Duluth they let you touch sturgeon

To avoid US-centric bias, we should call our Great Lakes by their complete name, the Laurentian Great Lakes, which are slightly less great than the Great Rift Lakes of Africa

Look at all those unsalted seas! We'll call it a day after swimming in the 5 Laurentian Great Lakes, thank you

After a terrific lunch at PhoHolic Taste of Vietnam, we drove up to Ely, MN for our base in the lakes district. Due to the drought, several wildfires were raging in the area, and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area was closed for the first time in 45 years. Also can someone tell me why Smokey Bear wears pants?

Our hotel was on a small lake with free use of human powered watercraft. I was not a fan of the SUP.

The Grand Ely Lodge did remind us of the Icicle Creek Lodge in Nancy Drew game #16. The fried whitefish at their restaurant was awesome. And after Tessie left Doggie behind there, they kindly mailed him back to us in Lexington

More industrial American history - this mine complex is now a Minnesota State Park.

The mine was the deepest and richest iron mine in Minnesota

You're looking at the ore, in a mineral called taconite. They'd pull it out and send it a few dozen miles on rails to the lakeshore, where it was ground into pellets and loaded onto barges. Pretty economical way to deliver millions of tons of raw material to make millions of tons of steel for vehicles and buildings.

Voyageurs National Park sits among three large connected lakes on the border with Canada. These were part of the canoe-based fur trade route used by Native peoples and then the voyageur French pioneers of the 1600s. Today, the lakes are populated by motorboats, which detract from the scenery.

In the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, no motor craft are allowed. We booked a half-day tour, but since the BWCA was closed, they took us on lakes just outside. On this day the biggest fire was only 20 miles away and the smoke was everywhere. Caroline used her KN95 mask to screen out the particulates.

It was loony to be paddling in thick haze that blotted out the shoreline

Our guides did the portaging, giving us the real voyageurs experience minus the back pains

You'd think it would be easy to contain wildfires in the land of 10,000 lakes, but in the BWCA there are few roads. Over 400 firefighters were called into the area and twice at dinner we felt inadequate as a hard-working troop filed into the restaurant to eat. They drank a lot of water. We even ran into a patrol from Ohio during the canoe trip. This firewoman is helping Tessie find frogs.

Near the "R" in Forest are the 3 lakes that we toured. On this map, all the dashed lines are portage routes.

On our canoe trip the guides introduced us to yummy granola Portage Bars made by a bakery called Crapola, whose world headquarters are in Ely.

After a couple of days away, it was nice to get back to our familiar vista of looking right and seeing the lake

CCC volunteer statue at Gooseberry Falls State Park, about an hours drive north of Duluth

The series of falls here were created by tiers of igneous rocks resisting the erosion of the softer sandstone. The igneous rocks are remnants of the anorogenic plutonic perforation of North America, a time about 1 billion years ago when young North America almost rifted apart and huge lava flows covered the Midwest

We overnighted in Grand Marais, MN, the last town of any size on the northwest coast of the lake heading to Thunder Bay, Ontario. Here the lake shed its happy demeanor and looked a little threatening on the eve of our ferry to Isle Royale.

The best food of the trip was here at the Angry Trout Cafe. I had grilled whitefish with wild rice and mushrooms.

There are three ways to get to Isle Royale (pronounced "royal"), located in the northwest corner of the Lake (see map above). One is the private seaplane and two are ferries. The 4-hour ferry leaves from the south shore of Lake Superior and is a large passenger ferry. We opted for the 2-hour ferry from the north shore but didn't realize how small the boat would be. Passengers were jammed into the central hold and overflowed onto seats against the outer rail. They boarded in order of when reservations were made and thanks to my advanced planning we got on early and could sit inside.

Once out on the open lake, we were in 4-ft swells with the powerboat slamming up and down. We had taken motion sickness pills and while we weren't vomitous, it was hard to feel anything but crapola on the boat

The poor people on the outside were exposed to constant spray and the cold wind

Isle Royale has large populations of moose and wolves, both recent arrivals and fodder for ecological studies of predator-prey dynamics

We kept hoping to turn a corner and see a moose, but no luck. Most of the ferry passengers were through-hikers bound for a 4-day hike to the other end of the island.

Isle Royale tops the list of least visited National Parks in the lower 48. However the rangers said that it is the most revisited park, but how that is measured beats me.

After a semi-comatose ferry return, we visited one more site, the Grand Portage National Monument. After all that canoeing and beaver hunting, the voyageurs had to connect to Lake Superior somewhere. That somewhere is here in Grand Portage, MN, where it was only a 8 1/2 mile schlep to the Pigeon River and the waterway connections.

Although they did inadvertently introduce horrific smallpox plagues, the French-Canadian trapper traders of the 1600s and 1700s had sort of a symbiotic relationship with the native North Americans.