Gitche Gumee

At this point in my life, I have seen all five Great Lakes - though admittedly only the tiny piece of Huron visible as you cross the Mackinac Bridge - and have swam in three of them (Ontario, Michigan and Superior). I've talked a bit before about how great they are, and nothing made me fall in love more than Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

Our first full day at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, which fell on July 27, we spent mostly driving from site to site, seeing as much as we could. We are based on the west side of the park, and unfortunately, part of the main road through the park is closed (the park stretches about 40 miles along the coast of Lake Superior, from Munising to Grand Marais). The only way to get to sites on the eastern end of the park is to go way out of the way on a gravel road and approach them from the east. As a result, we put about 200 miles on the car the first day we were there.

In the UP, we seriously got more brochures and maps from various businesses and tourist stops than we have at any location on this trip. The problem, however, is that the information that is on one map may not be on another, but the other map has other information we need - so we ended up shifting mostly between three different maps: One an index of waterfalls and lighthouses in the area; one a forest service map of Hiawatha National Forest and the state forests in the area; and one a map of Pictured Rocks itself. We managed to make sense of it all, however, and spent most of the first day checking out waterfalls all over the park and amassing passport cancellations at various visitors' centers.

The main attraction at Pictured Rocks are the incredible sandstone cliffs on Lake Superior, which often include fantastic wind-swept and ice-carved pillar and arch formations along the shore. The best way, supposedly, to see much of the cliffs is to take a boat ride down the coast - and in Munising, there are also glass-bottom boat tours of shipwrecks, which I think sounds like pretty much the coolest thing in history. But since we're doing this on a budget, we had to skip that. We loved the UP and Pictured Rocks, though, so we plan on going back eventually - and maybe we'll have money that time. Who knows.

Pictured Rocks also had a large dune much like the Lake Michigan Overlook dune at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore - the incredible sand cliff dropping 450 feet to the lake - called the Log Slide. It was apparently precisely that in the days that the UP was a logging hot spot - the workers would slide the logs down into the lake. The dune had more vegetation at Pictured Rocks, however, so it didn't have this terrifyingly steep crazy sand-cliff effect like the one at Sleeping Bear did. This one was more like a narrow flume going straight down.

Near the Log Slide (about two miles away) is the Au Sable Lighthouse, which is only accessible by trail; there is no road leading there. It's one of the most remote, isolated mainland lighthouses in the US, and I was really interested in getting out there. They even have ranger tours for much of the week. Unfortunately, it was getting late by the time we finally got there on the 27, and if we'd wanted to go back on the 28, we would burn up a ton of gas in the car going out of our way to get there. So we had to leave Au Sable for the next time too.

Our best time in Pictured Rocks, however, happened the next day, which we dedicated to a hike to Chapel Rock. The trail leads to a waterfall about 1.5 miles into the woods, and then another 1.5 miles past there brings you to Chapel Beach and Chapel Rock itself. Patrick was mostly just desperate to get on a trail and do some real hiking, so we chose the hike mostly because it was there - but what we ended up finding was one of our favorite wilderness spots thus far.

We got a relatively early start, hitting the trail at about 10:30 am. It was supposed to be a cool day, in the 70s,  whereas the previous day had been in the 80s, so we figured it would be the perfect day for walking. We got to Chapel Falls, which was pretty and all, but you can only see so many waterfalls in one week. The Pictured Rocks area has almost 20, and while we didn't see them all, we saw a lot.

Once we got past the falls, the trail started slowly descending, and by the time we got near the beach it was a sharp drop-off of about 100 feet where you have to climb down roots and rocks to get to the lake level. When we reached Chapel Rock, it was really impressive. It was a pillar like we'd seen at Miners Castle, but it had a full-grown tree on top of it! Just West of the rock was a large outlet from the woods where the creek we'd seen rushing over Chapel Falls finally reached the lake. It flowed into a large brown tidepool on the beach which was sometimes breached by waves from the lake, but flowed a little to the east and eventually joined in with the lake.

This day, the waves were particularly impressive, probably cresting at 6 to 8 feet! Not only were they large, but as they crashed into the sheer rock face that made up the area around Chapel Rock, I didn't doubt for a second that we were on the shore of a considerably powerful body of water.

Patrick and I sat on the beach for a while, and even though it wasn't very hot, we had both brought our swim suits and knew we had to go in. We took turns hiding in the brush near the beach to change our clothes, then ran into the water. It was pretty cold, but not as cold as I'd expected it to be - besides, you get used to it pretty quickly. The waves were just as strong as those of the ocean, and we found ourselves knocked around and pushed with the current - only we didn't have nasty, briney water to deal with. Only the fresh lake water, which was blue enough that you'd think you were in Bali.

After a while, we retreated from the water and sat on a piece of driftwood to dry off. As time went on (it was a little past noon by now), more and more people started flowing down to the beach. By the time we found a good hiding spot and put our clothes back on, there were probably 15 people on the strip of sand. We started heading back up the trail and, whereas on the way in we had passed a grand total of 3 people on the trail, we probably passed 40 to 50 people as we left. Yet another reason to get your kicks early! Most people on vacation don't want to rouse before 10 am, so if you can get anywhere by 10:30, you're pretty much guaranteed to have any given destination all to yourself.

One thing that I know Patrick and I will have to contend with on this trip is the fact that I don't like to exert myself too too much. Don't get me wrong - I like a challenging hike just as much as anyone else, but sometimes it seems like Patrick feels like he's not doing anything at all unless he's climbing a sheer cliff face or running up a 60-degree incline. I, personally, don't have fun when I'm in pain and uncomfortable, which I don't think so so radical a concept. So while I know I could do any hike if given enough time, Patrick doesn't like to take that time. If he had his way he'd run circles around me the whole way back to the car. But thankfully he knows that would get him slapped.

The Chapel Rock hike was only about six miles, so I can only imagine what I'll encounter once we get further West. Hopefully it won't get ugly.

After the Chapel Rock hike, we returned to the campsite to find it swarming with mosquitoes. The night before had seen the thunderstorm I wrote about earlier, and it brought out ridiculous numbers of bugs. They were biting us right through our clothes. We tried to eat by the light of the propane lantern only to feel like we were sitting inside a giant cloud of monster fruit flies, only these fruit flies wanted to drink our blood. Needless to say, it got pretty old pretty fast and we headed in to bed.

All in all, we loved the UP. The towns were tiny and the people welcoming. Pictured Rocks was an amazing landscape. The tourist traps were fantastic (yes, we went to Da Yoopers Tourist Trap and Museum). We'd love to go back again eventually.

Yoopers

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore was nice and all, but now that we have visited Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore on the Upper Peninsula, we are Yoopers for life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

After waking up dew-covered in our thistle field outside Empire, we packed up the car and headed out in search of coffee and the road north. Neither of us had ever been to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so we were eager to get there.

We opted to take the scenic route along the shore of Lake Michigan, and we’re glad we did. It brought us not only by the two world-record holding Largest Cherry Pie pans (the one in Traverse City is the current record-holder, but the one in Charlevoix was much nicer thanks to a particularly interesting Eagle Scout project. I mean, who else can say, “Yeah, for my Eagle Scout project, I renovated the pavilion around the pan from the world’s second-largest cherry pie”?), but we got to visit countless beautiful shore towns. Route 119 between Little Traverse Bay and Sturgeon Bay was definitely the most scenic scenic route we have encountered thus far.

Soon, though, it was time to bid farewell from the lower peninsula that we’d called home for more than a week. We crossed the Mackinac Bridge sometime in the early afternoon and we’d might as well have left the Lower 48 behind.

Other than the aforementioned dude who cursed at me as we bottlenecked into the toll booths – and by “He cursed at me,” I actually mean “I cursed at him” – (and the toll was only $3.50! We were counting on $10-$15. Welcome to the West), our experience of the Upper Peninsula has been nothing short of paradise. A slightly buggy paradise, but paradise nonetheless.

We were pretty amused by the tourist trap that is St. Ignace, the city you encounter right when you cross the bridge. Actually, we are pretty amused by every town on the UP, because if there’s something resembling a town here on something resembling a modern road, it does its absolute best to sell travelers “real Yooper gear” and pasties (which is pronounced “pass-tees” – NOT like the burlesque dancer’s nipple-cover) and fancy UP minerals and rocks.

We stopped at the “Mystery Spot,” which advertises itself as just that until you get into the parking lot and finally get a chance to actually read a little sign about what the Mystery Spot actually is. Apparently it’s one of those strangely-magnetized places (there are a number of them scattered around the country) where navigation tools cease to work, levels won’t level, people feel woozy, all that kind of stuff. This spot offered $7 tours (to which I say: “Why would I want to pay $7 to feel light-headed?”) and a little shop full of tchotchkies for travelers. Right near the Mystery Spot is the Deer Ranch, which we stopped at mostly to take our picture in front of the giant fiberglass deer out front (we didn’t go in to see the billions of albino deer the site claims to have living there).

When it came time for lunch, we knew we had to try the magical local cuisine known as the pasty. It’s essentially a pastry filled with anything you can imagine (everyone claims some different concoction is the “original” recipe) and formed freestyle with no dish to shape it. We stopped at Lehto’s, a little stand on the side of the highway that sells nothing but beef and onion pasties and cans of soda. But the place has been there since 1947, so we figured it had to be pretty good, right?

We were right to stop there. The guy behind the counter (yes, one guy – and I think there was one person back in the kitchen, and that’s it. No restrooms, no credit card machine, nothing but beef pasties) was really nice, and the pasties were fantastic. It was hot out, and the pasties were hot enough to burn our mouths, but they were the perfect size for a modest lunch for one person (but that didn’t stop me from wanting another one when I was done).

The further we got from St. Ignace, the more nothing we passed. It didn’t take long at all for the motels and clusters of vacation cabins to turn into miles upon miles of pine trees and the occasional abandoned cluster of vacation cabins. At Epoufette we cut north on a county road so that we could take a short drive through Rexton.

My sophomore year of college, I wrote a short story about a girl from Long Island who travels to visit family in Rexton, Michigan. I was loosely (very loosely) basing the story on a visit I made from New Jersey to visit Dexter the summer after my freshman year of college, but I wanted to change it around enough that it was unrecognizable from my own life (I later said that it was a miracle when, during my fourth year of college, I finally wrote a fictional piece of fiction). I looked at a map and chose Rexton, based probably on the X that it shared in common with Dexter, and its proximity to a lake that featured largely in the story (on the map it’s Strouble Lake, but there are actually tons of lakes in the area).

Rexton was not exactly as I’d pictured it for my story, and upon going back to read the story I would probably have to re-tool the landscape descriptions (I don’t remember exactly, but I probably talked about barns and farmhouses and fields like I’d seen in Dexter – but in the UP it’s all just trees and more trees). But overall it was great; a small cluster of houses, a couple streets, a Mennonite church (how perfect! If I ever go back to edit the story I will totally make the family Mennonites), and… That’s it. Most of the houses were tiny run-down saltboxes like you find all over the UP – not much more than a trapper’s cabin updated to have shingle siding and a screen door. Those that weren’t saltboxes were mobile homes from the ‘70s with particle board patches on the outside. There were a few houses that were a little nicer, and I figure that’s where my characters would have lived.

Driving through a town like Rexton, Pat and I were struck again by the question of how in the world people in areas like that could possibly make any money. Some of them probably live on public assistance, but the rest – seriously, where? There were a few companies floating around the roads we drove, like a granite company and a concrete company, but other than that – nothing. Even if someone needed the plumber we saw to fix their pipes, where would the person with the pipes get the money to pay the plumber? I’ve never lived in a tiny town like those so I have no clue – I mean, I live in a tiny town now, but it’s only 26 miles from the state capitol and 50-ish miles from the state’s largest city. These places on the UP don’t have much by way of a nearby metropolis.

We managed to get to the main interagency visitor center for Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore and the Hiawatha National Forest at about 5 pm (it closed at 6). Patrick knows all the right questions to ask to find camping, so he went to the woman at the desk and asked where some good places to pitch a tent in the Hiawatha National Forest were.

She replied, “You can just drive your car down any of those roads and camp, as long as it’s forest land.”

Um… We know. But are there any good places in particular?

“Oh, any of those roads.”

Okay.

We figured she wasn’t going to be much help (she didn’t look like much of a camper herself), so we decided to fend for ourselves. Our main concerns were finding water – we were very low on drinking water, and while Patrick has a water filter, we didn’t want to use it if we didn’t have to – and getting me a shower or some other manner of bathing, because it was now Monday and I hadn’t showered since Saturday morning, and I’m a bit of a hygiene freak.

We got in the car – Patrick a little irritated at our lack of specifics, me a little irritated that I was so filthy – and set off down H13 to find us some camping.

After trying a few times to go down roads that we thought would end up at bodies of water, only to find them dead-ending or impassible, we had our first indication that things were going to be okay. We found some water relatively easy. We took a detour off 13 to the Island Lake campground and came upon an old-school water pump. I held bottles under the freezing-cold stream while Patrick pumped away, and soon we got five or six bottles of… Brown water!

We smelled it, and it smelled like metal, so we knew it was just rust. Pat’s water filter would take care of the crap in it (but, as we found later, not the taste).

The campground was primitive, with no more facilities than that one brown-water pump, yet it was $16 to stay a night – oye! I mean, I know the forest service isn’t exactly rolling in dough, but that’s a lot of money for a place to pitch a tent and some rusty water.

We continued on and turned down a road that led to a strange swampy-looking place that wasn’t a swamp at all. It was a large expanse of tons of dead trees poking up out of ground that looked like it was covered in marsh plants, but when you walked into the field you realized the ground was actually sandy, and the “marsh plants” were actually ferns. We didn’t figure out why all the trees were dead, but it was pretty strange.

We drove down the road a ways, having no luck finding a place to camp, not to mention any water. Soon we saw a big pickup truck with a trailer behind it was coming our way on the one-lane road, so we pulled off the road to let it by.

The truck stopped, though, and a smiling forty-something man with a bandana leaned out the open window.

“You lookin’ fer blueberries, eh?” he asked.

“No, just trying to find some camping,” Pat said from the passenger seat. “Know of anywhere around here? Maybe on a stream?”

“No… No, no streams in this area,” he said. “I’m just out here choppin’ some wood.”

Somehow, both Patrick and the man got out of the cars and began talking, and when Patrick pulled out a map and told the man what we were looking for, he said, “Oh, yah! Yah, go down 13, and you’ll see Wide Waters on the right. Right there on the left, there’s a road, and then it will come to the Indian River. Turn right before you get to the river and there’s a road there with all offshoots to the right where people cut roads and campsites to put their canoes in. People camp there all the time.”

Bingo!

This was exactly what we wanted from the woman at the visitor center. We should have known to just ask a Yooper.

We hung out with the man for another few minutes, asking him how to find blueberries. He told us about how, when he was a kid, his family was very poor, so he and his siblings would all go out picking blueberries – then their father would sell them, and fed the whole family on blueberry money. He said the only problem with camping near a blueberry patch was “the bears and the cah-yoots.” He told us that he’d be picking blueberries, and he’d look up and not ten feet away a bear would be doing the same. But he knew he wasn’t in much danger – “the blueberries were sweeter than me.”

He brought us to a little bush on the ground, and it was just like the blueberry bushes we’d pick from as kids in Bass River State Forest. Patrick resolved then that we would be eating shitloads of blueberries while in the UP.

We thanked the man and I thanked the powers that be that Patrick is as nice as he is. For some reason, I have been more hesitant lately to talk to strangers – but Patrick isn’t, and many times on this trip he’s gotten us tips that I never would have gotten by simply smiling and going on my merry way. I have never been good at asking for help, but recognizing when you need it is one of the most important life lessons you can learn – especially while traveling.

We followed the man’s directions and, sure enough, the first campsite we stumbled across was beyond perfect. About 150 feet in from the road on a slightly bumpy little rutted sand driveway was a site with a trim stone fire pit and a steep eight-foot-ish embankment down toward the river. We went and looked at another few sites, but realized we weren’t going to find one this nice anywhere else.

We pitched our tent and this has been our home for the last two nights, and will be our home tonight again. I almost don’t want to leave in the morning.

My first order of business upon arriving was to take a bath in the river. The Indian River is actually pretty deep – probably four feet deep at its lowest point near our campsite, with a beautiful clean sandy bottom and a swift current of clear water the color of the weakest cup of tea you’ve ever brewed. I picked my way down the bank to a spot where a bunch of large stones rested in the water, forming a perfect stairway down into the water, not to mention a little shower seat and a place to put my soap while I washed up. The water was warm enough and the spot secluded enough that I took my time, even shaving my legs. It was far better than a campground shower any day.

That night we turned in relatively early. There was a whipporwill off near the road that sounded just like a car alarm and went off most of the night. Sometimes, in half-sleep, I could swear that I had distinguished two birds, calling and answering each other in a rapid and perfect pattern of whoops, never stumbling or hesitating for hours and hours on end.

Great Lakes III

I had to cut that last post uber-short last night because it started to rain. After a few little drops on my laptop screen, it continued to rain until Pat and I were in the tent during torrential downpours and ridiculous red lightning bursts that lasted for what seemed like hours. I laid there on my back and watched as first the tent ceiling would flash, illuminating the poles and seams, then it would go dark and the pattern would show up in negative, only to have lightning flash again a second later and the negative would float again. I realized during the storm that you could probably drive a car perfectly fine in the storm; it was only ever dark for a split-second at a time – the rest of the time it was bright as day.

So anyhow, that is what kept me from writing all this down last night.

Now I am dressed in bug-resistant garb and the sky is blue, so there will have to be some other less-expected occurrence for me to cut THIS post short.

We got to Sleeping Beat Dunes National Lakeshore on Sunday, July 25, and expected to be able to find camping in the primitive campground at the park. We rolled into the park relatively early in the day, counting on the few walk-in sites that campgrounds tend to reserve for same-day reservations, but found that we were too late anyway. All the campgrounds were full.

Pat got irritated and said we should just say screw it and head to the upper peninsula. I told him to shut up and that we’d find a campsite just fine – there were state forests all around Sleeping Bear Dunes and we wouldn’t have a problem finding a backcountry site.

First we tried calling a campground in Garey Lake State Forest to see if they had any sites available, but the state forest offices were closed so no one answered. Instead, we went to the road that the campground was on, a small dirt forest road outside the town of Empire, and did some driving to see what there was to see.

On forest roads like those, there are often private residences and properties interspersed within the state or national forest, and property owners are often vigilant with “POSTED” signs along these roads to discourage people like us from camping there. Along this road we saw a few signs like that, including a few offshoot roads that were clearly marked as private drives. We also saw, however, a number of Michigan state signs asking visitors to keep out of the forest because of newly-planted trees; this told us it was state land.

We drove along the road a ways until we found an offshoot road that was not labeled as a forest road, but was probably cut by other campers in the area because it led somewhere particularly nice. We turned down it, and in less than a quarter-mile we ended up in a beautiful field of thistle ringed by pines. We got out and investigated the road; ours were the only recent tire tracks, and we looked all over and couldn’t find any POSTED signs. Our best guess, then, was that the land was state-owned, and that we could camp there.

After we’d staked out that nice spot, we got back in the car and headed back to Sleeping Bear Dunes to explore.

The story of why the area is called Sleeping Bear Dunes strikes me as particularly sad. It’s printed in all the park brochures and has probably developed a trite and convenient tone to people who work or live in the area, but for a tourist like me, it rings new enough to be effective and touching.

An old Anishinaabek Indian story says that a long time ago, in what is now Wisconsin, a forest fire drove a mother bear and her two cubs out of the forest and into Lake Michigan. They swam all night, but eventually the two cubs began to tire. The mother bear finally made it to the other shore, but the cubs succumbed to exhaustion and drowned just before reaching land. The mother bear lay down on the dunes to wait for her babies. The Manitou turned her into The Sleeping Bear, a prominent dune, and then created the two Manitou Islands just off the coast to mark the spots where the cubs disappeared.

There are a lot of little stories like this to describe land formations all across the country, but usually they honor heroes or legends or particularly powerful beings. This story, unlike many others, I found particularly sad because it describes a mother who will never be reunited with her babies. As I read the few sentences in the brochure I expected a happy ending – that the cubs made it and they were happy and lived to old ages and eventually went to govern the islands that were created to commend their bravery. But it wasn’t like that.

All in all, the park was nice – you just don’t get massive dunes like this except for on the coasts of the Great Lakes. The beaches there were just as nice as any I ever visited in New Jersey, with fine sand and calm waves. They were admittedly pebbly here and there, but overall the swimming was great – and there is tons of it. Patrick and I opted for swimming between the Glen Haven Historic Village and Sleeping Bear Point.

To get to the latter, you have to go from a parking lot and down a huge dune to get to the beach – and when it came time for us to pack up and leave, I just didn’t feel like climbing up the huge dune again. Thankfully, since Patrick is ridiculous, he said he’d be happy to take a jog up the dune, get in the car, and meet me about a quarter- or half-mile down the beach at the Coast Guard station/maritime museum. Perfect. So I meandered down the shoreline and Patrick brought the car around and everyone was happy.

After swimming and driving around the park a bit, we were tired but not quite ready to end the day – not to mention we didn’t want to break out the camp stove and make dinner at our state forest campsite, just in case it was someone’s private property and they smelled the mysterious aroma of ham coming from their thistle field. So we went over to the Pierce Stocking Scenic Drive, which has been in operation since 1967 as a scenic drive around what was then Sleeping Bear Dunes State Park. The 12 stops on the scenic trail mostly focus on the ecology and geology of the dunes, including nearby Glen Lake and the beech-maple forests that grow right next to the sandy, stark dunes. The best stop on the drive, however, was number 9, the Lake Michigan Overlook.

You get the perfect sense of just how huge the dunes are. As approached the edge of the dune, it basically looked like the sand dropped off at a sheer cliff 450 feet above the lake. The sun was beginning to set when we got there, so it was casting a blinding shine over the water. As we approached the “edge,” we saw that it was actually a steep dune that ran all the way down to a narrow beach at the lake – the angle of the dune must have been 60 degrees. People were still trying to clamor up and down the hill. I just don’t see the appeal – the view is totally spectacular from the top, and once you get all the way down there, you’re on a beach like any other… And then you have to climb back up 450 vertical feet in loose, hot sand. Not my idea of fun. But there were a bunch of people doing it, most of them kids who I bet slept really well that night. I guess it’s worth it to say you did it, but I can say I did a lot of other cool things that didn’t cause so much physical pain.

After the scenic drive, we returned to the campsite to find it just as deserted as we’d left it. We parked the car and explored the outlying land a little – we heard a dog barking off in the woods and the occasional car drive down the main road we’d come in on, but other than that – and a conspicuously newly-planted tree surrounded by chicken wire – we were completely alone.

Being so totally alone again in the woods, after spending two nights with Tom and Mikki and a week before that in Michigan and two nights before that in Columbus, was particularly sweet. Pat and I function in a lot of the same ways, take comfort in a lot of the same things and enjoy much of the same activity – so we spent the evening enjoying each others’ company, reading, making jewelry and, eventually, getting a fantastic night’s sleep (despite some suicidal bug that buzzed and thrashed itself against the outside our tent for the better part of the evening). The sky, of course, was lit by residual sunlight until after 10 pm, and in the morning when we woke everything was soaking wet with dew, but that’s part of the package.

Great Lakes II

I had to cut that last post short last night because the mosquitoes were driving me up the wall. Everything they say about mosquitoes on the UP is true. If you come up here, ever, do NOT forget your bug spray.