Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, one of the least visited parks in America, is worth the trouble to get there
It's on an island in Lake Superior. Open six months a year. It's little known, remote and absolutely beautiful.
I clambered out of the seaplane, slung my bag over my shoulder and climbed the steep rocky dirt path that led from the floating dock. The path switched back to the left, and then opened onto an asphalt road that had been cut through the surrounding forest.
View of Isle Royale from seaplane
I detected movement to my left and turned in that direction.
About 100 feet away, there was a very large animal. It stood still, peering over its shoulder at me. Someone who had followed me up the trail from the seaplane dock stopped next to me and gave an audible gasp of surprise.
“Oh my God,” the man said. “It’s a moose.”
I looked again. It was, indeed, a moose, a truly magnificent beast.
Soon enough, the moose lost interest in us and moved slowly away.
Moose on the loose
It was the perfect, coolest possible introduction to Isle Royale National Park in Michigan, one of the most remote and least visited in the U.S. national park system. I had wanted to go there ever since my first trip to the upper peninsula of Michigan in June 2021. I had hit the road mostly just to break loose from the confines of Covid-constricted life. I drove as far west as Wisconsin, then looped north through the U.P. on my way back. As a kid, I'd read Hemingway's early short stories set in that remote part of the state. When I finally saw it, I was enchanted by the natural beauty, the emptiness and the majestic splendor of Lake Superior.
While I was in there, I heard about this little known national park that was an island in the middle of the lake. I vowed then to one day visit it. Now, almost exactly one year later, I was there.
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Isle Royale National Park is actually an archipelago of 400 islands with one large main island, which is 45 miles long and nine miles wide. Open to the public only from April to early October, it gets average of about 19,000 visitors a year. By comparison, the Grand Canyon National Park gets 4.5 million annual visitors -- about 12,000 per day, on average.
Getting to Isle Royale isn't easy. There are no major airports close to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Driving from Detroit to Houghton, Michigan where there's a ferry to Isle Royale takes over eight hours. It's a five-hour drive from Minneapolis to Grand Portage, Minnesota where there's a ferry to the western tip of the island. Depending on which ferry you take, it's another two to six hours to make the crossing.
I had driven to Houghton (starting in New York City, traveling there via Ontario, Canada -- about 1,300 miles). From there, I caught the seaplane to Isle Royale. It was quick and easy -- and expensive, close to $400 roundtrip.
Once on the island, I checked into the Rock Harbor Lodge, the only accommodations unless you are camping. The lodge consists of three buildings with guest rooms. a small restaurant and an office. My room was medium-sized, basic, with a porch overlooking the water. The restaurant had a very limited menu but the food was decent and moderately priced, which was good enough. It could have been bad and expensive because it's the only place on the island serving hot meals.
I dropped my bags and went for a walk. It was a little cool and overcast. I had picked up a trail map and decided to take the two mile-plus trail east to Scoville Point. There was a small group ahead of me -- a family, I judged, from the variety of ages and their good natured bickering. Otherwise, I saw no one else. (Yes, I know hiking alone is a bad idea for a lot of obvious reasons.)
The trail was mostly flat with a few short stretches of uphill incline, but it was exceptionally rocky and at times wet, making for difficult footing. If not for sturdy boots with a good tread and high ankle support, I could easily have gone down a number of times.
The path ran through dense forest and sometimes ran close to the shore. The clouds lifted and the sun came out. Every so often, I would just stop and listen. The only sounds were the chirping of birds, the lapping of waves against the rocky coast and ... nothing. The tranquil sound of silence. I shuffled along until I saw a small crescent of beach pegged with large, smooth black rocks. I went off the trail for a closer look. Across the water, just a few hundred yards, were more small islands, thick and dark green with foliage, and in the distance between them the blue gray, shimmering vastness of Lake Superior. The scenery was magical, the sense of isolation both profound and comfortable.
The Scoville trail eventually opened onto a large flat rock, like a plate, devoid of any vegetation. This was Scoville Point. To the east, I could make out a lighthouse on a small, distant island. To the north, across a narrow bay, the main island extended further to another point. Beyond that was the hazy outline of the shoreline that was Canada. I looked at my cell phone. No bars. I was utterly disconnected.
To be clear, there is not much to "do" on Isle Royale. Hike. Kayak. Swim if you can endure the bracing chill of Lake Superior. That's about it. You go there for the isolation, for a purity of nature that is increasingly rare in the world. You go there to step back in time and hear that silence.
Thousands of years ago, Isle Royale was the domain of Native people. It's unclear whether they inhabited this harsh island full time or whether they came and went by canoe, staying longer only after the brutal winter lifted. There is evidence that they mined copper all over the big island.
Eventually, of course, white men arrived. And, eventually, they took over the island -- in this instance, at least, by treaty rather than violent methods.
Knowing at least a little about the history of a place that you visit can make the experience much more interesting. In the case of Isle Royale, there isn't a lot of historical material readily available. I looked. What I did come across a particularly harrowing tale from the mid 19th century about a man named Charlie Mott and his wife, Angelique.
The couple was hired by a prospective copper miner to go to the island in June 1845. Their employers said they'd be back in three weeks to join them.
Three weeks passed. No ship. Months passed. Still, no ship. The couple began to run out of the little food they had brought with them. Then they lost the canoe in a storm and later their fishing net tore, making it impossible to fish. They were forced to subsist off bark, roots and berries. Even that became scarce as winter set in. Charlie grew weaker, then went out of his head. He started looking at Angelique, she thought, as if he was planning to kill and eat her.
"All night long I watched him and kept my eyes on him, not daring to sleep and expecting him to spring up on me at any moment, but at least I managed to wrest the knife from him and that danger was over," she recounted later.
Charlie regained his senses but soon died. Now Angelique was all alone in her despair and piercing hunger. She said she thought about "(taking) Charlie and making soup of him."
Nearly delirious from hunger, she somehow managed to resist the urge to eat Charlie. When spring came, Angelique was able to hunt rabbits by hand and later catch fish by making a small net from hair yanked from her scalp. She survived. Finally, after she had been stranded almost a year, a boat came and rescued her.
My second day on the island, I hiked west along a trail leading past the inlet that separates the two forks of the island that poke eastward. This trail was less rocky and mostly flat. It ran to the crystal clear water. Once again, the scenery was just stunning. Finally, the trail left away from the water and rose fairly steeply, flattened, then tilted down toward the south shore and finally turned left again back in the direction of Rock Harbor.
A few hikers approached from the direction I was now headed. From a distance, I recognized one of them, hiking alone. It was one of the waitresses from the lodge restaurant, a tall Black woman in her 30s. She smiled when she saw me.
"I was just thinking about you," she said. An interesting comment. I wondered why. She quickly explained. She said she had seen very few Black visitors to Isle Royale -- altogether three -- so she was curious about who I was and what had brought me there. We sat down on two large rocks beside the trail and I told her my story, rolling the tape all the way back to my desire to travel in my new retirement.
Donna (not her real name) was a high school English teacher in a small town in South Carolina. She was taking off the upcoming school year to visit parks around the country. She came from a family of avid park goers. She was starting her sabbatical by working at the lodge restaurant.
"I love being outdoors," she said. "Love being outside. When I need solace or I need to re-charge, it's nature."
She told me she was dismayed that there were so few Black visitors to Isle Royale.
"I'm always intrigued by who accesses these spaces," she said. "I'm hyper aware of it and it's always the lens I'm looking through. I want more people of color, Black people to experience this."
She mused about one day starting a project that would make parks more accessible for Black kids.
I found out later that her perception (and mine) was not inaccurate. Using data compiled by the National Park Service, the conservation group, George Wright Society, had reported in 2018. (http://www.georgewright.org/351scott.pdf):
"Hispanics and Asian Americans each comprised less than 5% of annual visitors to national parks, while less than 2% were African-Americans... Critics within and without NPS recognized that its long-term survival depends on making its parks more welcoming and relevant to constituents and changing population."
The report offered several theories why so few minorities go to national parks, including the park system's legacy of racial discrimination.
In 1922, NPS superintendents stated, "We cannot openly discriminate against (African-Americans), (but) they should be told that the parks have no facilities for taking care of them," according to a Colorado State University study.
Photo credit: National Park Service
The park system officially ended racial segregation in 1950.
Every national park has a story behind its formation. Often, it involves someone who saw it, appreciated it and lobbied for it. In the case of Isle Royale, that someone was a Detroit newspaper reporter named Albert Stolle, Jr..
By the early 20th century, Isle Royale was becoming a popular tourist destination with facilities being built to accommodate them. Commercial loggers were also busy denuding the landscape.
One day, in 1921, Stolle, a conservation reporter for the Detroit News, came to visit the island. He was blown away by its wild beauty and alarmed by the rampant development that he saw as a threat. Stolle resolved to fight to protect Isle Royale and he won. In 1940, the last private land was acquired by the government. and the island and surrounding waters were designated a national park.
There's a plaque on the Stolle trail, the path I hiked my first day on the island, that pays tribute to him. It bears this quotation of his: "Isle Royale is a part of an entirely different world than the one in which we labor daily. It knows nothing and cares less of the triumphs of modern civilization."
On my third and last day on Isle Royale, I boarded a small boat taking a group of visitors to Passage Island where I had seen a lighthouse. Along the way we spotted an eagle's nest from which the tiny head of a baby eagle protruded. Later that afternoon, I caught the seaplane back to Houghton and headed home.