Into the Wilderness

Isle Royale

Part 1

          A traveler may dare to enter the wilderness of Isle Royale in the heart of Lake Superior. If he survives his journey—the unforgiving rock, the sudden storms, the warring beasts, and the haunting isolation—he may exit the land and return to his former life. But a piece of him will remain.
          The wilderness cares not. It neither remembers the traveler nor acknowledges him. It bends no knee—not to the herds of foraging moose or to the packs of starving wolves, not to the sudden tree-snapping winds or the thirty-foot ship-crushing waves. The wilderness remains an unshaved chin impervious to razors, a fist of stone jutting 600 feet through the largest freshwater lake on earth.
          There’s a reason Isle Royale (pronounced “ROY-al”) is the least-visited National Park in the country. It can only be reached by sea or by air.
          Four of us, including my elder son, Josiah, drove north through the entire Lower and Upper Peninsulas of Michigan. The quicker route would have been southwest to Chicago, north around the western shore of Lake Michigan, east through Wisconsin, then up to the top of the UP. But we’re all from Michigan, and this was our home state adventure. At the top of The Mitten, we crossed the Mackinaw Bridge, once the largest suspension bridge in the world, still 500 feet high and five miles long. Upon entering the UP, we stopped at Clyde’s Drive-In—where they only take cash—to test their triple-decker hamburgers.  All “trolls” are welcome at Clyde’s—those who dwell “beneath The Bridge.”
          At our seaplane departure site near Houghton, Michigan, the pilot received our forty-five-pound backpacks and loaded them into the twin “floats” beneath his plane. In exchange, we received inflatable life vests and hearing protection. The pilot requested that our heaviest passenger join him up front “to balance the weight.” Feeling reassured by his expert balancing, we strapped ourselves in, and the single propeller roared to life.
          After a lengthy and noisy acceleration across the waves, the floats slowly lifted and finally slipped the bonds of earth. We flew forty-five minutes at relatively low altitude, with the shifting froth of waves ever beneath us. The central island came into view, forty miles long and ten miles wide. Within that island, we observed smaller lakes, some two or three miles in length, and within those lakes, more islands, and within them, more lakes.
          Surrounding Isle Royale, dozens of smaller islands of orange and yellow rock stood like sentinels, feisty battle-hardened soldiers guarding their fearless king, pillars of defiance arrayed in ranks against the rolling waters of Lake Superior. Weedless inlets and bays separated the peripheral islands. Algae coated the stones near their clear blue shores, but for reasons unknown—perhaps the nature of the rock, the coldness of the winters, or the power of the waves—green plants scarcely took hold.
          A forest coat of birch and spruce capped each island. The trees erupted from fractures in the earth and stood like isolated, rigid hairs on a shivering animal.
          We landed so smoothly that we could have slept through it. We ducked as we emerged from the small aircraft, then inhaled strange new scents, different from the Lake Michigan coast. We shouldered our hefty packs and ascended a steep trail, half rock, half root, and devoid of soil.
          At the welcome center, my brother, Chad, rented a motorboat. Due to a severe ankle injury, he couldn’t hike. He hoped to fish, instead. Using his speedy boat, he obtained a shelter for us on Tooker’s Island, a first-come, first-served screened-in roof against the rain.
          My brother-in-law Kyle, Josiah, and I adjusted the straps on our seventy-five-liter hiking packs. We filled our various canteens with clean, tasty water, the last available to us for the next five days. We applied insect and tick repellent, adjusted our walking poles, tightened our hiking shoes, fixed our eyes upward, and headed out.

To be continued . . .

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