Isle Royale is one of the most isolated and least visited of our nation’s National Parks, receiving fewer visitors in a full year than the popular Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming gets in just one day.
You can reach this gem of a park in the farthest reaches of Michigan Upper Peninsula and Lake Superior via a ferry ride of at least several hours from Michigan or Minnesota or by seaplane, but enjoying the solitude and wild beauty of the island is well worth the effort.
We booked passage to the island on the 100-passenger ferry, the Isle Royale Queen IV, which departs from Copper Harbor at the very tip of Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula and takes several hours to reach Isle Royale.
We began our adventure at the boat dock in Copper Harbor early one morning, watching as campers, kayakers, and other Isle Royale-bound visitors loaded up their gear for the ferry trip. The Isle Royal Queen IV offers passage for most non-motorized boats to the island and allows 70 pounds of gear for each passenger. You can also book passage out on the larger Ranger III ferry that departs from Houghton, Michigan, the Voyageur II and Wenonah ferries that depart from Grand Portage, Minnesota, or book a seaplane trip from Michigan's Houghton County airport over to Isle Royale.
The trip does require some planning and advance reservations as visiting season on the island only lasts from May until early September, and overnight accommodations are limited to a lodge and 36 wilderness camping areas spread over the island.
The park covers 850 square miles, with more than three quarters of it underwater. Isle Royale is itself is 45 miles long and 9 miles wide with an area just over 206 square miles, and the park includes about 400 smaller islands surrounding Isle Royale.
The area was a popular hunting ground for Native Americans from what are now the states of Michigan and Minnesota, and there is some evidence of prehistoric copper mining on Isle Royale. Isle Royale drew latter-day copper miners seeking their fortune during the Upper Peninsula's copper boom in the 1840s, but the island's remoteness and relatively small veins of difficult-to-mine copper remaining on the island meant miners quickly abandoned the area.
Loggers also worked the island during the 1800s, which left Isle Royale largely deforested by the end of that century.
The land reverted pretty much to a sparsely populated wilderness, with only a few residents remaining on Isle Royale when Congress authorized is as a park in 1931, and established Isle Royale National Park in 1940.
Today, the park is nearly entirely wilderness and has no permanent population, but the isolation from hectic, modern-day life is the primary charm for park visitors.
Isle Royale visitors enjoy hiking, paddling canoes or kayaks around inland waters, scuba diving to explore shipwrecks, interpretive lectures and boat rides, fishing, sailing, photography, and simply enjoying nature.
Park officials remind visitors that the national park is largely a true wilderness and ask that they familiarize themselves with ways to minimize their impact on the island. Zebra mussels became a special concern with the recent discovery of small groups of the invasive species in the park.
In general, they ask that visitors "take nothing but pictures and leave nothing but footprints" as they enjoy the island. Transportation around the island involves hiking, boating, or maybe a float plane trip as visitors may not bring wheeled vehicles beyond non-motorized wheelchairs to the island.
These instructions suited us as our major reasons for visiting the island were to take photographs and do a little day-hiking.
We particularly enjoyed the fact that the climate usually remains cool throughout the summer, with temperatures rarely rising above 80 degrees Fahrenheit and the cold Lake Superior waters usually no higher than 52 degrees Fahrenheit.
Black flies and mosquitoes, gnats, and black flies are more prevalent in June or July, but we hardly noticed any bothersome insects when we visited Isle Royale during early September.
Be sure to check back later this month for more stories and photos from our time on the island.
Check out Isle Royale: Images of America by Jessica Poirier and Richard E. Taylor to learn more about Isle Royale and its early history.
© Dominique King 2010 All rights reserved
I'd never heard of this park, but it looks beautiful. I want to be sitting on that dock right now.
Posted by: Carolina | July 08, 2010 at 08:08 PM
Carolina-The remoteness of the park probably is why it isn't on a lot of folks' radar. You really do have to plan a trip there because just getting to the island is a project. Still, we'd always wanted to visit here, and we're glad we were able to plan a trip over :)
Posted by: Dominique King | July 09, 2010 at 02:35 PM