Lake Superior’s Lost Isle

The Voyageur II is an ungainly but sturdy little ship that sails three times a week, from early May until late October, out of Grand Portage Bay to the northern end of Michigan’s Isle Royale—an island in the northwest corner of Lake Superior twenty miles off the Minnesota shore. It overnights there, at Rock Harbor, then sails back the following day, weather permitting. You don’t ride it for cuisine or comfort—bad coffee and candy bars pass for the former, a few rows of wooden benches for the latter—but the thing is beloved, mainly for where it takes you.

I took my first ride in late May of 1997. For some reason, a friend and I hit on the idea of taking five fifteen-year-olds on a hiking trip to the island. Weather for the two-hour crossing was sunny, chilly, and windy. The Voyageur II was on a nausea-inducing roll. Determined to suppress the queasiness by fixing my eyes on the steady horizon, I stepped out on the fantail, where the only other passenger was one of those attractive women of indeterminate age. Fit, clear-eyed, and exuding the relaxed confidence of someone most content outdoors, she could have been forty or seventy.

She wore gloves, a thigh-length oilcloth shelter coat, well-worn and freshly oiled hiking boots, and weather-tested wool slacks. But no hat. Her straight auburn-silver hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She stood, leaning against the starboard rail, arms crossed, eyes open, serenely facing into the wind, the sun, and the misting spray. Absorbing the elements, you might say.

Being fairly insensitive to her reverie, I said something about this being my first trip to the island and asked, was this a typical sea? “I’ve been coming three, sometimes four times a year for fifteen years,” she said, giving me a quick look, noting, I hoped, the fresh oil on my old boots. Clearly, she knew things about where we were going. “There have been times we didn’t go out, because it was blowing too bad. Today is fairly normal.”

“Sixty trips? It’s that good?”

“It is for me,” she said. “For some people, Isle Royale isn’t spectacular enough. It’s not Yosemite. A lot of people who live up here think it’s just more of the same, forest and shore. But the island itself is so quiet and so pristine. Very few people come here, and there are places all over where you feel like you have the world to yourself. Friends brought me over the first time, and the place has had a spell on me ever since. Especially late September. I love September.”

For all I know, she could have been a Kia saleswoman from Bloomington. But she was right. The five days that followed were a revelation. A huge, unspoiled aggregation of maple, birch, and pine forests in equal magnitude. Gaping bays of frigid, impossibly clear and clean water. Distant lighthouses. Northern lights. Giant inland lakes. Moose, fox, wolves, and quiet.

I’ve kept coming back for ten years. I may be highly susceptible to everything that has nothing to do with commuting and an office cubicle, but the spell of Isle Royale enveloped me like smoke from a maple fire. Running forty-five miles northeast to southwest, and nine miles at its widest, the island, with its immediate archipelago of 400 smaller islands, may be, according to one geological factoid I read, a remnant of the world’s largest lava flow, flattened, scoured, and pulverized by a two-mile thick ice sheet 11,000 years ago.

Various Indian tribes hunted and did rudimentary mining on the island before white men arrived more than 150 years ago to do their digging and logging. That all stopped when Isle Royale became a national park in 1940, and today the scars of industry are all but completely indiscernible. A very small commercial fishing industry continues today out of Windigo/Washington Harbor at the south end of the island, where a handful of families with century-old ties to the island still maintain idyllic summer homes. (There’s another group of private cottages at the north end.) Park employees say that more people visit Yellowstone in a day than visit Isle Royale in a year, and sky-high gas prices have cut into private boat traffic, assuring that the number will probably not go up.

I kick myself for not getting the woman on the fantail’s name. I am in her debt. She heightened my senses to Isle Royale’s primal beauty, and she was absolutely right about September. I daydream all year of walking the island and recapturing another early autumn afternoon with sunlight filtering through canopies of fire red maple.
Getting There
Grand Portage Bay is roughly 300 miles, or a five-hour drive, from the Twin Cities. In addition to the Voyaguer II’s thrice-daily trips around the island, the Voyageur’s sister ship, the Wenonah, makes a daily trip from Grand Portage to Windigo Harbor, weather permitting, and has a three-hour layover if you wish to explore the island without staying overnight. Boats also make the trip from Michigan. The biggest, the Ranger III, crosses from Houghton, another, the Isle Royale Queen IV, leaves from Copper Harbor. Round trips cost from $108 to $124.

What to Do
Activities on the island vary depending on location. The northern end of Isle Royale is dramatically different from the south end. Glacial scouring produced dozens of deep, narrow harbors and most of the park’s 400 tiny islands. The abundance of easily accessible coves, bays, and idyllic campsites is one reason kayakers and canoers generally prefer to work the northern tip of the island.

On the rest of the island, most of the landscape is accessible to day-hikers from Rock Harbor. (Grab a quart of water and some sandwiches from the Rock Harbor marina grill, and you’re good to go.) The Rock Harbor area has a number of trails, and most are well-marked, well-traveled, and easily navigable in good walking shoes.

The classic route is the roughly two-mile jaunt northeast to Scoville Point. You can take the Lake Superior side one way and the inner, Tobin Harbor, side the other way and get an excellent feel for the island in a little over two hours, albeit meeting many more fellow hikers than you’d ever encounter during the nearly fifty-mile run from Rock Harbor to Washington Harbor.

The water taxi service at Rock Harbor takes you five miles or so down the harbor to the Rock Harbor lighthouse and adjacent Edisen Fishery, which doubles as an interpretive center. Both are picturesque and well worth the time, although, at $214 round-trip for two, the taxi is a bit pricey. Canoe rental is $34 a day, a kayak is $50, a small motorboat $72. The National Park Service also offers guided boat and hiking tours for a marginal fee.

Where to Stay
Accommodations for noncampers and nonboaters are spartan at the island’s south end, where small screened huts with bare wood floors and a broom are available on a first-come, first-served basis. These little huts are scattered around the island at various designated campsites. Their only appeal to the camping-averse is the sanctuary they offer from insects, sudden rain, and the prospect of sleeping on hard or wet ground. If you are a backpacker though, the little huts exude an odd homey appeal, their walls and ceilings cluttered with the graffiti-verse of previous occupants and their grounds often patrolled by the “camp fox,” remarkably fearless and handsome creatures that will walk up within six feet of you, sniffing for droppings of your chicken-noodle appetizer.

On the north end, Rock Harbor, where the Voyageur II overnights, is Isle Royale’s only fully developed tourist center, with most of the amenities you expect from a national park— including Rock Harbor Lodge, where you can rent a south-facing room on the rocks ten feet above Lake Superior for $239 a night per couple in peak season (July 15–August 15) and $215 off-peak. Although a better option might be one of the twenty cottages back in the woods that comes complete with kitchenette, electric heat, and a private bath. Rates vary based on occupancy: $209 a night for two, $384 a night for up to six. (Additional charges for children under twelve.)

As for food on the island, it is pretty much standard fare, ranging from pizzas and burgers to fresh lake trout dinners in the more formal dining room. If you are expecting high-end eating, you might be disappointed. But most folks returning to the lodge after a day strolling in the woods and contemplating the natural splendors of life on some tranquil, crystal blue cove will be thoroughly satisfied. 

Basic Info Getting to the Island: The ships leave from Grand Portage daily, weather permitting. The boats tend to fill, so make reservations through Isle Royale Transport Line. 715-392-2100 or 888-746-2305 Staying on the Island: For noncampers, there is Rock Harbor Lodge (906-337-4993 in summer, 866-644-2003 in winter). If you plan to camp with a group of seven or more, you must purchase a $25 national park permit. There is a $4 fee for daily use of the park. 906-482-0984, nps.gov/isro