Isle Royale: A U.P. Outdoor Adventure
Sunday’s Detroit Free Press has a great article on Isle Royale, Michigan’s only national park and one of the least-visited parks in the entire system. The Free Press’s travel writer, Ellen Creager, spent a couple of days on this remote island, something that apparently only about 14,000 people do every year. I’m actually a little surprised the number is that high – this place is the definition of remote, reached from this part of the world by ferry from either Copper Harbor or Houghton, a trip that takes somewhere between 3 1/2 and 6 hours. According to the National Park Service, Isle Royale gets fewer visitors every year than Yellowstone National Park gets in just a day, Isle Royale’s backcountry use — hiking, paddling and camping are popular – is the highest of all the national parks.
Around Houghton, attention is also paid to a long-running study of the moose and wolves on Isle Royale, thanks to the involvement of Michigan Tech researchers in the project . The 50-year-old study of how the two species interact is followed locally by students at Houghton Middle School, who can track the animals’ movement on a monitor inside their building (How cool is that?).
Still and all, Isle Royale has a mystique about it even to Copper Country residents. It’s enough of an effort to get there, even without one of the famous storms that rock Lake Superior, that not everyone you meet has been. You’d be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t want to, however. It’s just one more exotic feature of this fascinating area.
For more details on Isle Royale park and how to get there, Wikitravel has a nice entry. For information on the national parks in general, check out the National Park Service’s Web site or the independent National Parks Traveler blog.
