The Lake Superior Circle Tour Trip Report

Map of the Lake Superior Circle Tour

Living in Minnesota these past four years, I've heard a lot of people comment that the shores of Lake Superior were some of the prettiest country they'd ever seen, and I'd noticed on maps that they are still heavily wooded. I'd also run part of a role-playing campaign (Rifts, bad system, interesting world) set partly on the eastern side of Lake Superior, although I'd never been in that area before. So when my mom suggested that we take our annual trip there, curiosity alone impelled me to go. A friend of Mom's, Josie Thorpe, wrote to tourism offices in Minnesota and Ontario for information on the North Shore, and they not only sent her plenty of that, but informed her that the large stretches of highway closest to the lake had been designated the "Lake Superior Circle Tour". My car has been running pretty well, and early autumn would be pleasant weather for such a trip.
Before I begin, I should mention that this was my second trip to northern Minnesota (though I went a lot further this time). On the first trip, Mom and I visited the Split Rock Lighthouse, the voyageur camp at Grand Portage, and the really big voyageur camp at Old Fort William in Thunder Bay, Canada. Though I won't describe those in this report, I strongly encourage anyone making this trip to allot an extra day to enjoy these sites.

Wednesday, September 4th, 1996:

We left St. Paul and headed north on I-35. It was, as usual, a fairly dull trip up to Duluth, but as we drove through the northern suburbs, we noticed a lovely fenced estate. As we passed it, we saw a big parking lot and a historic-site marker. Since we were in sight-seeing mode, we turned around and drove back to it. It turned out to be Glensheen, an old mansion that had been built at the turn of the 20th century. The Congdon family had donated it to the University, and tours were being run in order to finance its renovation and maintenance. Duluth has got to be the last place I would expect the very wealthy to have lived, so we definitely had to have a look. The building we saw from the parking lot was only the carriage house, and it was impressive enough itself. Glensheen also has beautiful formal gardens, amid lots of gorgeous natural scenery, including an excellent view of Lake Superior.

Glensheen was really interesting as a house built around 19th century ideals and 20th century technology. Showers were only in the men's bathrooms, as they were not considered proper for women, and the electric wires were run parallel to natural gas lines, just in case electricity proved to be a passing fad. The hallways are ornate with hand-carved woodwork, stained glass (actually art-glass, it's different), and heavy draperies. The rooms are wall-papered with tapestry and have tiled fire- places and tailor-made furniture, with each room or hall having a theme (i.e. pineapples in the guest-rooms and lions in the front hall).

The value of some of the Congdon's possessions was a little macabre. Two rooms are decorated with hyper-rare Circasian walnut. There is so little growing today that if it were all to be harvested, one would still not get as much lumber as adorned those rooms. Another example is a silk embroidery from Japan, an art form now banned because one or two such works render the artist who created them blind.

From there, we headed northeast on Minnesota-61 and through the pretty tourist town of Two Harbors. We had entered boreal forest: spruce, pine, birch, and aspen, so it was really nice just driving along. We stopped in Grand Marais, a really nice town where we'd stayed on our last trip north, to grab relevant pamphlets from the visitor center and to get a drink. We were sent to Leng's Bar and Grill, where they would make sodas to order. I tried their cherry-chocolate soda, wonderfully weird stuff that no- one would touch unless they were on vacation.

We decided to stay the night at the casino in Grand Portage, an Indian reservation of the Anashinabe (a.k.a. Ojibwe, Chippewa, First Nation, etc.). We had no interest in gambling, but it's a nice hotel, affordable, and at a convenient place for our trip. Grand Portage is, like most Minnesota casinoes, considerably more restrained than the usual Vegas variety, so the associated hotel and restaurant aren't afflicted with neon, slot machines, signs warning against bringing kids on the premises, etc. The casino/hotel complex in Grand Portage is right on the water. Unfortunately, a thick fog had descended on the lake, so we couldn't really enjoy the view.

Thursday, September 5th:

Our plan was to start off with a short hike to see the "Witch Tree", a normal-sized tree growing out of bare rock, hanging over Lake Superior. I had some ideas about how it was able to get by without the benefit of soil nutrients. But we were told that the tree had been vandalized, so the reservation leaders had decided to close off the trail leading to it and to keep tourists away.

So we drove off to Canada, and Minnesota-61 became Ontario- 11/17. The terrain became mountainous, and the road frequently passed by exposed beds of dark red rock, full of the iron-rich minerals that are mined all around Lake Superior. As if to inform us that we were officially in Canada, a black bear galloped across the road just in front of us. A few miles later, a huge red fox sauntered across the road, confident that we would brake for it. We drove through the city of Thunder Bay, but could not even see it from the expressway (but we knew it was there because there were traffic lights). We stopped at the Terry Fox Memorial Lookout, from which we could actually see Thunder Bay (which looked like a city, ho hum), but not the Sleeping Giant, a mountain to the south, because of the fog. Terry Fox was an athlete who lost a leg to cancer, had it replaced with a prosthetic, and decided to run from Montreal to Thunder Bay to raise money for cancer research before the disease finally killed him.

There were lots of amethyst mines between Thunder Bay and Nipigon that were offering tours, so we drove 5 miles down a red dirt road up, down, and around various ancient little mountains to the largest one: the Panorama Amethyst Mine. The tour guide was one of the three miners, essentially taking a break. He explained that the amethyst formed when an earthquake faulted the local granite, and silicon dioxide (quartz) was deposited in the resulting cracks and gaps. The iron impurities in the quartz turned purple over time, and the resulting crystals are amethysts. Unlike Brazilian amethysts, which are contained in geodes, the Canadian crystals are exposed, so they will be destroyed if they are mined with any equipment heavier than a high-power hose. However, the vein these Canadians are working is so rich, they're treating all the non-gem quality amethyst as gravel material, and they told us that we could help ourselves to the tailings for $1 Canadian/lb (negotiable if you offer to take a lot of rock off their hands).

We made another stop at the Ouimet Canyon. It's a short walk along a gravelled path through one of the provincial parks. It's boreal forest: spruce, fir, aspen, birch and jack pine. On the way is a bridge over a lovely river canyon, thick with trees. The canyon itself is very impressive, with mostly bare, striated rock walls and a lake at one end. There's sub- arctic tundra growing at the bottom, because the steep sides let very little light in all year. The exact origin of Ouimet Canyon is unknown, but it was not cut by a river.

We headed east again and decided to check out Red Rock, as we could no longer see Lake Superior. Red Rock turned out to be well out of our way and an ugly little industrial town to boot, reeking because of the local pulp mill. But it was on Lake Superior, so we were reassured that it hadn't gone anywhere. So we returned to the highway and went west again, stopping in Nipigon for banking and lunch. We went straight to Marathon, although someone later told us that we should have visited Rossport and Terrace Bay, which are nice old towns. On Ontario-17 east of Nipigon, there were the rocks were no longer entirely red, as some outcrops were older than others (the red beds of North America were all deposited about the same time, when Earth's atmosphere became enriched in free oxygen, which made all the iron salts in the oceans precipitate at once). The scenery was really impressive and we had frequent glimpses of Lake Superior. Marathon itself is an ugly boomtown, complete with pulp mill and expanding because of a recently-discovered gold mill, and none of the local hotels have a view of the lake. Such is life.

Friday, September 6th:

We didn't realize the true lameness of Marathon as a tourist town when we tried to leave and found that none of the Esso gas stations on that stretch of highway were open as of 10 AM. Our first stop of the morning was Pukaskwa National Park, and there was an Anashinabe reservation on the way where they were happy to sell us gas and to tell us to ignore rumors of a local voyageur monument; even the plaque had been removed.

I had to see Pukaskwa because I had set several role-playing adventures there. The scary thing is that it is very much as I envisioned it, utterly isolated and eerie, definitely the kind of place where the Queen of Air and Darkness and her Unseelie Court of Faerie would feel right at home.

Pukaskwa National Park has been designated a wilderness area, with no real roads through it (chosen because it's full of streams and wetlands that would have to be bridged). We made it to the visitors' center, where somewhat disoriented wardens sold us permits and gave us maps. About half of them seemed to be Anashinabe, perhaps locals.

According to the maps, there was a short trail near the parking lot at the Hattie Cove Campground, so we headed for it. The Upper Headland Trail was very easy hiking and went through a succession of gorgeous environments, many of them along Lake Superior: rocky shores, sandy beaches, leatherleaf growth on a rockface, and lots of dark spruce forest. Of the whole trip, I'd have to say that the nicest scenery was at that park.

As we continued eastwards, we passed through the pretentious non-entity that is White River, and stopped for tourist information and lunch (at Wally's) in Wawa. They've got a huge statue of a goose looming over the highway for some reason. We got film and Smarties at the honest-to-God general store and went across the highway to look at the Scenic High Falls on the Magpie River. They were scenic alright, 75' high and not a straight drop, but rather a complex of waterfalls tumpling down a jagged rock face.

We drove like maniacs to Sault Ste. Marie to get there in time for the 6 PM boat tour of the locks. The town's name means "The Rapids of Saint Mary", and it's on the shores (both American and Canadian) of the Saint Mary's River, which connects Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Nowadays, it's a highway nexus and the rapids have been removed and replaced with huge locks (the Canadian ones have been out of operation for years, but everyone can use the four American locks for free). We made the boat, the Chief Shingwauk, with 15 minutes to spare. The boat went through the biggest lock, 1000' long (imposing a maximum size of about 800' feet on the Great Lakes Ships), along with a big freighter, the American tour boat, and a flock of geese, and wandered up to the big Canadian steel refinery, surrounded by mountains of taconite (iron ore), limestone, and sulferous coal.

By the time we were done, we were starved and exhausted. We couldn't get a room at the Holiday Inn next to the dock, so we went to the Quality Inn. Unfortunately, there was a thin door between our room and one occupied by a couple of families which had come for a hockey tournament. The husbands stayed up late and got up early to argue with each other and to berate the women and children. We ate dinner at the Busy Bee (open 24 hours). The waitress said, ominously, of the spaghetti: "It's better than it used to be," but I tried it and it was harmless.

Saturday, September 7th:

After breakfast, we went to look at Queen Street, the historic district of Canadian Sault Ste. Marie, and realized that this industrial city had unwisely torn down almost all of its old buildings and was trying to make do with memorial plaques. One of the few remaining historic buildings (marked incorrectly on their map) is the Ermatinger house, built by a fur trader and his Anashinabe wife. We would have to wait an hour for it to open for tours, so we gave up on it. We stopped at the duty-free shop on the way to the bridge to Michigan's upper peninsula, so Mom could find souvenirs to bring my dad and my brother.

We got information and gas in Michigan, neglecting to look around American Sault Ste. Marie (which had no refinery, and consequently had left some historic buildings standing). We headed westwards on Michigan- 28, through more boreal forest, now seasoned with sugar maple and other temperate hardwoods, which were thinking about having their leaves change color, but hadn't gotten around to really starting.

We got bored of the highway, and I wanted to get a look at the shore, because there were outcrops of "pictured rocks" in that area, with colored patterns from layers of ores. So we went north on Michigan-77 to Grand Marais, MI, a nice little town, to the visitors' center for the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The ranger explained that there was a scenic road that didn't actually follow the shore (because that part of the southern shore is eroding away) and gave us directions to a lookout that would let us see one of the rock formations. So we took the scenic road, H58 -Alger County, 33 miles of not-terribly-safe-but-pretty dirt road, through various kinds of forest: aspen, sugar maple, white pine and others. We gave a deer a good scare and finally got to an overlook near Munising where we could see Miner's Castle, a weird eroded shape sticking out of Lake Superior, and Painted Cliff, with bizzarre stripes and whorls of color. What we should have done, apparently, was take the highway to Munising, then take another boat cruise along the coast, which would have shown us all the formations (although it would not have left until 2 PM, and we would have been in town by noon; we just couldn't time anything right that day).

We ate lunch at the Munising A&W (they gave us whole mugs of root beer!) and I went to the nearby visitors' center to ask about the possibility of finding agates on beaches in the area. The red-and-white- banded Lake Superior agates are supposedly pretty common on the Upper Peninsula. The forester on duty said that there were public beaches in several of the National Forests. So Mom and I stopped off at Hiawatha National Forest, which did indeed have a beach, and a ruined foundry. This foundry had set the town of Furnace Bay aflame in 1877, and ironically, was the only building to survive (being mostly stone). We couldn't find any agates, but we did bring back huge chunks of purple crystal and bright green stone. These turned out to be glass, the slag of the foundry. The molten quartz had been separated from the iron in the ore, and thrown into the lake , where it hardened and broke. My theory is that pure iron ore generated the amethyst-like glass (and it is industrial amethyst), whereas copper ore would have produced the green glass. There was so much iron oxide dissolved in that bay of Lake Superior that there was rust on our hands when we pulled them out of the water.

The visitors' center in Marquette told us to ignore rumors of a voyageur site in L'Anse. Between L'Anse and Baraga on Michigan-41 is Bishop Baraga's shrine, on the Anashinabe reservation there: a huge bronze statue of the missionary to the Anashinabe who wrote a dictionary and a grammar of their language (which is still standard), and would travel 700 miles or more on snowshoes to visit the congregations he had founded.

We had planned to stay in Octonogon, which was a relatively big but apparently empty town, so we continued on to Silver City. The Best Western was right on the water and had its own beach, so we had another look for agates, without success. But, I had noticed an agate beach marked just to the west on the map and planned to check it in the morning. It was too cloudy to view the sunset, so we went to have a large dinner in the hotel restaurant. We found a schedule for the boat tour Mom had heard about in Washington of the Apostle Islands in Wisconsin. We had planned to proceed to the dock in Bayfield and arrive in time for the afternoon cruise, but only 10 AM cruises were available in September. So, no agate beach for me. We set a wake-up call for 6:30 AM and went to bed early.

Sunday, September 8th:

We zipped off to Bayfield, Wisconsin early the next morning, following our new tradition of driving like maniacs to catch boats. I grabbed some free hotel muffins for us on the way out, but they turned out to be maraschino-cherry-flavored (what were those people thinking of ?). I noticed that my watch said that it was just after 6 AM, so we had actually gotten the wake-up call at 5:30. I hadn't realized that western Michigan isn't on Central Time; the international time line is diagonal at that point on the map, almost horizontal. We got to Bayfield and found the city dock exactly one hour before the Island Princess was about to start boarding. So we had a real breakfast. This was the only day on our trip when the weather was less than beautiful; it was grey and cold.

We ended up with seats downstairs on the boat, which was fine with us because we knew it was drizzly and cold up above. We bought popcorn from the crew and heard the histories of the islands and of their names. There are 22 Apostle Islands, of which only one is now inhabited. The rest were bought up by the Park Service as a National Lakeshore, and we got to see about half of them. There are six lighthouses and radio beacons on various islands, all automated. The water between the islands and the mainland is a great deal less choppy than that of most of Lake Superior, so ships often take shelter behind the islands during storms. We got a good look at the lighthouses on Devil's Island and Raspberry Island and at the caves of Devil's Island. The captain, whose name was never given, had served on the Edmund Fitzgerald from 1971 to 1973 and knew 13 of the 29 crew who died when she was shipwrecked in November, 1975, and one of the crew, Bob Buffalo, was a part-time judge and the great-grandson of the chief who had negotiated a pretty decent reservation treaty on behalf of the local Anashinabe.

After the cruise, we looked at some of the shops and Mom got some souvenir t-shirts on sale for Dad, my brother, Joe, and me. We checked into the Bayfield Inn, got a huge room on the lower level with a view of the lake, and took what was supposed to be a short nap. By the time we woke up, the weather had cleared up. Mom needed to visit a money machine, and the nearest one was at the casino at the Red Cliff reservation. The casino looked pretty shabby compared to its Minnesota cousins. On the cruise, we'd heard that the Anashinabe had been unlucky lately; sea lampreys had destroyed the trout fishing, and the local sawmill had gone out of business. But Bayfield is a big-money tourist town, so the casino and the reservation's new marina may allow them to recoup a lot of their losses.

We had to drive like maniacs to get back to Bayfield to catch the ferry to Madeleine Island. It had been left out of the National Lakeshore park because it holds the town of La Pointe. The Apostle Islands Historical Museum was closed by the time we got there, and the Anashinabe burial grounds and monument (this was where they lived and defended themselves from their many enemies before they moved to the mainland reservations) were a bit far to walk to. We passed a shop where bizarre lawn ornaments were being sculpted, and the proprieter invited us to the porch for a drink, but we decided to move on. There were a lot of nice houses there, and a town park and a state park of the same size. We stopped for a beer at the Thirsty Sturgeon, a quiet and friendly neighborhood bar. La Pointe is definitely not a tourist area; the people who have summer homes there seem to prefer it not to be.

We didn't have a car to catch the ferry back, but we still had to run for it. We ate dinner back in Bayfield, at Gruenke's Inn. The service and decor were great, but the pizza was disappointing. Afterwards, we drove around Bayfield (I had parked at the dock; we were that close to missing the ferry) and looked at the lovely Victorian houses before heading back to the hotel.

Monday, September 9th:

We got free muffins and coffee and drove back towards Duluth. We passed Fairlawn Mansion in Superior, but were too toured-out to turn around and visit it. We ate lunch at the Anashinabe casino in Hinckley, Minnesota. Our last stop was a factory-outlet shopping center just north of the Cities on I-35 that Mom had noticed on our way up. We stopped and had a look, but I couldn't find anything I wanted at their bookstore, and Mom couldn't find anything anywhere else. One shop did have tumpled agates for sale, but they were yellowish-brown Brazilian ones. We decided to just head home at that point.

Overall, it was one of the best trips I've ever taken, even compared to Interrail expeditions in Europe. We saw more in the way of natural scenery than of historical and cultural, but that was partly because of bad luck and the fact that we had already seen some of the historical sites. Having two people to do the driving is essential. Travellers who need to cut costs can save money by camping (the parks along the way are beautiful) and eating cheaply. The boat tours, however, are worth spending money on, as Lake Superior is the central attraction of the trip.

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