Memories of Grand Island, 1999

 Memories of Grand Island, 1999

Patti and I paddled miles of the shining waters of Lake Superior off Munising, Michigan in our two-person kayak to Grand Island. We were equipped for a week of camping on the Island.

Along the way, we beached our boat and took a cooling “natural shower” in a waterfall that poured off an Island cliff to the water below.

We rounded what is known as “The Thumb” of the Island, and discovered a beautiful, secluded beach that circled the shore of Trout Bay. There we camped.

From our camp, on succeeding days, we hiked the Island, and were able to procure bicycles from the ranger to transport us over rough roads to the distant north end of the Island and the lighthouse there.

We learned later that we had shared the Island with a bear who broke into one of the very few cabins on the Island down the way from our camp, and raided the refrigerator. We were careful to hang our food in air-tight bags in a tree out of reach of bears. 

One night it rained, but we stayed dry in our little tent. In the morning, we went on a hike on the forest path. There Patti pranked me by using her hiking pole to shake the wet branches of a tree over my head. I christened her with a Native American-sounding name, “Makes Trees Weep.”

On this trip my name became “Tombolo Tom,” named for the “tombolo,” or sand bridge, created by wave action piling-up sand between the large island and another smaller one known as “The Thumb.”

We read the gravestones of a couple that settled on the Island in the 1800’s. This was the only evidence of white settlement on the Island where Native Americans had done so for centuries. Well-to-do men tried to make the Island a game preserve by importing deer, but, in the winter when the channel to the mainland iced over, the deer all left.

When not hiking or biking, we put up our little sail on the kayak and cruised the waters of Trout Bay. We discovered a small sea cave in the 100 foot cliffs at the north end of the Bay. and paddled through it.

After we returned to the mainland, we took a tour of shipwrecks on a glass-bottom boat in the channel between the Island and the mainland. There were quite a number on this rocky coast.

 Grand Island is a National Recreation Area adjacent to the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. At the ranger station, their joke was, if you are from Wisconsin, you are from the “banana belt,” which apparently is everything south of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

We learned that, even though the UP is really a peninsula of Wisconsin, it was awarded to Michigan when Michigan Territory became a state. As the somewhat humorous story goes, an error in interpreting a land survey back then created a relatively narrow strip of land between the southern tip of Lake Michigan and Toledo, Ohio. The “ownership” of this, the Toledo Strip was heatedly debated between the Michigan Territory and Ohio. Finally the hotheaded, 19-year-old governor of Michigan Territory sent militia to the strip to claim it. Ohio responded by sending their own militia. Not a shot was fired in the “Toledo War of 1835”, however, because both militias got lost in the swamps, and couldn’t find each other. The issue was officially resolved when Michigan became a state, and, as a compromise, the Toledo Strip became part of Ohio, and the much larger Upper Peninsula - with all its mineral and lumber resources - went to Michigan.

The Island is Grand in many ways, particularly in our memories - Patti’s and mine. This year, 2023, we visited the area again with Patti’s sister Donna and her husband Steve, the fellow I visited Nepal with last year. Stay tuned for a depiction of our trip to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.