Michigan's Upper Peninsula in the fall

On Thursday, September 27th, we left the campground and drove north. With our trip taking us right through Green Bay, we stopped to see the Packers stadium, Lambeau Field. Since no game was being played in the middle of the day, we had the parking lot almost to ourselves. We walked into the stadium to see about a tour, but apparently the NFL's big ticket reach extends to non-game related events as well. The tickets for a stadium tour were prohibitively expensive, so we opted instead for a free tour of the gift shop.

Ken with a truck full of cheeseheads. Nice.

All things Green Bay Packers related can be found here. No less than thousands of different items were available for sale including t-shirts, cheeseheads, paper towels, golf tees, bobbleheads, wine glasses, and so on, all sporting the requisite green and yellow Green Bay logo. Upstairs in the massive store we saw an antique Chevy truck painted Green Bay green whose truckbed was filled with cheeseheads. How appropriate. (Here's to you, Joel.) We made our way back outside where we strolled across the street hoping to catch sight of some of the Packers practicing. No such luck, but we did see a coach high above the opaque fence blowing his whistle. It was a bit anti-climactic. We noticed another sign indicating that admittance to the practice is through paid entrance, for sure with a cut for the NFL.

Munising Falls

We drove into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan shortly after leaving Green Bay and found an autumn colored section of the country whose little towns hint at a slower pursuit of life. We set up camp near the town of Manistique at Indian Lake Travel Resort campground. Nearing the end of the season, we were lucky the campground would still be open for our two nights of camping, though both the water and the trash service were disconnected while we were there. Nonetheless, Indian Lake provided a convenient location from which to launch our tour of the Upper Peninsula, which we began in earnest on Friday, the 28th.

Miners Castle along
Lake Superior's
Pictured Rocks

On Friday, we headed north to the southern shore of Lake Superior where Munising, Michigan, marked the beginning of our tour of the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. Near Munising, we found one of the over 200 waterfalls dotting the Upper Peninsula. We walked the short path to the Munising Falls where we saw the sun filtering through the trees in the beautiful colors of fall. The falls themselves have carved the little valley of sandstone there over the course of thousands of years despite being a small, delicate fall of water.

Piece of birch bark emptied of its tree
rolling on the beach

We continued along Hwy 58 and soon turned off to see Miners Castle. The 'Castle' is a rock formation on the shore of Lake Superior formed by the constant action of the water against its soft sandstone structure. We walked out to a small overlook before we began a mile long hike to the sandy shore. We made our way through the forest whose pretty fall leaves were backlit by the sun. Continuing on our downward journey, we came across several spots where the calm spring waters had collected into a lazy stream heading for Lake Superior.

Ken looking for fishies swimming upstream

Increasingly, the ground beneath us became sandy until it was purely sand and stretched into dunes before us. We clumsily walked through the soft sand to the beach of the lake and saw thousands of little pebbles gathered along the shoreline, having been smoothed into polished oval stones by the constant rolling of the sea. After strolling on the beach for a few minutes, we watched the exchange between the outflowing water of the stream and the incoming tide of the lake. At the end of a small peninsula of sand, the two waters met and softened the sand beneath our feet. We noticed a few little fishies swimming upstream from the lake, fighting for the chance to get there sooner than their friends, and affectionately remembered the swarms of salmon in Valdez, Alaska doing the same thing.

Our trip back up the path went a bit more slowly than our way down, but we stopped to admire the pretty leaves occasionally and catch our breath. Once back to the car, we continued further east along the shoreline until we came to one of a number of places offering a staple of Michigan's U.P....the pasty. The Bear Trap Inn in remote Van Meer offered one pound pasties and fried Wisconsin cheese curds. How could we possibly pass that up? After indulging in the local delights, we rolled ourselves out of the restaurant. Just outside we saw some folks gathered around the back of truck in which lay a recently shot black bear. Apparently in the U.P. it's legal for some folks to hunt bear, though I understand the meat isn't preferable to many of the others available (like deer, elk or moose). Poor bear.

Log Slide Overlook at Pictured Rocks
National Lakeshore

Back on the road, we continued eastward and soon came to the Log Slide on Grand Sable Dunes. We trekked out to the Log Slide, a path advertised as a 10 second ride down and more than an hour (or an emergency helicopter ride) back to the top. We gingerly walked out to an edge about a third of the way down from the top, hoping we wouldn't inadvertently trigger a sand slide and end up at the bottom (we didn't). The view of the Lake Superior shoreline from this vantage was long and uninterrupted. So beautiful. At the turn of the century this area was logged of its old growth trees. The log slide itself was a wooden chute (long since disintegrated) down which logs were slid to barges on the lake. According to a sign at the site, two men on a barge were accidentally killed when a log came down the chute and then skipped across the water before crushing them on their boat. Quite a grisly image at such a serene place.

Little grasshopper posing
on a post at the park

We walked back to the parking lot and saw some amazing fall colors in the trees around us. Perhaps because it's been several years since we saw them and our memories have faded, but neither of us remembers the fall trees in the last few years being as vibrantly colored as they are in Michigan this year. Wow. As we headed down the road and eastward to Sable Falls, the trees were distractingly pretty, especially against the deep blue sky.

Same little grasshopper posing for pictures

Sable Falls

We found Sable Falls in among the trees down a long staircase where the water rushed past in a hurry to the lake. At the Grand Sable Visitor Center we learned about some of the shipwrecks in Lake Superior. Interestingly, the shipwrecks themselves are part of the Alger Underwater Preserve and protected by federal law, though coordinates are given by the Park Service for divers and historians to access them. We made our way into the tiny town of Grand Marais where Lake Superior lapped at the town's northern edge and crisp white sailboats bobbed in the breeze.

Heading back to the RV after our day of hiking and touring the lakeshore, I promptly fell asleep in the car. Nice. Upon arrival at the coach, though, we both took part in happy hour while watching some old Frasier episodes. What a great day!