I smiled and agreed, because they were right and because, yes, we’d definitely been here before. It was fun to see their “first-time high”—the immediate breath-taken-away magic of the old-growth cedars and hemlocks—a necessary gateway. We all need that initial spark to fall in love with a place.

But as I watched them walk toward their car, I thought about the “Twelfth Time” philosophy. The first visit is for the postcard view; the twelfth visit is when the land begins to speak back in multilayered conversation.

To truly see a place, you have to move past the “view.” You have to stop treating the landscape like a postcard and start reading it like a manuscript. This is what I call Landscape Literacy: the ability to see the layers of time, law, and ecology that you don’t seen if you just look at a regular, two-dimensional map.

To practice Landscape Literacy, I’ve developed a Deep Map Methodology for the Lake Superior region. Here’s how you can read the six layers of this method at Frog Bay, a short drive north of Bayfield, Wisconsin in the Red Cliff Reservation.

A short note on accessiblity & facilities

There are no accessible trails at Frog Bay. Visitors can chose to take the Ravine Trail (start by crossing the foot bridge) and doing a loop of approximatley 1.5 miles by connecting to the Beach Trail.

Alternately, you can start on a two-track and head directly toward the beach. If you stay on the two-track, you’ll reach the beach in under half a mile. You’ll also have the option to take a single track trail that splits to the right and heads through a cedar grove, before bringing you to a different section of the beach (and the opportunity to connect to the Ravine Trail).

You can view a map here.

There are minimal facilities at Frog Bay. The parking lot is gravel and there is an outhouse. Be respectful and pack out any garbage from your visit.

Layer 1: The Ravines of the Rift (Geology)

The story of Frog Bay doesn’t start with a trail map; it starts 1.1 billion years ago with a scar.

Deep under your boots is a remnant of the Midcontinent Rift, a moment in Deep Time (over a billion years ago) when the continent tried to tear itself apart, spewing massive layers of lava to the surface. Eventually, the split failed, but the sheer weight of that cooling lava caused the earth’s crust to sag, creating a vast, bowl-shaped basin. Across hundreds of millions of years, that basin filled with sediment that hardened into the sandstone which is the foundation for the shore we see today.

But the geology here isn’t just about the ‘failed split’; it’s about how the earth breathes. The Bayfield Peninsula is defined by its ravines—deep, dramatic drainage lines scultped by more recent geological events.

Most of these ravines are carved into a 50- to 100-foot-thick ‘mantle’ of glacial till and lake-bed clays. The till was deposited and carved in the last Ice Age (over 11,000 years ago). Because these layers are soft and highly erodible, water can slice through them quickly, creating the steep, V-shaped walls that characterize our coastal plain.

The geology also affects how the earth breathes. Those deep, cool cuts in the clay act as lungs for the landscape, trapping pockets of air that are consistently cooler than the surrounding woods. These micro-climates are what protects the ecological diversity at the heart of this forest.

Layer 2: The Boreal Outlier (Ecology)

Frog Bay is a mesic forest (moderate, well-balanced supply of soil moisture) with a mixture of hardwood and conifer species, including oak, maple, and hemlock. Because of that cool air and the proximity to the Big Lake, Frog Bay also has pockets of forest with stronger boreal elements than you’ll find in the surrounding region, including species like spruce and birch.

One of the foundational species of this forest is the Giizhik—Northern White Cedars. They rise along the side of the trail, like old guardians of the land. The roots of cedar and other trees wrap around the soil and stones under the surface, like a web, helping to hold the earth together and prevent erosion.

When you look closer, you’ll see the “nurse logs.” These are fallen ancestors that have become mossy cradles for new growth. In ecology, death isn’t an end; it’s a regeneration. This cyclical nature is the pulse of the forest, but it’s also a mirror for human history. These trees are living archives; they have witnessed every legal and social shift this shoreline has endured. They are the living connection between generations and our present moment.

Layer 3: Indigenous Peoples and Sovereignty

This is the layer that explores who has accessed this land, who has claimed ownership of this land, and who has stewarded this land.

Anishinaabe people have lived along these shores for millennia.

Then, with the Treaty of 1842 (also known as the Copper Treaty), the Anishinaabe ceded the territory to the United States but reserved their usufructuary rights to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory. They were protecting a relationship with the landscape that a legal deed could never fully capture.

The Treaty of La Pointe in 1854 added a new, more localized layer. While this treaty established reservations, it was also an assertion of presence. Chief Bizhikii (Buffalo) and his community were determined to remain specifically on the Bayfield Peninsula. While communites in places like Odanah grews as state and local officials drove Anishinaabe people onto reservations in the decades following the treaty, Bizhikii fought for the right to stay here, on this specific ground. Before the treaty was signed, he famously traveled to Washington D.C. to ensure his people would not be removed from the shores they had stewarded for generations.

However, the 1854 treaty also introduced a legal mechanism that would fracture the map: Allotment. By carving tribal land into individual, “owned” fee simple parcels, the government created a path for land to slip away. Over decades, through complex and often predatory real estate maneuvers, these allotments were transferred into the hands of settlers. This is how the “Deep Map” became a checkerboard of private “No Trespassing” signs, and how this specific stretch of shoreline became a private estate for nearly a century.

The story didn’t end in privatization, though. When the last private landowner passed away, they left the land to a local conservancy. Recognizing the deeper history of the soil, the conservancy worked with the Red Cliff Anishinaabe Nation to repatriate the land.

This wasn’t just a land transfer; it was a strengthening of sovereignty. The creation of Frog Bay Tribal National Park—the first of its kind in the country—restored the Human Layer of the map to its rightful stewards. When you look at the boundary of the park today, you aren't just looking at a property line; you're looking at a hard-won victory against a century of legal erasure—a physical map finally realigned with its true story.

Layer 4: Extraction

This is where the ‘Deep Map’ reveals a stark contrast. When you stand on the protected, un-cut shore of Frog Bay and look out toward the Apostle Islands, you are looking across a blue highway at two entirely different ecological and industrial histories.

In contrast to Frog Bay, the islands bear many scars of 19th-century extraction. Most of the islands were heavily logged during the Cutover Era that followed land cession treaties. They were also mined for their Brownstone, which is the same red sandstone that built the iconic “Brownstones” of Chicago and New York.

Federal officials were reluctant to make this heavily scarred landscape a national park in the early twentieth century. However, by 1970, the industry had subsided, opinions changed, and the Apostle Islands were transformed once again—this time from a site of extraction to a National Lakeshore managed by the National Parks Service. This move strengthened the growing tourist sector in the region. Since the late nineteenth century, wealthy residents of the southern Midwest headed north in the summer to experience the cool Lake Superior air and beauty of the landscape (Nebraska Row in the Town of La Pointe on Madeline Island was established at this time).

The creation of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore also undermined Anishinaabe sovereignty. In 1986, an act of Congress included part of Long Island in the National Lakeshore. In the mid-1970s, sand connected the island to Chequamegon Point. The eastern border of the park’s lands on Long Island abuts the Bad River Nation (whose reservation extends east of Ashland and encompasses Chequamegon Point).

Bad River Band of Lake Superior Chippewa claims ownership of Long Island, and trace their claims back to the Treaty of La Pointe in 1854, which established the Bad River Reservation boundaries as extending along the lakeshore and across Chequamegon Point. You can read more about this dispute on the Cheqauemgon History blog, which is a fantastic source for the history of our region. This is also an example of the complicated history of public lands in North America, and how their creation is often fundamentally tied to the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands.

Layer 5: Maritime History

When you look out at the islands, the lighthouses on Raspberry or Michigan Island are hidden by the horizon from this beach. However, even though you can’t see them, their presence defines this water. They are the invisible anchors of a maritime highway. During the Cutover and Brownstone Era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was an industrial highway weaving between the islands. The lighthouse was a witness to the transition from Indigenous trade routes to the industrial shipping that fueled the growth of the Midwest.

It is a profound contrast: today, you might see signs of recreational motorboats or sailboats, or even boat tours. But this was once a crowded, soot-stained industrial highway. Knowing those lights are out there, even when they are invisible, reminds us that the stillness of this beach is a relatively new chapter in a long, loud history of extraction and rescue.

When you visit today, take a moment and close your eyes. Use all your senses. What do you hear? What do you smell? What do you taste? What do you feel? Then open your eyes and take in the present.

Now, close your eyes again and visualize a different historical era. Think about your senses again. Would you hear the rhythmic thud of a steamship engine, or the snapping canvas of a schooner like the Lucerne struggling against a November gale before wrecking off the ice-coated shores of Long Island? Would you smell the sharp scent of fresh-cut pine or heavy coal smoke? How does the “taste” of the air change when it’s filtered through a modern forest versus a soot-stained industrial harbor?

Now, push back even further. Think about what this shoreline felt like in the year 1600—an era of seasonal rounds, deep Anishinaabe diplomacy, and a forest that had never heard the ring of a crosscut saw.

What do your insights tell you about the history? How will your insights inform your actions when you leave this place?

Layer 6: The Act of Walking (Stewardship)

Stewardship isn’t just a feeling we have while looking at a sunset; it’s an informed responsibility to the layers of the landscape. When you stand on that beach now, you aren’t just looking at the water. You are standing on land that was retained by Chief Bizhikii for his people, fractured by allotment, and finally brought home.

Knowing this history changes how you walk the trail. It turns a “hike” into a conversation with layers of history. But for this conversation to mean something, it must move from your head to your feet. Stewardship means that once you see the layers of a place, you can no longer ignore them. It informs your actions long after you leave the trail—shaping how you advocate for the shoreline, the forest, and the stories revealed by the ‘Deep Map’ rather than just consuming a view and moving on.

This is the transformation that happens when you engage with the Deep Map Methodology: you stop being a guest of the landscape and start building an actual relationship with it—one that extends far beyond the drive home.

Seeking the Deep Map

History is complex. Navigating that complexity and reading the landscape is what it means to be an intentional and sustainable explorer. It’s not about finding a “hidden gem” for an Instagram photo; it’s about engaging with the “Deep Map.”

That’s why I use the methodology I demonstrated in this post to look at the northern Great Lakes through six interconnected layers:

1. The Architecture of the Land (Geology)

2. The Deep Green (Forest Ecology & Natural History)

3. Sovereign Stories (Indigenous Peoples, Nations, and Stewardship)

4. The Industries of Extraction (Logging & Mining)

5. Maritime History (Shipping, Shipwrecks & The Network of Rescue)

6. From Spectator to Steward (Memory, Lived Experience, & Action)

Keep an eye on your inbox next week, because I’ve mapped out a brand-new, free 3-Day Bayfield Itinerary designed to introduce you to the landscape through this lens.

Have you visited Frog Bay Tribal National Park? Which layer(s) stood out most to you? Comment below and share!

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P.S. I love helping explorers plan meaningful trips in the northern Great Lakes. If you’re looking for tips on how to engage with the “Deep Map” on your next adventure, I offer a limited number of 1-hour strategy sessions each month. If you’re interested, send me a message!

You’ve seen them: maps with iconic sites in the completely wrong places.

I’m sure you’ve also seen fake viral photos, whether it is the “sinkhole” photos that claim massive whirlpools are opening up near Thunder Bay or fake and blatantly wrong photos of fake sandstone arches in the Apostle Islands or waterfalls in Wisconsin that look nothing like the real thing.

Even the National Weather Service fell victim to a bot-hallucination in 2025, releasing a map that included town names like “Orangeotilld” and “Whata Bod.” It would be laughable if it weren’t so wasteful. It’s digital noise that clutters our understanding of the places we love.

And it’s even worse when we go searching for actual content. Whether you’re looking for a summer expedition itinerary or weekend inspiration, there is a sinking feeling when you realize the article was written by a bot—or by someone who has never actually felt the spray of the Big Lake.

The issues here go deeper than annoyance. AI-generated content is damaging for three major reasons:

1. Historical Erasure

When stories are simplified for “clicks,” we lose the nuance of the “Deep Map.” We lose the stories of labor history, the complexities of the fur trade, and the millennia of stewardship by the Anishinaabe and other Indigenous peoples. Instead, we get “surface stories” recirculating again and again the same facts about a shipwreck or famous white male politician while ignoring the thousands of years of human life that came before.

2. Physical Impact on the Landscape

AI loves a “soft life.” It generates images of Lake Superior that look like a turquoise Mediterranean postcard—sun-drenched, calm, and serving pina coladas. But a bot doesn’t understand a November gale or fragile ecosystems.

We’ve seen what happens when people who don’t understand local impacts promote a “hidden gem” without context. Primare examples are Sawpit Bay in Ontario, which is now closed to the public, and Paradise Point in the UP, which is now only accessible by water to protect the private property and sensitive shoreline. When a bot tells thousands of people to visit a spot that has no infrastructure, it isn’t “sharing a secret.” It’s causing trail erosion, littering, unsafe parking, and a massive strain on local emergency services.

3. The Lack of “Provenance”

As a historian, I’ve been trained to treat information like an artifact. You don’t just look at it; you check its provenance. I track where the information comes from, who is circulating it, and who that information serves. AI generated information has no provenance. It is a “copy of a copy,” stripped of the accountability that comes from real-world expertise.

The Three Pillars of a Vetted Source

If you want to practice “Landscape Literacy,” you need high-quality sources. Here is how I vet the sources I use for my own research:

• Pillar 1: The “Primary” Check. Does this source cite legitimate physical or digital archives? I treat info like an artifact. You wouldn’t find a rusty tool in the woods and guess it’s a Viking sword; you’d check the metal, the location, and the layers of soil around it. If a blog post says “History says...” without pointing to a land record or a digitized map, why treat it any differently?

• Pillar 2: The “Indigenous Peoples” Check. If a narrative starts the clock in 1850 or 1900, it’s not just missing the “beginning”—it’s missing the entire foundation. A vetted source acknowledges the long-term stewardship of the Anishinaabe and other Indigenous peoples. If the first few thousand years are “missing,” the information is biased at best.

• Pillar 3: The “Contextual” Check. Does it take into account recent research by leading experts and the lived experiences of the community? A vetted source doesn’t just look at a map; it listens to the people who have been in the watershed for generations.

Why I Do the Hard Work

History is complex. That’s why I use a Deep Map Methodology. For me, landscape literacy isn’t just a hobby; it’s a rigorous practice. I look at every place through six distinct lenses:

1. The Architecture of the Land (Geology)

2. The Deep Green (Forest Ecology & Natural History)

3. Indigenous People & Nations

4. The Industries of Extraction (Logging & Mining)

5. Maritime History (Shipping, Shipwrecks & The Network of Rescue)

6. From Spectator to Steward

When a bot scrapes the internet, it might catch a glimpse of one of these layers. But it can’t see how they interconnect with one another like an ecosystem.

And while my social media posts might not get thousands (or even hundred) of “reactions” like the AI-generated slop, the comments and messages I get from real people make it worthwhile to me.

Why I Created the Curated Resource Library

I’ll be honest with you: even with a PhD, sometimes I get overwhelmed by the “infinite scroll.”

There are nights where I’m searching for info and I realize I’ve spent 45 minutes just weeding. I’m filtering out ‘top 10’ lists written by creators who couldn’t find the Chequamegon Bay on a map—let alone pronounce it correctly. And look, I have a lot of grace for the humans who trip over those vowels. I’ll be the first to admit I botched the pronunciation during an academic job talk when I first moved to the region. It’s a mouthful, and learning to say it correctly is part of building a real relationship with this place. But while humans struggle with heart, AI just fills the space with junk. If a bot can’t even get the vowels right, how can we trust it with the history?

Landscape Literacy requires high-quality sources. You can’t read the layers of time if the map you’re using is blurry.

I realized a while ago that I had been building a “private sanctuary” for myself—a collection of bookmarks, digital archives, and vetted books that I return to whenever I need to get my facts straight. Because I know how exhausting it is to vet everything yourself, I decided to open that sanctuary to you.

I’ve put together The Deep Map: A Curated Resource Library—a 15-page free PDF guide to the books, maps, and digital tools I actually trust. These are the sources that helped me write my books and build the Northland Collaborative. No junk, no “hallucinations,” just the real story of the Big Lake.

Get your free Curated Resource Library!

Next time you’re out on the trails or paddling the shoreline or wandering the sidewalks of a downtown street I hope you have the right “map” in your hand—one that respects the past and protects the future of the watershed.

Have you seen any AI-generated junk recently that you want to rant about? Sound off in the comments! I’d love to commiserate with you.

Most of us are navigating the world using what I call the “Flat Map.” The Flat Map is the one provided by your GPS, your highway signs, and the glossy tourist brochures at the rest stop. It is a two-dimensional world of “points of interest” and “estimated time of arrival.” It tells you exactly where you are, but it is remarkably silent on why you are there or the complex histories of the places you visit.

When we only rely on the Flat Map, we are at risk of becoming algorithm-driven travelers—bouncing from one highly-rated photo-op to the next without ever touching the true story of the place. We see the 'Best 10 Views' but miss the 1.1 billion years or more of history that carved them. Or, we pull over at the scenic overlook, snap the photo, and leave without realizing our boots are standing on the pages of a story we haven't even begun to read.

As a historian, what interests me is the “Deep Map” of the Northwoods. While the Flat Map gives you the 2D coordinates, the Deep Map gives you the 3D verticality and illustrates the web of interconnection. It allows you to look through the pavement and the “pristine” forest to see the layers of cooling basalt, the centuries of Indigenous diplomacy and sovereignty, and the industrial skeletons of the ‘White Gold’ timber rush—so named because the massive white pines were the primary wealth of the 19th-century North.

If you missed my last post, we dipped our toes into three of these layers, explored why most people miss them, and learned how to find them.

Today I’m focusing on how these layers are part of my larger 6-Layer Deep Map methodology I use to navigate Lake Superior because traveling without a framework is like reading a book where you only understand every fifth word. You see the shapes of the letters, the spaces between the paragraphs, and the "pretty" font, but the plot—the actual soul of the story—remains a mystery.

To move from being a spectator to a steward of the Northwoods, you need a way to read the whole page and make connections between the pages. You need strategies that turn every road trip into an exploration and conversation with the land. That’s why I’m showing you how to dive into the Deep Map for yourself.

Why 6 Layers?

These are the foundational layers I use to understand the Deep Maps of the Lake Superior watershed and the adjacent Northwoods. They are the collective themes that have emerged from spending a lifetime traveling in the watershed and over fifteen years researching and teaching about it.

These layers are not linear: they are stacked, tangled, and pulsing with life. They are a multilayered, webbed ecosystem. Think of them like a healthy forest. There is a deep layer (the microbes, roots, and mycorrhizal networks in the soil), the "short" vegetation of the forest floor, the "medium" vegetation of the shrubs and young trees, and the "tall" vegetation of the mature canopy.

Across these stacked layers are vital connections—the movement of water, fungal networks, and wildlife that strengthen the whole. Just as a bird might eat fruit from a flower in the understory and spread the seeds to a new ridge, or how a river transfers sediment and rocks from the inland interior to a delta at a river mouth, the stories of the Northwoods move between layers.

When you understand the system, you stop seeing just a "pretty view" and start seeing a dynamic conversation that gives life to the beautiful scenery.

Field Historian’s Note: Don’t let my ecology metaphors scare you. You don’t need to be a biologist to use this framework—I’m not one. You just need to start observing the world around and realize that when you change one layer, you vibrate the whole web.

The 6 Layers of the Deep Map

For each layer of the Deep Map, I am going to include a photo from the northwestern Wisconsin stretch of the Lake Superior Circle Tour to show how you can apply all of these layers whether you are exploring one section or doing an entire circumnavigation of the Big Lake.

1. The Architecture of the Land (Geology)

The Designation: The Basement

This is the deep timeline of geologic events that eventually created the Great Lakes. The ancient Canadian Shield forms the foundation. Then, 1.1 billion years ago, the Midcontinent Rift pushed layers and layers of magma to the surface, creating the basalt ridges of the Keweenaw Peninsula, the Minnesota North Shore, and northwestern Ontario. The weight of the lava created the Superior Syncline (a bowl shape), which collected layers of sediment that eventually formed Jacobsville Sandstone. Later, the entire landscape was sculpted by glaciers. The geology is the foundational stage upon which every other story is built.

2. The Deep Green (Forest Ecology & Natural History)

The Designation: The Covering

If geology is the foundation, the forest is the covering. This layer focuses on the vegetation that grows from the soil and the rock. In particular, this layer focuses on the transition from the Boreal forest of the North Shore to the Mixed Hardwood (Mesic) forests of the South Shore, where the red clays and sands support a "Deep Green" of Sugar Maple, Yellow Birch, and Hemlock. Engaging with this layer means becoming attentive to these transitional shifts, and recognizing the forest’s relationship with the "Basement" layers beneath it and human layers above it.

3. Indigenous People & Nations

The Designation: Sovereignty Across Generations

Since glaciation, Indigenous peoples have called the Great Lakes home. Along with being home to the Anishinaabe, the watershed has also been a place of home and refuge for the Dakota, the Cree, the Menominee, the Wendat (Huron), and others. It has always been a vital center of ecological diversity, political alliances, and diplomacy.

One important focus of this layer is seasonal rounds—land practices grounded in the specific time of year that were long used to sustain Indigenous communities. Some of these practices were specifically reserved in 19th-century treaties by the ancestors of today’s Anishinaabe Nations, like hunting and fishing. After a century of being criminalized for practicing these rights, courts eventually recognized them in landmark decisions in the second half of the twentieth century.

To read this layer is to move beyond the “wilderness” myth and acknowledge the enduring political sovereignty and treaty law that defines the watershed today.

4. The Industries of Extraction (Logging & Mining)

The Designation: The Industrial Scar & Legacy

This is the layer where humans harvested the rocks and the trees. The architecture of extraction is carved into the land by the “White Gold” logging era and deep veins of copper, iron, and silver. It is visible everywhere, from the crimson iron-ore harbors to the dark, copper-rich basalt of the Gay Stamp Sands to the submerged silver shafts of Silver Islet. By mapping the historic flow of timber and ore, we see the physical blueprint of industrial triumph and eventual transition. While today’s forests might feel “pristine,” in most parts of the Northwoods they are actually healing scars—the legacies of massive reforestation labor required after the timber rush.

5. Maritime History (Shipping, Shipwrecks & The Network of Rescue)

The Designation: The Hydraulic Connection

For centuries, Gichigami has functioned as both a highway and a hazard. This layer examines the “Hydraulic Connection”—the sophisticated systems built to move wealth across an unpredictable inland sea. This wealth came from the natural resources of the region: timber, taconite, copper, silver, gold, and more. It also highlights the Network of Rescue: the interconnected grid of lighthouses, fog signals, and life-saving crews who stood watch over the ships carrying the valuable goods.

6. From Spectator to Steward

The Designation: The Synthesis

The final layer is the evolution and transformation of the traveler. The Synthesis is the shift from consuming a pretty view to working to understand a complex place. It’s not a destination, but a practice. It begins the moment you stop simply “driving the loop” and start participating in the life of the lake. By un-layering the Deep Map, you become a steward of the land’s interconnected stories. In this way, your understanding of how the past affects the present directly informs your actions today.

Lest you think this methodology only applies to my backyard in Wisconsin, you can apply it anywhere across the watershed. Take Marathon, Ontario, for example.

The town is several miles south of Highway 17 and has commanding views of a harbor that was once a prime fishery for the Anishinaabe. Just a few miles east of the turn-off is the Gchi-Waaswaaganing Cultural Center, run by the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg Nation (Pic River First Nation). The name means “Place of the Big Lake of Torches,” which refers to the traditional practice of spearfishing by birch bark torchlight.

Marathon’s name also reveals information about its layered past. Originally called Peninsula, the nearby town was renamed “Marathon” in the 1940s when the Marathon Corporation, a Wisconsin company, built a massive mill on the harbor. The mill closed in 2009 and is now largely demolished. It is another chapter in the boom-and-bust story of the Lake Superior watershed.

Marathon is an example of how the wealth of the Canadian Boreal forest (Layer 2) was once harvested and dispersed south to markets in Wisconsin, leaving behind the “concrete ruins” of a paper mill in Marathon as the remains of that massive industrial movement (Layer 4). All of this occurred in the traditional and contemporary territory of Anishinaabe people (Layer 3). Today, much of Marathon’s economy is tied to gold mining (Layer 1 and 4).

In the Northwoods, the closing of a mill or a mine isn’t just an end; it’s the beginning of a new chapter of the Deep Map. My point is not to minimize the loss, but instead to show that historically, these changes are also opportunities for a community to experiment with shifting to sustainable economies.

How to Use the Framework in the Field

Next time you are in the field, try using these four prompts. If you aren’t used to identifying these layers, you may need to do some “research” in advance by looking up information about the different layers (Hint: you can find helpful resources in my Deep Map Library!). Then, practice spotting the physical evidence on the trail:

Look Down: Identify the rock (Layer 1) and see what’s growing on it (Layer 2). Do you notice connections or patterns between the two?

Look Around: Identify the "networks" you see evidence of. This includes both natural plant communities and human infrastructure (Layers 2, 3, 4, and 5).

Look Through: Acknowledge the names and history beneath the surface. Replace "Flat Map" labels with "Deep Map" stories—Indigenous place-names, industrial lineages, and maritime networks (Layers 3, 4, 5, and 6).

Look For Help: Seek out historical markers, exhibits, or local guides. Remember that signs (especially older ones) may not tell the entire story of a place, but they often provide a helpful initial nugget of knowledge.

The Ultimate Field Demo

To see how this works in practice, let’s look at a single, specific shoreline on the South Shore. Here’s exactly how I apply this framework at a site like the one pictured above near Gay, Michigan on the east side of the Keweenaw Peninsula.

First, I Look Down and notice: this isn’t natural beach sand. It’s crushed dark basalt from the historic Gay Stamp Mills on the east side of the Keweenaw Peninsula—a direct byproduct of copper mining industry, which illustrates Layer 4 (Extraction).

Next, I Look Around and notice how there is a total lack of typical dune vegetation (Layer 2) in this man-made “desert.” The forest only begins at the very edge of the dark sands.

Then, I Look Through and acknowledge that this shoreline was once the roaring “engine room” of Copper Country. I think back even further to realize this was home to the Anishinaabe for millennia before the mills arrived, and that they continue to fish these waters today. This prompts a deeper question: How do these toxic stamp sands affect underwater fish spawning grounds, and how does that environmental degradation affect the human communities relying on those fish today?

Conclusion: The Reward of Depth

This 6-layer framework is not a list of facts; it is a way to develop your own understanding of the watershed and the landscapes you visit. It is the methodology I use to see connections throughout the watershed from the billion-year-old basalt to the contemporary sovereignty of Anishinaabe Nations.

When you travel this way, the "boring" stretches of highway—the long miles between the famous waterfalls and the gift shops—become engaging chapters of the book. Suddenly, a roadside rock cut is a window into the Midcontinent Rift, and a secondary forest is a map of the Industries of Extraction. You are no longer just driving; you are un-layering. You are moving from Spectator to Steward, and history begins to shape how you act in the present.

Take the Methodology into the Field

Ready to apply this to your next road trip or day hike in 2026?

Download my free The Deep Map: A Curated Resource Library. It includes the field kit essentials, the 'Deep Map' definitions, and the specific resources I use to un-layer the Northwoods for myself.

Get Your Free Curated Resource Library!

What’s your favorite place to dig into the Deep Map of the Northwoods? I’d love to hear about it. Let me know in the comments!

But, have you ever stood at an overlook and felt like you were missing the real story? Usually, that's because we are only trained to see the top layer. We are spectators at a grand performance, admiring the scenery without ever being invited backstage.

Delving into the “Deep Map” of the lake requires a different kind of effort. It asks us to look past the aesthetic beauty and grapple with the harder, often invisible threads of geology, sovereignty, and industrial legacy. It is hard work, but the reward is profound: the landscape stops being a backdrop and starts being a conversation. When you learn to read these layers, you move from “collecting views” to developing landscape literacy. A rock isn’t just a rock; it’s the volcanic plumbing of a continent. A “ghost town” isn’t just a ruin; it’s a physical record of human ambition and extraction.

By doing the work to see these layers, you gain something a “pretty view” can’t offer: a deep, unshakable sense of place. Imagine standing on the shore and not just seeing the water, but understanding your own relationship to the history beneath your boots. You aren’t just passing through the Northwoods; you are beginning to develop a relationship with it.

Whether you’re planning a full 1,300-mile loop or focusing on a single state park, here are the three critical layers most people overlook—and how you can include them on your own itinerary.

1. Indigenous Landscapes: Sovereignty & Stewardship

Most travelers see the Northwoods as a “pristine wilderness.” But there is no such thing as an empty landscape. Since the glaciers receded, Indigenous peoples have lived in and shaped the region. Ancient copper mines in the Keweenaw and on Isle Royale are a testament to this deep presence.

Today, every mile of Big Lake’s shore is Anishinaabewaki—the ancestral and contemporary home of Anishinaabe peoples and their nations. Many parts of the lake have also been (and in some cases continue to be) home to Indigenous peoples from other nations including the Cree, Dakota, Menominee, and Wendat/Wyandot.

What people miss: They see the state park signs and the scenic turnouts, but they miss the historical impact of Indigenous peoples. They also miss the ongoing political and economic power of Anishinaabe Nations in the watershed. They miss the fact that the “pristine wilderness” they are enjoying is a managed, lived-in territory that continues to be a site of sacred ceremonies and political structures, like treaty rights.

As you travel around the lake, you are on ceded territory: land that was transferred from the Anishinaabe to the United States and Canada through land cession treaties in the mid-nineteenth century. The only time you aren’t on ceded territory is when you are on a reservation (in the United States) or a reserve (in Canada); these are areas still under the legal jurisdiction of Anishinaabe Nations.

As with most complex parts of history, there are exceptions. In the United States, allotment and other historical processes created a “checkerboard” pattern of land ownership that within a reservation creates a mix of land that is under legal jurisdiction of the Anishinaabe Nation and private property.

On both sides of the border, Anishinaabe peoples retained “usufructuary rights,” or the right to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory. These are also known as “treaty rights.” For over a hundred years after treaties were signed, state and provincial authorities usually ignored these rights and arrested (and in some cases, killed) Anishinaabe peoples for hunting and fishing off-reservation.

In the 1960s, Anishinaabe people began asserting their treaty rights off-reservation, and when they were arrested, they launched successful legal battles. So, when you see a truck at a boat launch with a tribal plate, or see a family harvesting wild rice or fishing, you aren’t just seeing ‘recreation’—you are seeing the active exercise of a 180-year-old international agreement between sovereign nations.

How to look past the erasure:

Research the history of the treaties in 1836, 1842, 1850, and 1854 that shaped the watershed.

Look up maps with Anishinaabe place names produced by organizations like the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) to see the land through a different lens.

Read fiction and history written by Anishinaabe people. Louise Erdrich’s Tracks and Basil Johnston’s work are essential starting points.

Regardless of where you are on the shore, don’t just look at the water—engage with the names, the stories, and the sovereignty of the people who have stewarded this coast for millennia.

2. The Deep Time “Plumbing”

We often marvel at the variety of the lake’s edges—the jagged Sawtooth Mountains of Minnesota versus the flat-topped mesas of Ontario (like the Sleeping Giant). To the casual observer, they look like different "scenery." To the Deep Mapper, they reveal the earth's skeletal remains.

What people miss: They miss the layer of geology that dictates exactly where we can build, where we can hike, and where the water flows.

The Canadian Shield: This is the foundation: a massive, 2-million-square-mile geological region covering nearly half of Canada, spanning from the Arctic to the Great Lakes, featuring ancient, exposed Precambrian bedrock. It is characterized by thin soil, exposed rock, thousands of lakes, and boreal forests. It is also exceptionally rich in mineral resources. Most visible at Pukaskwa, Lake Superior Provincial Park, parts of the UP (like Sugarloaf Mountain by Marquette).

The Midcontinental Rift: 1.1 billion years ago, magma was pushing toward the surface. In Minnesota, it reached the sky and cooled into the jagged ridges we see today. In Ontario, it stayed hidden within older foundations, cooling into the massive, flat “sills” that created the mesas. In other areas, sandstone was created in the base of the rift (Jacobsville Sandstone), visible in places like the Apostle Islands and the Keweenaw Peninsula. This billion-year-old sandstone later became the building blocks of Midwestern “brownstone” buildings in cities like Milwaukee and Chicago. Most visible at the Sawtooth Mountains, mesas in Northwestern Ontario (from border to Kama Cliffs region), Isle Royale, and the Keweenaw Peninsula.

Glaciation: The “landscaping” that occurred as glaciers slowly receded 18,000 to 10,000 years ago. Keep in mind that glaciers are very recent when we think of a geological timeline stretching back billions of years. The entire watershed was sculpted by glaciation.

Most areas are a combination of these layers. For example, Lake of the Clouds in Porcupine Mountains State Park is a glacial lake formed between two ridges of basalt and conglomerate formed by the Midcontinent Rift. The glacier eroded softer layers of shale and sandstone, leaving behind the lake basin.

The Historian’s Fix: Think of the landscape as having a foundation (the Canadian Shield), a subterranean “plumbing system” (the MCR), and a giant sculptor (glaciation). When you understand how these layers fit together, the view from the overlook becomes a 3D history of the planet.

3. Industrial Underpinnings at Scenic Sites

It is tempting to think that “Deep History” is only found at the end of a rugged two-track or a ten-mile hike. We often assume that if a place has a paved parking lot and a gift shop, the story has already been told.

What people miss: They see the “Scenic Highlight” but miss the industrial infrastructure. They see a beautiful waterfall or a dramatic sand dune and assume it has always been a site of “leisure.” They miss the fact that many of our favorite state and provincial parks were once the busiest, loudest, and most transformative industrial sites on the continent.

The Historian’s Fix: You don’t need a 4WD vehicle to find the Deep Map. You just need to know what to look for at the lake’s most popular stops. Often, these are former industrial sites.

• The Log Slide (Pictured Rocks): As you take in the grandeur of the dunes, remember, you are looking at a site of massive labor. This was an “extraction chute” where old-growth white pine plummeted down to the lake to be rafted to mills. It’s a site of environmental change hidden in a “scenic” landscape.

• High Falls (Pigeon River/Grand Portage): Travelers stop here for the “highest waterfall in Minnesota.” As a historian, I see the layers of history. For millennia, this waterfall was a barrier to paddlers; by the mid-nineteenth century, it became an international border and served as a key route for the timber industry.

• Split Rock Lighthouse: People see the most photographed lighthouse in the world. This site exists because the iron ore industry demanded it after a catastrophic 1905 storm. Today lighthouses are iconic structures, but it’s also important to remember they were nodes in a systemic grid designed to protect the flow of wealth from the mines to the mills. Sites like Split Rock also highlight the exceptional labor of sailors and lighthouse keepers who took part in the ‘Network of Rescue.’

Whether you are on a five-minute boardwalk or a five-day backcountry trek, look for worn portage paths, the rusted iron, the squared-off timbers, and the “unnatural” levels in the landscape. These aren’t just remnants or ruins; they are the blueprints of how we have related to this lake for the last two centuries.

Remember, in many cases, you don’t even need to get your boots muddy to find the Deep Map. It is accessible to anyone willing to look past the postcard view and start doing the work of reading the landscape.

From Spectator to Steward

The work of the historian is to provide the context that turns a spectator into a steward. A spectator consumes a landscape—taking the photo, checking the box, and moving on. A steward, however, begins to cultivate a relationship with it.

When you begin to see these connections—between the cooling magma, the legal weight of a treaty, and the imprint of an extraction chute—you develop a deeper relationship with the land. You stop just “driving the loop” and start participating in the life of the lake. You aren’t just visiting a “pristine” wilderness; you are engaging with a lived-in, storied territory that demands our respect and our memory.

These three shifts in perspective are just the beginning. In my next post, I’ll be sharing the full 6 Layers of the Deep Map—the methodology I use to turn every northern Great Lakes road trip into an intentional experience.

Of the three layers we covered today—Indigenous Landscapes, Deep Time Plumbing, or Industrial Infrastructure—which one do you think will be most influential on your next road trip? Let me know in the comments or send me a message!

Ready to Plan Your Own “Deep Map” Journey?

I’ve developed two tools to help you navigate these layers with intention:

1. Download the Free 2026 Lake Superior Circle Tour Planner: This 5-step guide will help you manage the logistics and intention of your trip.

   YES, send me the FREE planner!

2. Get the Circle Tour Field Guide: For the full “Deep Map” experience, grab the digital e-book. It’s the comprehensive guide to the 6 Layers of the Lake, featuring curated 8, 10, 14, and 21-day itineraries, tips on how to learn to “read the landscape” at your stops, and checklists and strategies to help you prepare efficiently.

   I'm ready to design my Deep Map trip!

3. Get the Field-Tested Menu: Planning to camp on your Deep Map adventure? Get my stress-free, fresh-forward, customizable 3-night camping meal plan, including a printable grocery list.

   YES, send me the FREE menu!

   P.S. I’m currently deep in the digital archives, pulling together a curated library of some of my favorite, accessible maps, books, and records to 'read' the Northwoods landscape. It’s almost ready to share with you. I can’t wait to show you what’s inside.

As I focus on a few weeks of deeper research and my day job, I wanted to leave you with a different kind of guide. This watercolor map isn’t about highways or mileage; it is an attempt to visualize sites that illustrate the“Stacked Maps” of the Circle Tour Series—the layers of Indigenous sovereignty, industrial extraction, and spiritual resilience that define this coast.

Think of this as a sample Deep Map Syllabus: eight anchor points where the land speaks louder than the GPS if you know what to look for. This hand-painted map was designed to evoke the feeling of a personal field journal—a tactile andpersonal record of the “stacked” histories that digital navigation simply can’t capture.

(P.S. Make sure to continue reading to the end if you’re interested in a map giveaway!)

The “Deep Map” Annotations

1. Black Beach (Silver Bay, MN): The Color of Industry

• The Surface Layer: An anomaly of black sand that looks volcanic against the blue of the lake. It draws tourists seeking a one-of-a-kind beach on the Minnesota North Shore.

• The Deep Layer: This isn’t natural geology; it’s taconite tailings from a nearby processing plant that operated from 1956 to 1987. It’s a material culture site where the waste of the Iron Range literally reshaped the shoreline. While striking, these tailings historically impacted local fish spawning and water ecology.

• The Lesson: Sometimes the most “scenic” spots are actually industrial footprints with long-lasting ecological impacts.

2. High Falls (Pigeon River, MN/ON Border): From Highway to Dividing Line

• The Surface Layer: Tourists make the trek to see the tallest waterfall on the Minnesota North Shore.

• The Deep Layer: Bypassing these falls is the foundational reason for the “Grand Portage.” Originally used by the Anishinaabe and other Indigenous peoples for generations, this route was later adopted by the fur trade. By 1842, the Webster-Ashburton Treaty formalized this river as the border between the United States and (British) Canada. In 1850, Anishinaabe people transferred the land on the north side of the border to the British Crown. In 1854, Anishinaabe people on the southern side of the border transferred the land to the American federal government. In the late 19th century, the river shifted from a canoe highway to a timber conduit. Clear-cut White Pine was floated down the river to paper mills; today, you can see remnants of the log flume used to bypass the height of the falls.

• The Lesson: The Lake Superior watershed has a deep Indigenous history; the borders we see today are relatively recent geopolitical inventions.

3. Silver Islet (Sibley Peninsula, ON): The Underwater Mine

• The Surface Layer: A quiet cluster of cottages and a general store with docks looking out at the open lake beyond.

• The Deep Layer: Out in the open water beneath the waves sit the shafts of what was once the richest silver mine in the world. It was a feat of Victorian engineering that ultimately succumbed to the lake’s power when the pumps failed and the mine flooded in 1884. The community of Silver Islet is the ongoing legacy of the mine in the present.

• The Lesson: Extractive industries rarely have great long-term odds against the power of Gichigamiing.

4. Neys Provincial Park (Ontario): Complexities in the Silent Forest

• The Surface Layer: Sweeping sand beaches and beautiful views.

• The Deep Layer: These volcanic shores were shaped by the Midcontinent Rift—the same geologic event that created the Sawtooth Mountains and the Keweenaw. Hidden within the brush are the remnants of a World War II prisoner-of-war camp and 1940s-era pulpwood docks. It’s a landscape of confinement and labor that has been largely reclaimed by the boreal forest.

• The Lesson: The forest is an expert at composting difficult histories, but that doesn’t mean these industrial and human layers should be forgotten. When we visit recreational sites today, it is important to reflect on who spent time in these places in the past and what the circumstances were. In the present, we are free to visit these sites as we please, but that wasn’t always the case for the inhabitants of previous eras.

5. Gargantua (Lake Superior Provincial Park): Presence & Vanishing

• The Surface Layer: A rugged, rocky harbor accessible only by a long, unpaved road through the boreal forest.

• The Deep Layer: This was once a bustling commercial fishing village and a key stop for lake steamers. Long before that, it was a place where Anishinaabe people fished and held ceremonies. Today, the village is “ghosting”—leaving only a few rusted engine blocks and submerged cribs behind. However, it is a popular site for outdoor recreation, including hiking and backpacking. And for the Batchewana First Nation, this place remains a spiritual landscape they reclaimed by asserting their sovereignty in the 21st century.

• The Lesson: In the Northwoods, “permanent” is a relative term. Industrial boomtowns come and go, but Anishinaabe stewardship persists across generations.

6. The Log Slide (Pictured Rocks, MI): The Chute of Green Gold

• The Surface Layer: A massive, 300-foot sand dune with a vertical drop to the water.

• The Deep Layer: This was a high-speed highway for White Pine logs. The “imprint” you see today is the scar left by millions of board-feet of timber extracted in the wake of the Treaty of Washington (1836) that transferred the region from Anishinaabe control to the United States.

• The Lesson: Places that are scenic overlooks today were often the “assembly lines” of 19th-century extraction.

Calumet (Keweenaw Peninsula, MI): The Weight of the Copper Country

• The Surface Layer: Massive red-brick ruins and steel hoist houses rising out of the trees like industrial cathedrals, alongside the hallowed sandstone archway of the Italian Hall site.

• The Deep Layer: This was the heart of “Copper Fever,” built on the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe. This “Copper Treaty” ceded mineral-rich land to the U.S., opening the door for the deepest mines in the world and the subsequent 1913–14 strike. During the conflict, the Italian Hall disaster killed 73 people, mostly children. This sits atop an even older foundation: over 7,000 years of Indigenous copper mining by the Anishinaabe and their ancestors.

• The Lesson: A landscape is not just a resource; it is an archive of sovereignty, labor struggle, and the difficult memories that remain long after the mines close.

8. The Brownstone Trail (Bayfield, WI): The Architecture of the Midwest

• The Surface View: A cliffside path overlooking Lake Superior.

• The Deep Layer: The trail follows an abandoned 1883 railroad grade designed specifically to transport “Green Gold” and red sandstone. This stone built the iconic architecture of Chicago and Milwaukee (and you can also see brownstone buildings in nearby communities like Bayfield, Washburn, and Ashland). When you walk here, you are standing on the industrial spine that filled the “negative space” of the urban Midwest. This specific stretch of coast was also the site of the Prentice Quarry at Houghton Point, where in 1892, workers cut a record-breaking 115-foot monolith intended for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. The “Great Monolith” famously cracked during the move and was abandoned—a giant that remained on the shore as the industry eventually collapsed.

• The Lesson: Midwestern cities depended on northern resources—and the immense labor to extract them—for their very foundation.

Conclusion: The Syllabus of the Land

Mapping a place like Lake Superior is an act of humility. You are constantly reminded there is more to see, more to explore, and more to learn. While these eight anchor points offer a glimpse into the layers of the coast, they are only a fragment of the “Syllabus of the Land.” As I shift my focus toward deeper archival research and writing here in Bayfield, I hope this Deep Map serves as a companion for your own observations.

The goal of the Outdoors Historian isn’t just to find the remnants of history, but to understand why they remain. Whether you are standing on the black sands of Silver Bay or walking the railroad grade of the Brownstone Trail, you are participating in a living history.

If this sample “Deep Map” has piqued your curiosity, my Lake Superior Circle Tour Field Guide is the full “textbook” to this syllabus. It features curated itineraries and strategies to help you find the hidden layers of the Northwoods, along with comprehensive planning logistics.

Grab your copy of the Field Guide here!

THE WATERCOLOR GIVEAWAY

To celebrate the conclusion of the Circle Tour Series and the release of this first “Deep Map Syllabus,” I am giving away the original watercolor map featured in this post.

How to Enter: Simply leave a comment on this Substack post answering our “Ninth Pin” question: Where is a place on Lake Superior where you’ve felt the weight of history or a deep connection to the land? Or, what is one place you would like to go to experience this?

Bonus Entries: As a “thank you” for supporting independent research:

• Paid Subscribers to this Substack automatically receive 3 bonus entries.

• Circle Tour Field Guide owners also receive 3 bonus entries. (If you’ve already bought your copy, you’re all set!)

  • And, YES, if you’re a double-supporter (Paid Subscriber and Field Guide owner), you automatically get 6 entries.

The Details:

• The final day for entries will be April 17 and I’ll announce the winner on Substack on April 18! I will also message or email the winner.

• Eligibility: Open to residents of the Continental US and Canada.

• Shipping: I will cover the cost of standard shipping to ensure this “Deep Map” arrives safely at your door.

• Note for Canadian Winners: Please be aware that I will ship the map during my next trip to Ontario (currently planned for May).

Last year, I was sharing “Monthly Favorites” posts for my paid subscribers. I’ll be honest—I struggled to keep up with those alongside my long-form research this winter. Over the next few months, I’m going to try some new things to show my gratitude for your support. If you were here last year and find yourself missing the “Monthly Favorites,” please let me know! I may decide to bring them back or find a way to incorporate them into these “Director’s Cut” deep-dives.

Thank you for making this “classroom with no walls” possible. I hope this clip and my annotated bibliogrpahy help you find your own layers on the Lake.

Paid subscribers: Look below for your exclusive Member Rate code for the Circle Tour Field Guide!

"Support the 'Classroom with No Walls' and unlock the full Spirit Trail footage and my 5-book Research Archive. Click ‘Subscribe now’ to upgrade.

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Part travelogue, part history, this series explores the intersection of industrial ruins, boreal ecology, and personal transition. It is a journey to see how landscapes survive when the systems built upon them—including mines, railroads, and careers in higher education—fall apart. This is Part 7 of 7. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, Part 5 here, and Part 6 here.

Over the last two months, I’ve shared the narrative of our journey on the Lake Superior Circle Tour. As an outdoors historian, I spend a lot of time looking at maps and archives, but I also spend a lot of time living out of a tent. This trip was born out of a specific moment in my life and a gap in my own experience. I needed time with Lake Superior while I processed major changes in my life. And while I had driven Highway 17 countless times and even taught college students there, I never took a personal trip where I had time to explore on my own terms.

During this series, we’ve talked about the history of extraction and its connection to geology and ghost towns, the spiritual weight of the deep boreal at Pukaskwa, the ‘stacked maps’ at Lake Superior Provincial Park, and my realizations on the South Shore.

But today, I want to get into the nitty-gritty.

If you are looking to plan your own Circle Tour, or are just curious about how we pulled this off, here is the breakdown of our route, our gear, and the reality of traveling in the “Secret Season.”

The Strategy: Why This Route?

For this trip, we made a conscious (and somewhat painful) decision to skip the Keweenaw Peninsula—which I absolutely love. The goal of this trip was to slow down in the Ontario sector and explore sites that we hadn’t visited before.

The Flexibility Factor

In the fall, flexibility is key. We booked the first half of the trip to ensure we had spots but left the return leg open. Because we loved Neys so much, we stayed an extra day. This was easy to adjust since our next stop was Pukaskwa, which is first-come, first-serve. Since we spent additional time at Neys and Pukaskwa, we decided to skip camping at Lake Superior Provincial Park entirely in favor of a hotel “reward” in the Soo.

The 15-Day Itinerary at a Glance

DAYS 1–4: Bayfield to Thunder Bay (Family, High Falls, Mt. McKay)

DAYS 5–7: Sleeping Giant (Thunder Bay Lookout, Marie Louise Lake, Sea Lion, Silver Islet)

DAYS 8–10: Neys Provincial Park (The Trapp Cabin, Jackfish Ghost Town)

DAYS 11–13: Pukaskwa National Park (Hattie Cove, Manitou Miikana, Dark Skies)

DAY 14: The “Signage” Run and the Scale of the Landscape (Wawa Goose, Old Woman Bay, Gargantua, Katherine Cove, Alona Bay)

DAY 15: The UP South Shore (Breakfast in Sault Ste. Marie, The Log Slide, Hurricane River, Home)

The “Best Of” Awards: Circle Tour Superlatives

If you have limited time, here are the standouts from our 1,300-mile loop:

• 🏆 Best Scenic Drive: Nipigon to Marathon (unmatched elevation), with Wawa to Sault Ste. Marie as a very close second.

• 🥾 Best Short Hike: Manitou Miikana at Pukaskwa. It is the perfect synthesis of land, lake, and sky.

• 🌅 Best Sunset: Neys Provincial Park. Watch the wet sand reflect the sky like a mirror.

• 🏛️ Best Hidden History: Neys Logging Boats. These hulls are the material culture of the pulpwood era, and a reminder of Canada’s history of internment. (Difficulty: Moderate; requires a hike and potentially slippery rocks).

• 🏛️ Best Accessible History: Silver Islet. A drive-in spot that illustrates the lake’s power over human industry. (Stop in the General Store for a cinnamon bun!)

• ⛺ Best Campsite for ‘Reading the Depths’: Hattie Cove. It offers the solitude required to process the history you’ve been hiking through.

The Camping Report: Where to Pitch Your Tent

• Sleeping Giant (Marie Louise Lake): A "Mega-Campground" done right. Excellent plumbing and hot showers, but it still feels peaceful in the shoulder season.

• Neys Provincial Park: History meets scenery. The sites are large, private, and the beach is breathtaking.

• Pukaskwa (Hattie Cove): The edge of the world. The vibe is inky, velvety blackness and the most profound quiet on the lake. Note: These sites lack lake views but have seclusion and dark skies.

• Lake Superior Provincial Park (Agawa Bay): We had planned to stay here, but ended up just scouting it and moving on. Stunning beach, but very exposed to wind and highway noise.

Favorite Campfire Meals

We treat camp cooking as a form of creative fieldwork. A few standouts from this trip:

🍳 Campfire Chicken Enchiladas: My biggest win. I prepped a rotisserie chicken in advance buy shredding it and freezing it. At the campsite, I assembled them with salsa verde and cheese. Method: Campfire. The Pro-Tip: Eugene used a blow-torch to finish the cheese to bubbly perfection.

🥩The Classic: Steak, pre-baked potatoes (wrapped in foil), and "salad in a bag." Nothing beats a steak cooked over open hardwood. Method: Campfire

🌭 The "Thunder Bay" Special: We picked up local Italian sausages in Thunder Bay and grilled them with sautéed peppers and onions. Again, the blow-torch made a cameo for the cheddar melt. Method: Campfire.

🍝 Cook Once, Eat Twice: I made a sausage and red pepper pasta one night, then repurposed the leftovers into a Pasta e Fagioli by adding broth and diced tomatoes the next day. Method: Whisperlite.

The Glovebox Essentials

• Reading: Superior: Under the Shadow of the Gods (Chisholm/Gutsche) for the North Shore, and Impermanence (Sue Leaf) for the South Shore.

• Listening: CBC Radio One is a must for “local flavor.” For podcasts, check out Points North or the Lake Superior Podcast.

Gear Wins and Fails

The Wins:

• The “Mood” Lights: We bought battery-powered string lights at Canadian Tire in Marathon. In October, the sun sets at 6:30 PM; these saved our morale and turned the tent into a cozy library.

• Our Sleeping Pad: Our Thermarest MondoKing pad (R-value 5+) was essential. The ground steals more heat than the air does.

• Our Quilts: We invested in Jack R Better quilts for our hammocks and they also work great with a cot. We used the Tahoe blanket from WoolX for an additional layer of warmth on extra cold nights.

• The Tundra: Our truck handled the rough road to Jackfish and the 45mph windstorms without a rattle. Eugene’s organizational system in the bed made packing and unpacking a science.

  

The Fails:

• The Kitchen Kit: We forgot the tongs. (Shoutout to the Canadian Tire in Nipigon for the assist).

• The Hatchet: We brought a Sawzall for logs but forgot a hatchet for kindling. (Also resolved at Canadian Tire—our unofficial trip sponsor).

The Reality of the “Secret Season”

Traveling in October demands respect. You will experience “Sea Smoke” on the water and 30-degree mornings.

• The Border Strategy: If you’re crossing at Pigeon River, buy your perishables in Thunder Bay. It supports the local economy, is a fun cultural experience (check out Canadian snacks and treats), and makes customs a breeze. My Rule: If it once had a heartbeat or a root, buy it in Canada to avoid agricultural restrictions.

• Winds: We hit 45mph gusts. If you don’t know how to “guy out” your tent, the Secret Season will teach you the hard way.

• Cold: We managed 30-degree mornings with zero-degree down quilts and high R-value pads.

• Forgotten or broken gear: While specialized gear can be tricky to find on the Ontario North Shore, the Canadian Tire stores in Nipigon and Marathon are cultural landmarks in their own right and perfect to grab any basics you might have forgotten or to replace anything that breaks.

Places We Can’t Wait to Return To

Whenever we road trip in the Great Lakes, we cross things off our list only to find we've added even more! Here’s a sample of things that got added this trip

• Sleeping Giant: From some of the longer hikes to boating adventures, there’s a lot left to explore.

• Neys: From returning to the Trap Cabin, to paddling the Little Pic River, to experiencing the Visitor Center, to some of the trails we didn’t get to—there are so many reasons why we want to return!

• Pukaskwa: I’d love to hike the Manitou Miikana Trail again, and I’d love to hike to the White River Suspension Bridge someday. I also want to paddle in Hattie Cove.

• Lake Superior Provincial Park: There is so much I want to do and explore here still—from hiking to paddling.

Yes those were our main stops this. The route was that good.

Also, I’m not listing Pictured Rocks in this list, although it was technically part of this trip and I’m always up for another visit! For me, Pictured Rocks and the Keweenaw are two places around the Big Lake I’ll always return to.

Final Thoughts: Fieldwork for a New Vocation

This trip was more than a vacation; it was a re-introduction to the region I grew up in and that I call home. I realized that while I may have lost my traditional classroom, I haven’t lost my subject matter. My new syllabus is written in the land, the water, and the shifting light along Lake Superior’s shore.

If you found value in these stories, the best way to support this “classroom with no walls” is to grab the Circle Tour Field Guide. It contains the itineraries, “Historian’s Pivots,” and logistics I used to navigate these 1,300 miles. Whether you have 8 days or 21 days, there’s an itinerary for you!

Get the Field Guide!

Want more free tips on planning a Circle Tour?

Get the FREE Planner!

Paid Subscribers: Stay tuned for an exclusive ‘Director’s Cut’ coming soon, including raw footage from the Manitou Miikana trail and my annotated bibliography for this itinerary!

Part travelogue, part history, this series explores the intersection of industrial ruins, boreal ecology, and personal transition. It is a journey to see how landscapes survive when the systems built upon them—including mines, railroads, and careers in higher education—fall apart. This is Part 6 of 7. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, Part 4 here, and Part 5 here. This is the narrative conclusion. Next week, we’ll dive into logistics.

When we crossed the International Bridge into Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan to finish up our final section of the Lake Superior Circle Tour, we didn’t just cross a political border; we crossed a geological and psychological threshold.

Ahead of us lay the final stretch to drive. Behind us lay the Ontario North Shore—a landscape of 2.7-billion-year-old granite and the ‘ghosts’ of industries like Jackfish and Gargantua. As I explored in Part 5, those towns were reminders of the fragility of systems built for individual profit, and how easily they collapse when the ecology shifts.

Crossing the border is also an important reminder of how the watershed is the homeland of Anishinaabe people. Whenever I travel across the border in the Great Lakes, I try to remind myself how this imaginary line was created and imposed on the land. For the Anishinaabe, this place is known as Baawitig (or ‘place of the rapids’) and it was never a border. It was a hub. Long before the International Bridge or the Soo Locks, this was a place of deep diplomacy and shared kinship. Crossing here reminded me that while I was moving from one settler-colonial jurisdiction to another, I was still traveling through Anishinaabe homelands that ignore the line on the map. I delve more into the history of Sault Ste. Marie in some of my other posts.

We had taken a gamble on finding a room for the Saturday of a holiday weekend, but after several anxious phone calls on our drive, we secured a modest room on the Michigan side of the border. It wasn’t the Ritz. But after nine days in a tent, a climate-controlled room and a hot shower felt like ultimate luxury.

We celebrated our first night not cooking on a campfire with a margarita and a booth at Applebee’s. After nine days living in the boreal forest, stepping back into a corporate chain felt like a strange re-entry into the very systems I’d been critiquing all week. It was a reminder that we all navigate the 'fragile systems' of modern life—sometimes for a paycheck, and sometimes just for a basket of chips and a cold drink. But as I sat in that booth, I wasn't just a tired camper anymore; I was a researcher who had finished her first week of fieldwork. I was happy, I was fed, and for the first time in months, I was feeling good about my direction.

Lattes and Locks

The next morning, Eugene finally got what we had been yearning for: a latte and crepes at Oh Crepe downtown. Sitting there with a proper latte, he looked like a happy man.

Sitting at Oh Crepe, we were just steps away from the Soo Locks—the mechanical heart of the entire Lake Superior extraction system. It’s impossible to ignore the layers of history here. Long before the first lock was built in 1855, this was the site of the St. Marys Rapids, a place where Anishinaabe people gathered for millennia to fish and conduct diplomacy.

The construction of the locks in the mid-nineteenth century didn’t just bypass the rapids; it signaled the decisive shift from the fur trade to the boom-bust industries we had been tracking for 1,300 miles. Once the locks opened, taconite from the Minnesota North Shore and copper from the Keweenaw Peninsula could be ground down and shipped out at an industrial scale. The locks were the gateway for the timber, the iron, and the copper that built the very “modern systems” I had been critiquing at Applebee’s the night before.

Standing there with my own latte, I realized that while the International Bridge represents a political threshold, the locks represent a structural one. The locks were a project of re-engineering the water to serve the extraction of the land and make the Lake Superior watershed accessible to industry. They are the "drain" through which the wealth of the north was funneled to the cities of the south.

A Thematic Bookend at Pictured Rocks

Ahead of us lay the South Shore: a land of sandstone, shifting dunes, and the familiarity of home. But as we left Sault Ste. Marie, we weren’t ready to pull into the driveway in Bayfield just yet. The weather was holding, and I knew there was one final ‘thematic bookend’ waiting for us in the eastern half of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore: the Log Slide. I didn’t realize at the time that this final stop would be an important moment in my own personal journey.

The Log Slide was an ideal narrative anchor because it connected to the multiple sites we visited while tracing the map of extraction on our Circle Tour.

• At Black Beach, we stood on the waste of the iron industry.

• At High Falls, we saw remnants of a log flume used to transport logs to Lake Superior.

• At Silver Islet, we stood on the shore, looking out to where the world’s richest silver mine was—briefly—before the lake took over.

• At Jackfish, we stood on the ruins of the coal docks.

• At Neys, we stopped at the mouth of the Little Pic River and saw the logging cleats in the bedrock shore.

• At Pukaskwa, we found the rusted boom chains at Hattie Cove—reminders that even the ‘Wild Shore’ was once a site of massive pulpwood extraction.

• At Gargantua, we stood on a cobble beach near the “ghosts” of the commercial fishery.

Now we were heading to the Log Slide in the Grand Sable Dunes, where in the second half of the nineteenth century, towering white pines and other conifers were clear-cut from the interior, dragged to the slide, and sent down a wooden chute to the lake below where they were rafted to mills. Hardwoods weren’t logged until railroads reached an area, because unlike conifers, hardwoods don’t float and can’t be transported by waterways.

The Cutover Era emerged in the Northwoods after land cession treaties, like the 1836 Treaty of Washington, transferred these forests from Anishinaabe control to the US government. The timber was the prize for states like Michigan, but for the Anishinaabe, the treaty was a survival strategy to maintain their connection to their traditional territory.

Adding Layers: The Map of Sovereignty

Land cession treaties are one part of the story, but it’s also important to remember that the 'Deep Map' I’d been reading for 1,300 miles wasn't just made of iron, copper, and logging. It was held together by the names and the stories of the people who have stewarded this water since long before the first surveyor’s line was drawn and these extractive industries took hold. This map also traced our route:

• High Falls (Grand Portage): This 120-foot drop is the physical reason for Kitchi Onigaming (The Great Carrying Place). This 8.5-mile portage was the vital link that allowed the Anishinaabeg—and later the fur trade—to bypass the unnavigable lower Pigeon River.

• Mount McKay (Animkii-wajiw): Known as “Thunder Mountain,” this sacred site on Fort William First Nation stands as a silent witness to the shift from deep diplomacy to the industrial grit of Thunder Bay.

• Silver Islet & Nanabozho: The oral histories of the Sleeping Giant aren’t “folklore”; they are the geological archive of the region. The story of Nanabozho being turned to stone to protect the silver is a direct commentary on the ethics of extraction.

• Neys & Intersecting Histories: During WWII, the Canadian government used this isolated stretch of shore for internment camps. To “see” Neys is to recognize how settler-colonial states often repurpose Indigenous lands as sites of confinement.

• Pukaskwa (Manitou Miikana): A living classroom for Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK). From managed boreal forest fires to its proximity to the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg, Pukaskwa is a model for modern Indigenous stewardship.

• Lake Superior Provincial Park: From the spiritual gravity of the Agawa pictographs to the reclamation stories of the Batchewana First Nation, this park reminds us that the “Wilderness” was always a home.

• Baawitig (Sault Ste. Marie): Long before the locks, this was the focal point of Anishinaabe diplomacy, and continues to be home for Anishinaabe communities on both sides of the international border.

• Mashkiiziibii (Bad River): As we crossed back into Wisconsin, we saw the white pine branches shaped like a migizi (bald eagle) in the Bad River Anishinaabe Nation. This tree wasn’t just a sign of nearing home—it was a reminder that the South Shore’s story is still being written by those who have fought for this water for centuries.

There’s also another map of the tourism industry. This map includes the tension of how public lands were created by seizing Indigenous homelands, and recognizing how tourism has emerged in some communities as an alternative economic pathway to extraction.

There’s no singular map, and it’s not about seeing the “right” map. These maps are layered, stacked, connected. When we choose to engage with them, we stop being tourists and start being students of the land.

When you realize that, you begin to see connections between the landscape and the different peoples who have called it home. You develop a deeper understanding of this place, why it matters, and why it’s worth stewarding in the present. Without these layers, a trip around the lake is just a collection of pretty views; with them, it becomes a conversation about how the past connects to the present.

It’s not that the beauty of the scenery isn’t important. But recognizing the beauty of this place isn’t enough. We need to care for it. And for many people, to motivate them to care for it, they have to begin to understand it; to relate to it. That is the work of the historian: to provide the context that turns a spectator into a steward.

Sand As Far As The Eye Can See

With ‘stacked maps’, in mind, we turned the Tundra toward the Grand Sable Dunes—a place where the map literally shifts beneath your feet. Seeing these dunes for the first time changed my understanding of the lake.

The view looking north from these dunes is fundamentally different from looking south from Pukaskwa. As I discussed in Part 4, Pukaskwa has a rare dune ecosystem extending west to the Pic River. But the Grand Sable Dunes are massive. They are a towering wall of sand rising hundreds of feet above the water. They feel more akin to the massive Sleeping Bear Dunes in the Lower Peninsula than anything else on Lake Superior.

I grew up in the Thunder Bay area. I regularly drove the Minnesota North Shore with my parents and other family members on countless roadtrips to Duluth, Minneapolis, and southern Wisconsin as a kid and teenager. When I went away to university in Kingston, Ontario, I drove the Ontario North Shore several times on Hwy 17 heading east (although I never took the time to properly explore it).

My first glimpse of the dunes was in 2014. We backpacked to Masse Homestead, set up camp, and hiked up the forested dune to the top. Before us stretched forested and bare dunes as far as we could see. It was our first-ever backpacking trip and our first-ever trip to Pictured Rocks beyond Miner’s Castle and Beach. I was stunned. I had no idea Lake Superior could have this much sand.

I thought I had some level of familiarity with the watershed at that point in time. But seeing the Grand Sable Dunes and all the sand completely overturned my worldview. I had seen beaches on Lake Superior before, but I had never seen this massive amount of sand.

At that moment, I knew I had so much more to learn and explore. This was a slow process. It had happened in spurts and starts. I didn’t understand the layers and ‘stacked maps’ at first. But that didn’t matter. The Grand Sable Dunes changed something in me and started me on a path of my slow journey of learning more. This changed how I related to the Lake—not just the dunes, but the entire waterbody.

The Log Slide and the Architecture of Sand

When we arrived at the Log Slide in October 2024 after traveling the Ontario North Shore, we walked the short trail and then took in the immense views.

I had visited the site about six months earlier in May with students. It was the day after I learned I had lost my job at Northland. It was a surreal experience. I was devastated and more of an emotional wreck than I had ever been in my life. But I was still moved by the site, and I was also moved seeing the effects it had on students viewing it for the first time. One student remarked that it was a place he could spend all day, just hanging out and taking in the scenery.

The sand is the main show at the Log Slide. The wooden chute is long gone. According to the sign at the site, there are no known pictures of it when it was in operation. But its shape in the sand remains.

Pondering the ‘stacked maps’ of our trip, something clicked for me. It was the final puzzle piece of a system we had been tracing for 1,300 miles. I realized the chute was gone but the lesson remained. The sand isn’t ‘weak’—it is adaptive. The dunes survive the winds of the Shipwreck Coast precisely because they are willing to shift.

For months, I had been mourning the ‘granite’ foundation of my tenure and my classroom, but standing on the edge of the Log Slide, my perspective shifted. I hadn’t lost my subject matter; I had simply traded a rigid institution for a diverse landscape. I realized that my new syllabus wouldn’t be found in a course catalog, but written in the land, the water, and the shifting light of a storm moving across the dunes, the basalt, or the Canadian Shield granite. I wasn’t looking for ‘closure’ anymore. I was beginning to look toward my future, and in that, I saw a classroom with no walls. I might be in uncharted waters, but there were opportunities still to discover.

We spent our remaining time at the Log Slide wandering through some remaining old-growth trees, greeting them like old friends and soaking in their grounding presence. We lingered as long as we felt was reasonable. Then we left, driving west on H-58 through a tunnel of brilliant oranges and reds.

Reflections on the North and South Shores

Driving home, I reflected on the significant geologic differences between the South Shore and North Shore of Lake Superior. Much of the Minnesota and Ontario North Shore is defined by basalt and the granite Canadian Shield. These are ancient, hard, rocks that resist the water. The shore often feels permanent, rugged, and sharp.

Much of the South Shore, including most of the eastern and central UP and my current home in the Bayfield Peninsula, is defined by sandstone and sand. It is softer, shifting, and constantly being sculpted by the wind and waves. The geology creates a different emotional resonance.

Sue Leaf, author and South Shore resident, describes it like this:

The North Shore’s rock formations rising high above the water make the lake inaccessible in most places. The water is deep and cold immediately offshore. There are few opportunities to swim or boat. The lake is a backdrop for human endeavors on land.

On the South Shore, people interact with Lake Superior. They boat, sail, paddle, and kayak. The shallow water in the bays warms sufficiently for swimming and wading. Anglers ply the water in vessels bristling with rods baited with gaudy lures. When South Shore residents speak of the lake, they use personal terms. They say, “The lake is a misunderstood Beauty.” Or “The Lake is the Boss.” They refer to her as “she.” (Impermanence, pg. xiv).

I get what Sue Leaf is talking about when it comes to the South Shore. However, her analysis of the North Shore often feels centered on Minnesota, leaving the Ontario shore—the largest stretch of the circle—strangely absent. As a historian, this ‘inaccessible’ narrative strikes me as a ‘convenient forgetting.’ It erases the primary highway of the Anishinaabe world. For the Anishinaabe and the fur traders who followed the water routes (including some of my own ancestors), the North Shore wasn’t any more inaccessible than stretches of the South Shore like the Pictured Rocks Cliffs. Both shores required technical skill and navigational knowledge, and Anishinaabe peoples taught fur traders these skills when they arrived.

While the South Shore ‘invites connection’ through its sandy shallows, the North Shore illustrates connection through its deep-water history. If the South Shore is about accessibility to the lake, the North Shore demands a witness to its scale. You cannot look at the 85 miles of protected water in the National Marine Conservation Area and see a ‘backdrop.’ From the paddlers in Nipigon to the families splashing at Katherine Cove or Pancake Bay, the love for the Big Lake is not a South Shore monopoly. It is a shared, intimate reality that spans the entire circle.

The Lake is big. The Lake is vast. The Lake is varied. Whether it is in Wisconsin, the UP, Minnesota, or Ontario, people speak about the Lake in personal terms. She shapes all their lives. The vibe on the South Shore is different, but the love for Lake Superior is woven into the fabric of the entire watershed. I’m always reminded of this whenever I circle the Lake and connect with the people who call the watershed home.

My role as a historian is to bridge these gaps, revealing the ‘stacked maps’ that connect the shores. When you see these layers, you realize the entire lake is a deep archive of human connection. Diving into that archive is what leads to a greater responsibility of stewardship.

The Return

On a shoulder-season Circle Tour with remarkably little precipitation, we finished the drive home in the rain. As we crossed over the Montreal River back into Wisconsin and returned to our little corner of the lake, I realized something important. I had started this trip to begin to heal from the heartbreak of losing my job at Northland College. I was angry at the institution and fearful of the future. I spent 14 days looking to have fun with Eugene and reconnect with Lake Superior. I wanted to reclaim what I felt it had taken from me last May.

I didn’t find “closure.” That would be too simple. I still had anger and confusion about Northland and my own future. But I succeeded in one of my main goals: Eugene and I had a lot of fun, and we made a lot of amazing memories. That alone made the trip worth it.

And something more important shifted in me too. As we were standing on the Log Slide, and I explained the history of the lumber industry to Eugene, I realized that I was still teaching. I didn’t have a classroom. I didn’t have tenure. But I had the lake. And I had the stories. The transition from Associate Professor to Outdoors Historian isn't a retreat; it's an expansion of who I can reach and connect with the complex and diverse histories of Lake Superior.

I drove home realizing that I hadn’t just taken a vacation. I had done the first week of fieldwork for a job I am just beginning to invent. Right now it is not my 9-to-5 job, but it’s the job that speaks to my heart. And it’s a job I want to do for you—to help you find the ‘stacked maps’ of your own journeys.

Next Saturday: The Circle Tour Logistics Masterclass

Closing the circle at Pictured Rocks was the moment I realized that while my classroom has changed, my syllabus remains. But fieldwork—especially in the “Secret Season”—requires more than just historical curiosity; it requires the right tools because you can't read the deep map if you're freezing in your tent.

Next week, I’m pulling back the curtain on the mechanics of this more than 1,300 mile journey. I’ll be sharing my Circle Tour Logistics Masterclass, including:

• The “Secret Season” Gear Report: We wanted a Sawzall and a hatchet, and why we made two different Canadian Tire “lighting runs.”

• The Border Strategy: A guide to navigating customs with a truck full of gear (and what not to bring across).

• The Historian’s Superlatives: My “Best of” list for the entire loop, from the most profound hidden history to the best campsite for reading the depths.

• Our Favorite Meals: Our “go-to” favorites that kept us warm and fed on chilly October nights.

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And to my paid subscribers: After the Logistics Masterclass, stay tuned for an exclusive ‘Director’s Cut,’ including raw footage from the trail and my full research reading list for this series. If you want to see these features, now is a great time to become a paid subscriber. It’s a direct way to support my deep-dive research into the hidden geographies of the Great Lakes. This includes a piece I’m working on now about the forgotten “Great Lakes Middle Passage,” content about my local region of the Chequamegon Bay, and more posts about my favorite spots along the Circle Tour and throughout the northern Great Lakes.

If you’ve followed this series, you know when I share about my favorite spots, I’m not sharing the same “fluff” that many travel sites recycle. When I pull over at a scenic overlook and take in the landscape and read a sign, I’m processing the ‘stacked maps’ of the site and understanding how they are part of a story of stewardship, industries, and survival. Your support allows me to keep ‘reading the depths’ and bringing these hidden stories to the surface.

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If you’re ready to start mapping these nuances for yourself, make sure to tune in next week—and don’t forget to grab your copy of the Field Guide to start building your own syllabus.

It contains the itineraries, checklists, and planning tips I used to navigate these 1,300 miles multiple times. Most importantly, it includes “historian’s pivots”: the moments where a scenic view reveals a deeper story of industry or ecology. If you’ve found value in these stories, purchasing the Guide is the best way to support this ‘classroom with no walls’ and start planning your own journey through these layers of history.

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Where is the one spot on the Lake Superior Circle Tour that feels like 'home' to you, even if you don't live there?

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Part travelogue, part history, this series explores the intersection of industrial ruins, boreal ecology, and personal transition. It is a journey to see how landscapes survive when the systems built upon them—including mines, railroads, and careers in higher education—fall apart. This is Part 5 of 7. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, Part 3 here, and Part 4 here.

On our final morning at Pukaskwa, we packed up with the efficiency of a team that had been living out of a truck for nine days. We had found our rhythm in the ‘inky dark’ of the boreal forest, but the real world was calling us back. We each had responsibilities to return to, but that didn’t mean we rushed our exit.

Even with 250 miles and an international border crossing ahead of us, we took our time. Shortly after leaving Pukaskwa we stopped at a historical marker in the Biigtigong (Pic River) Anishinaabe Nation. Anyone who has traveled with me knows that I love stopping at historical markers; I use them as entry points into the deeper landscape.

This specific marker was the perfect place to begin our final day on the Ontario North Shore. It was a reminder that this watershed has been a highway for Anishinaabe peoples, fur traders, and commerce long before it was a modern tourist route.

The historic marker on the lands of a contemporary sovereign First Nation was yet another reminder of how Anishinaabe peoples have stewarded this watershed in both the past and present. It felt like a fitting way to begin our final day driving the Ontario North Shore.

Kitsch, Culture, and Complexities

We fueled up the Tundra and our stomachs in White River, getting gas and snacks at A&W, and made the required visit to say hi to the Winnie the Pooh statue. While it's a lighthearted stop, the story of 'Winnie'—the black bear cub from White River who eventually inspired A.A. Milne—is another layer of the 'stacked maps' that connect this rugged corridor to a much larger global imagination. But just down the road, the 'stacked maps' shifted from literary icons to abandoned infrastructure. We stretched our legs at a no-longer-operating provincial park. It was an impromptu stop that tied together many of the recurring themes. In hindsight, it was one of the most secluded, peaceful stops of the day. While tourism isn’t a boom-bust industry (and in some communities, it is positioned as a sustainable alternative to volatile industries based on extraction), it a different kind of reminder of failed systems and abandoned infrastructure.1

Next, we made the mandatory stop in Wawa to visit the famous Goose statue. It’s kitschy and exactly the kind of quirky that speaks to me, but as a historian, I can’t help but notice the layers of translation at play. While the town’s name is often cited as the Ojibwe word for 'Goose,' the linguistic reality is more specific. The Ojibwe word we’we (in the most commonly used orthography for the language, an ‘e’ makes a long ‘a’ sound that would rhyme with ‘hay’ or the Canadian ‘eh’) actually refers to the Snow Goose. Snow geese look quite different from the massive Canada Goose immortalized in the statue. The Ojibwe word for Canada goose is very different: nika. It’s a small detail, but it’s a reminder of how easily local narratives can oversimplify the complex Indigenous geographies they claim to represent.

We also stopped at Tim Hortons where Eugene was desperate for a latte after days of camp coffee. We found their machine broken. We took it as a sign to keep moving.

The Windshield Tour: Lake Superior Provincial Park

We left Wawa behind and crossed into Lake Superior Provincial Park. This landscape rivals the stretch from Nipigon to Marathon for beauty. In fact, many people feel it is the most beautiful stretch of the Ontario Shore (or the entire Circle Tour). The vibe is different here: you are transitioning from the true boreal forest to the mixed conifer and hardwood forest that defines the eastern part of the lake and the majority of the South Shore. It’s a unique stretch: you get a lot more hardwoods along with the dramatic Ontario topography.

We also noticed that it was a much busier section. This wasn’t surprising: it was the Saturday of the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend and we were closer to the population centers of Ontario than when we started the trip in the northwestern part of the province. Many people (including some residents of Ontario) don’t realize the province’s full scale. It’s approximately 80,000 square miles larger than the state of Texas. Maybe there needs to be an “Everything’s bigger in Ontario” rebranding.

As I mentioned in Part 2, Ontario has a lot of impressively large provincial parks. The biggest is Polar Bear Provincial Park at over 5.8 million acres. Second is Wabakimi Provincial Park at over 2.2 million acres. Neither of these parks are accessible by road. Third largest is Algonquin Park at over 1.89 million acres and Quetico comes in close behind at over 1.8 million acres. Next is Opasquia Provincial Park with over 1.5 million acres, however, like Polar Bear and Wabakimi, there is no road access.

Lake Superior Provincial Park trails behind these at over 395,000 acres. This might sound measly in comparison to the top four, but it still dwarfs other provincial and state parks directly on the Circle Tour (the largest state park in Michigan, the Porcupine Mountains, is “only” approximately 60,000 acres).2

Of course, whenever there are public lands of this size in North America, it illustrates a historical tension: these were lands controlled by Indigenous peoples until government entitities forced them off (through treaties or military actions). And even when treaties promised Indigenous peoples the rights to use government-owned lands for hunting, fishing, and gathering, these rights were rarely honored until after long, legal battles in the late twentieth-century.

The Ancient Face in the Cliffs

Our first stop in the park was at Old Woman Bay, one of my absolute favorite spots on the lake. The bay is named for the face of an old woman that can be seen in the 400-foot (200-meter) standing cliffs on the south side of the bay. We wandered the long curve of the sandy beach for an hour and chatted with a salmon fisherman who had just returned from the water.

Old Woman Bay is a site I fell in love with when driving from Thunder Bay to Kingston, Ontario during my undergraduate and master’s degrees. I never had much time to explore the Ontario North Shore on those trips, but by chance, I stopped at Old Woman Bay once, and something about it spoke to my soul.

Now I know that when you look south at the massive 400-foot cliffs, you are looking at the edge of a continental scar. While these cliffs are made of Canadian Shield granite, they were created by the Mid-Continent Rift, the same 1.1 billion-year-old tear in the earth that created the Sawtooth Mountains along the Minnesota North Shore and the Nor’Westers in Thunder Bay and the Penokee Hills in northwestern Wisconsin and the rugged copper-laden terrain of the Keweenaw.

The MCR is the bedrock for the mineral wealth (like iron, silver, and copper) that drove the very "extraction systems" that have defined the landscape since land cession treaties were signed in the mid-nineteenth century. Deep clefts in the rock create the face of the woman and illustrate differential erosion along geologic faults. These same faults acted as the plumbing system for the mineral-rich fluids that, a billion years later, would draw the very mining interests we had been tracking along our Circle Tour.

The land continues to speak to my soul here. I wonder how a human can see this site and not feel moved on a deep level. It feels like a bridge between the true boreal further west and the mixed hardwoods further south, and a dramatic duet between the primordial and the accessible. Unlike the sandy stretches of the South Shore, Old Woman Bay offers a long, inviting curve of beach that sits directly in the shadow of massive and ancient 400-foot cliffs. You have the soft sand underfoot: an entry point to the water. This grounding feeling is immediately contrasted with the stoic, Canadian Shield granite sculpted by the MCR. And as the shifting sky moves light across the ‘face’ in the rock, you’re reminded that this landscape isn’t just a backdrop; it is a living conversation between the elements.

Spontaneous Backroad Detours

Our next stop in the park was a spontaneous detour to Gargantua Harbor. Faced with a sign warning of a 14-kilometer rough road one-way, I asked Eugene if we should turn back. His response was typical. He said, “I’m up for exploring!” Formerly a logging and fishing village in the 1930s and 1940s, today, Gargantua is a popular access point for the Lake Superior Coastal Trail.

The narrow two-track was a scenic drive through the fall colors, and we received another distinct reward for our efforts: the cobble beach near the Gargantua trailhead was the most peaceful stop we found in the park. We didn’t have time for much exploring, but we enjoyed our break on the beach and took a quick along the Coastal Trail.

Like so many other spots, this was another place we’d need to return to in the future. In fact, at some point, I’m looking forward to planning an entire trip at Lake Superior Provincial Park to explore, camp, hike, and paddle.

The Specters of Extraction and the Road to Sovereignty

At the trailhead, the “stacked maps” of this landscape are visible in the signage alone. A faded Ontario Parks sign describes the harbor as “a place shrouded in fog and legend,” while another nearby panel notes the area is “steeped in history,” claiming that “to the Ojibwa, its first inhabitants, Gargantua was a sacred place.” This is the language of a finished story—one that romanticizes the past to the point of abstraction while relegating Indigenous connection to the past tense.

But just 20 feet away stands a bright, assertive new sign from the Batchewana First Nation. It identifies the area as Nanabozhung and explains that these are their active ceremonial and cultural grounds. It is a striking juxtaposition: one map treats the land as a mystery to be explored; the other reclaims it as a home that never stopped being sacred.

The Batchewana First Nation sign is a recent addition necessitated by the violent history of settler colonialism (a fancy way of refering to the process of settlers, or non-Indigenous peoples, asserting claims and a permanent presence on Indigenous lands). Long before fur traders arrived, Gargantua Harbor was a vital fishing site for Anishinaabe people. However, during the development of Lake Superior Provincial Park in the early 1940s, Batchewana community members were evicted from their ancestral fishing village. On both sides of the border, colonial practices have historically included evicting Anishinaabe people from traditional grounds and criminalizing the exercise of their guaranteed treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory (a subject I explore in my previous post on Gishkiitawag, or Joe White).

The Outdoors Historian

The Ojibwe Hunter and the American Game Warden

The snow was already on the ground near Long Lake in Washburn County, Wisconsin, on December 13, 1894. Giishkitawag, an Ojibwe leader also known as “Joe White,” was doing what his ancestors had done for millenniums: providing for his family. He was traveling with his wife, children, and friends, moving between the reservation created half a century ago …

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7 months ago · 10 likes · 3 comments · The Outdoors Historian

The final two kilometers of the road we used to reach the harbor is itself an act of reclamation. In 2007, the Batchewana First Nation established road access to their harbor by constructing two-kilometers of gravel road over what the park had previously managed only as a walking trail. Their actions to assert sovereignty are the sole reason vehicle access to this shoreline exists today.3

East of the cobble beach was a natural harbor where a fishing and logging community was established in the late nineteenth century. The first lighthouse was established around 1899. During its existence, the village was accessible only by water; a boat brought supplies twice a year. The fish was stored in an ice house and shipped to Sault Ste Maries.

The settler community reached its peak in the 1930s and early ‘40s. The introduction of the sea lamprey essentially destroyed the commercial fishery and the community that depended on it. Gargantua—like Jackfish—is a ghost of industries past on Ontario’s North Shore.

Throughout the series, I’ve discussed the connection between Land, Water, and Sky. At Gargantua, we clearly see how People enter this relationship. When the ecology of the Water shifted, the community of recently arrived settlers couldn’t survive. Meanwhile, the Anishinaabe continued to fish the region as they had for millennia, until they were forced out by the provincial government’s goal to control Land. It is a lesson in resilience: while extractive systems are temporary and vulnerable, a landscape collectively stewarded as a permanent home can outlast even the most dramatic environmental shifts.

The remnants of settler communities on the shore are a reminder that systems built around extracting wealth for individual profit are inherently fragile. In the case of Gargantua, the community was rendered obsolete by a single biological shift like the sea lamprey. They stand in stark contrast to the stewardship of the Anishinaabe, who have collectively maintained a holistic relationship with these waterways for generations. While these industrial towns were abandoned the moment the ‘boom’ turned to ‘bust,’ the Anishinaabe presence remains a continuous thread of diplomacy and survival. It is a lesson in resilience: while extractive systems are temporary and vulnerable, a landscape collectively stewarded as a permanent home can outlast even the most dramatic environmental shifts.

Accesible and Popular Tourist Pullovers

We left the ghosts of Gargantua and continued south to Katherine Cove and Agawa Bay. The scenery was still stunning, but the reality of the holiday weekend set in. For the first time on the trip, we had to share scenic overlooks with other tourists (most headed the opposite direction from us). After the profound quiet of most of the trip, Lake Superior Provincial Park felt busy. We were seeing the same lake, but we “weren’t in Pukaskwa anymore.” We were in the “Canadian Long Weekend.”

Katherine Cove is famous for its shallow, crystal-clear water and the “Bathtub” island just offshore. It is a stunning spot that’s great for a quick break to stretch your legs, but it was also the busiest stop in Ontario we experienced.

Then, we drove through Agawa Bay campground. It reminded us of our final night at Lake Marie Louise. Strong winds blew directly off the lake and at the sites. This is where we originally planned to camp, before extending our time at Neys and Pukaskwa. The weather reassured us of our decision to head on to Sault Ste. Marie and seek out a hotel room. Yes, lake front sites have a gorgeous view, but the trade off is there is no protection if the wind picks up! We’ve tent camped on Lake Superior getting hit head on by high winds before, and it’s a challenging situation we didn’t feel like tackling.

The Pictographs: A Missing Stop

During our drive through Lake Superior Provincial Park, we didn’t stop at one of the most iconic sites: the Agawa Rock Pictographs. These red ochre images were painted on the sheer granite cliffs hundreds of years ago and are powerful expressions of Anishinaabe cosmology and history, and yet another reminder of Anishinaabe people’s long relationship with the watershed.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit them once, and I truly look forward to returning. However, if you’re planning a Lake Superior Circle Tour in the fall, you must account for the fact that the site closes to the public in mid-September. These seasonal closures ensure that Anishinaabe people can perform ceremonies in private at this sacred site.

Safety is the other driving factor for the closure. To view the pictographs, you must walk out onto a narrow, sloped stone ledge that drops directly into the deep water of the lake. While Lake Superior’s most dramatic storms usually come later in the season (the infamous “Gales of November”), fall weather in general is significantly more hazardous than the summer. Even a moderate swell can send waves washing over the ledge, making the granite incredibly slippery and the viewing area treacherous. It’s a reminder that even the most sacred and 'permanent' historical sites require a constant negotiation with the present moment; the Lake always gets the final word on when we are allowed to look.

The closure at the pictographs was a reminder that while the Ontario North Shore might feel wild, rugged, and isolated, this narrative relies on a convenient forgetting of the past. Anishinaabe people have called this place home for generations, and maintained a complex network of trade, diplomacy, and stewardship long before Europeans arrived.

And even when they are open, accessing the pictographs feels like a fleeting gift from the Lake. To stand on that ledge requires a dynamic balancing of elements: you need the water to be calm and the sky to be settled enough that no precipitation is produced.

Crossing the Border: From Permanent Rock to Shifting Sands

Our final stop after leaving Lake Superior Provincial Park was Alona Bay, a pullover on the side of Highway 17. There’s both an Alona Bay Lookout and an a pullover where you can hike down and access the shore. We chose the latter and said goodbye to the Ontario Shore while taking in the beauty of a moody sunset from our second cobble beach of the day.

This leg of the journey was so full of ‘stacked maps’ and hidden histories that I’ve decided to split the conclusion of this series into two parts. At 1,300 + miles, the Lake is too big to rush—and so is the story of how we find our way home when the systems we’ve relied on collapse. Next week, I’ll focus on the final leg our our journey: driving home through the UP.

In the meantime, if you’re ready to start mapping these nuances for yourself, my Circle Tour Field Guide is now available. It includes the exact itineraries, “Historian’s Pivots” (the moments where a scenic view reveals a deeper story of industry or ecology), and seasonal planning tips (like how to navigate those Agawa closures) that I used to turn these 1,300 plus miles into a meaningful journey through history.

Get the Field Guide & Start Planning!

Next week, in the series finale, we cross the International Bridge into the Michigan Soo. We’ll leave the stoic granite of the North Shore behind for the towering, shifting dunes of Pictured Rocks. It was there, standing on the edge of the Log Slide, that the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place: I realized that while I may have lost my classroom, I had finally found my syllabus.

Join me next week as we close the circle.

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Part travelogue, part history, this series explores the intersection of industrial ruins, boreal ecology, and personal transition. It is a journey to see how landscapes survive when the systems built upon them—including mines, railroads, and careers in higher education—fall apart. This is Part 4 of 6. You can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.

We left Neys with a sense of heaviness and excitement. The heaviness came not from sadness, but from the weight of the history we had absorbed—a burgeoning awareness of everything a landscape remembers, even after the systems built upon it fall away. Our excitement was tied to our next destination: Pukaskwa National Park, a place often called the “Wild Shore” of Lake Superior.

It is a romantic name. It suggests a place untouched and uninhabited. But as we drove south toward Marathon, we were reminded that “wild” is often just a synonym for “unindustrialized.” This shore has been a home for millennia.

We were reminded of that at our very first stop.

Lake of the Torches

Before entering the park, we stopped at the Gchi-Waaswaaganing Cultural Center, run by the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg Nation (Pic River First Nation). The view from here is commanding, looking out over a harbor that was once a prime fishery for the Anishinaabe.

The name Gchi-Waaswaaganing translates to “Place of the Big Lake of Torches.” It refers to the traditional practice of spearfishing by birch bark torchlight. For me, this sparked an immediate connection to home. In Northern Wisconsin, Lac du Flambeau is the French translation of the exact same concept—Waaswaaganing, or “Lake of Torches.”

It was a reminder that modern borders—like Wisconsin versus Ontario, or the US versus Canada—are recent overlays on a much older and interconnected Anishinaabe geography. It is also a reminder that this is a living geography; Anishinaabe people currently exercise their treaty rights to hunt, fish, and gather on both sides of this border.

Originally called Peninsula, the nearby town has another Wisconsin echo. It was renamed “Marathon” in the 1940s when the Marathon Corporation, a paper company founded in Wisconsin, built a massive mill on the harbor. The mill closed in 2009 and is now largely demolished. It is another chapter in the boom-and-bust story of the North.

But it also represents a deeper extractive history: Canadian boreal timber was harvested here to feed American markets back in Wisconsin. The wealth flowed south across the border, and when the macro-systems shifted, the ruins of the papermill were left behind. Standing there as a Canadian born-and-raised in Thunder Bay who now lives in Wisconsin, looking at the footprint of a Wisconsin company, the 'Refuge and Refuse' history of the lake felt like a closed loop. Like the lumber, I had flowed south. But I also kept my roots anchored in the north.

The sign outside the cultural center moved beyond that boom-bust paradigm to talk about the future. It reads: “The forest can provide food, shelters, medicines, green energies, and much more.” By listening and learning to Anishinaabe people who have stewarded this land for generations, we can move beyond the boom-bust cycles that developed after land cession treaties were signed in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Inky Dark

We drove across the bridge over the Pic River and arrived at the Pukaskwa gatehouse. It was a personal milestone because it was the first time either Eugene or I had visited this park.

To understand Pukaskwa, you have to understand its scale:

• Pukaskwa National Park: 464,000 acres (mostly land).

• Isle Royale National Park: 571,520 acres (but only 133,760 acres is land).

• Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore: 73,235 acres.

By landmass, Pukaskwa is the largest national park in the Lake Superior watershed. It is an immense, roadless interior of granite and spruce. The campground at Hattie Cove is just a tiny pinprick on the edge of a vast wilderness.

Pukaskwa offers epic backpacking opportunities and phenomenal day hikes. My last post makes my loves of Neys clear, but if you want to spend a couple days doing day hikes on the Ontario North Shore, Pukaskwa should be your top pick.

We secured a campsite in the non-electric loop. Honestly, after the spacious, lake-facing sites at Neys, Pukaskwa felt a bit disappointing at first. The sites are small and enclosed by thick trees with no view of the water. But by setting the campground back from the shore, the park preserves the “Wild Shore” aesthetic completely.

And the campsites had a different beauty to share with us: the darkest nights I have ever experienced.

I have camped in the dark sky sanctuaries of the Boundary Waters and the Porkies. But Pukaskwa is different. It wasn’t just dark. It was an inky, velvety blackness. Standing beside the towering black spruce with the northern lights occasionally flickering overhead, the darkness felt physical. It wrapped around us in a way that was absolute. At Neys, we fell in love with the brilliance of the sky at sunset. But at Pukaskwa, it was the dark that hooked me.

The Pinnacle: Manitou Miikana

The next morning, we hiked the Manitou Miikana (Spirit Trail). This 2 km loop quickly became my favorite short hike on all of Lake Superior.

This trail epitomizes the boreal forest. I often talk about the Northwoods in Wisconsin and the UP, which are mixed hardwood and conifer forests. But Pukaskwa is true boreal. It is a world of black spruce, paper birch, Old Man’s Beard lichen draping the branches, and thick carpets of sphagnum moss.

The Manitou Miikana trail climbs to a series of overlooks where the granite plunges directly into the lake. Standing there and looking out at a horizon that swallowed the sky, I felt the “Land, Lake, Sky” theme of our trip reach its pinnacle.

I struggle with choosing “favorite” parts of the lake. There are places I’ve felt an instant connection with, like Old Woman Bay. There are places I’ve fallen more in love with as I learn their complexity, like the Keweenaw Peninsula.

Then there’s a very special category of places that simply take my breath away on first sight. This list includes Grand Portal Point at Pictured Rocks. It includes Ouimet Canyon. And it now includes the overlooks on the Manitou Miikana Trail.

I struggled to capture the moment on my cellphone. The bright, sunny October day was perfect for hiking, but terrible for photos. After several efforts, I abandoned the camera and just took it all in. I let the immensity of the views roll over me.

It was here that the last lingering stress of my job loss seemed to dissolve into the scale of the landscape. When you are standing on the edge of 464,000 acres of boreal forest next to the world’s largest lake, your own professional crisis feels properly small. It doesn’t disappear, but it finds its correct proportion.

Eventually, we stepped away from the overlooks. I felt like I could have stayed there endlessly, watching the interplay of light on the water, but we wanted to explore. We continued onto the Beach Trail to explore small rocky coves (which Eugene helped me climb down into) intermixed with a rare dune ecosystem.

Seeing dunes on this rock-bound coast triggered a memory from May 2019. I was exploring the other side of the Pic River with a friend, a fellow professor, and our students. The bridge to Pukaskwa was closed, but we unexpectedly ran into a citizen of the Biigtigong Nishnaabeg who offered to give us a tour of their powwow grounds and the dunes along the lake.

Our impromptu tour took place during a cold, windy, “freezing mix” mid-May day. Our guide was shocked to hear we were camping, noting that locals usually wait until after the Victoria Day long weekend to even attempt it. It was a spontaneous moment of connection, similar to meeting the man at Jackfish earlier on this trip. It reminded me again that this watershed is shaped by a web of relationships.

Complicating the Wilderness

Eventually, the beach trail took us back to the campground. After a late lunch, we headed to Hattie Cove to check out the canoe launch, where we found our first set of iconic red Parks Canada chairs.

I had originally hoped to visit Schreiber Beach and find the chairs I had sat in with my co-professor back in 2019, but our extended explorations at Jackfish meant we ran out of time. Sometimes, prioritizing off-the-beaten-track sites means you don’t get to everything on your list.

While at Hattie Cove, we also visited the Anishinaabe Camp. The camp plays an important role in complicating the idea of “wilderness.” This isn’t just nature. It is a political and cultural landscape.

From there, we hiked the beginning section of the Coastal Trail, walking through areas managed by controlled burns. This practice, rooted in Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK), was used historically in the Boundary Waters and Apostle Islands and is being reintroduced today. Seeing it applied here reinforced a central truth: this “wild” shore has always been a managed home.

Lows and Highs: The Rock-Breaker and the View from the Headlands

On our final morning, we hiked the Southern Headlands Trail. The weather decided to show us every mood Superior has. We saw fog, rain, wind, and sudden bursts of sun all in the span of two hours.

We spent hours on this short 2.2 km loop because we kept getting distracted. We found patches of saxifrage, an arctic plant that survives in these cold and exposed micro-climates. Saxifrage is an ‘arctic disjunct’—a botanical holdover from the retreating glaciers of the Ice Age that got left behind when the climate warmed.

The name literally translates to ‘rock-breaker.’ It survives the harsh winds of the Wild Shore by clinging to the microscopic cracks in the 2.7-billion-year-old granite. Seeing it thrive there, against all odds, felt profoundly symbolic. If this tiny plant can carve out a life in the unyielding rock long after its world shifted, it gave me hope for navigating my own shifting landscape

Following the coast of the rocky peninsula, we watched the waves crash against the granite, turning the water a churning white. Eventually, the trail climbs and turns away from the exposed lake toward Hattie Cove. We found our second set of red Parks Canada chairs, sat down, and just breathed the cold, clean air.

I reflected on the stunning boreal landscape we had hiked through. The old birch. The Old Man’s Beard. The cedar. The sphagnum moss. The shallow, acidic soils over ancient bedrock. The saxifrage.

The institution may have taken my job, but it didn’t take the gift my colleagues gave me: the ability to read the ancient Canadian Shield bedrock and recognize the resilient arctic saxifrage clinging to its cracks.

I realized I could appreciate the complexity of this landscape specifically because of my time at Northland College. I taught in the Superior Connections program, where I learned from other faculty and community experts. It was my own crash course in the geology and natural history of Lake Superior. In other words, it was my own liberal arts education.

All of a sudden, the complexity of my experience hit me. I could be rightly angry at the “powers that be” who mismanaged the college into financial exigency. But I could also be deeply grateful to my faculty colleagues for the knowledge they shared, and for the memories we made teaching together in this watershed.

I realized that while the institution had taken my job, it hadn’t taken my eyes. Or my training as a historian. The ability to read this landscape—to see the saxifrage and the sphagnum for what they truly are—was a gift from my colleagues that I get to keep forever.

I could hold the anger in one hand and the gratitude in the other. A friend and former colleague used to joke that the answer to any question about the human history of the watershed is always: “It’s complicated.”

As I travel around the lake in this new phase of my life, my relationship to the watershed has changed. It’s gotten more multilayered. More complicated. And that is not a bad thing at all.

Leaving the Woods

We barely scratched the surface on this first visit to Pukaskwa. We left the White River Suspension Bridge (a challenging day hike) and the park’s interior waterways for a future visit. But leaving unfinished business is just a promise to return. Learning how to prioritize your energy—knowing when to push for a challenging hike and when to just sit in a red Parks Canada chair—is the secret to surviving the Circle Tour. (It’s exactly why I included pacing strategies and curated itineraries in my Field Guide).

We headed back to camp for a final dinner of enchiladas and debated our next move. We had one night left before the drive home. We decided to take a risk: we would leave Pukaskwa the next day, drive the spectacular Lake Superior Provincial Park, and try to find a motel for our final night.

It was a gamble to try this on a Saturday night on a holiday weekend during leaf-peeping season. But after the spiritual recharge of Pukaskwa, we felt ready for hot showers and climate-controlled lodging again. And for the first time in awhile, I felt like luck was on our side.

In Part 5, we cross back into the United States, chasing the fall color through Lake Superior Provincial Park, and ending our journey back on the South Shore.

🧭 Stop Planning, Start Driving.

One of the hardest parts of the Lake Superior Circle Tour is knowing where to stop and where to keep driving.

In this post, I mentioned that we skipped Schreiber Beach to spend more time at Jackfish, and chose the Manitou Miikana trail over the White River Suspension Bridge. Those are the kinds of strategic decisions that make or break a road trip.

You shouldn’t have to guess which trails are worth your time, or worry about missing the significance of an iconic stop.

That is exactly why I wrote The Lake Superior Circle Tour: A Historian’s Field Guide.

This digital guide is designed to help you read the landscape and travel with confidence. It includes:

• Google Maps Layers that visually illustrate the itinerary with the exact coordinates for the best overlooks, coffee shops, and breweries.

• Custom Itineraries (8, 10, 14 and 21-days) that tell you exactly how to pace your driving.

• The “Audio Syllabus” Playlist: A curated list of music and podcasts to match the history of the land you are driving through.

Grab your copy of the Field Guide here!

Need more hands-on help? If you are totally overwhelmed by the logistics, I also offer 1-Hour Strategy Sessions where we will jump on Zoom and build your perfect itinerary together.

Book a Strategy Session here!

Have you camped or hiked at Pukaskwa? What were your favorite parts? Let me know in the comments!

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In Part 2, our final night on the Sibley Peninsula was rocked by the strongest thunderstorm we’ve ever experienced in a tent. Leaving the Sleeping Giant, we headed east into the wind. We packed up in 70 km/h gusts, leaving a campground that many tenters had fled overnight.

The drive that followed—specifically the stretch from Nipigon to Marathon—challenges every assumption you might have about the “flat” interior of the continent. I will say it clearly: This is the most spectacular scenic drive on the entire Lake Superior Circle Tour. I know a lot of people favor a different section of the Ontario shore, but I stand by this choice. From Ouimet Canyon, to the Kama Cliffs, to the Rossport Islands, to the shores of Neys, it’s a breathtaking section of the Circle Tour. And since this section is home to the Casque Isles Hiking Trail and the Lake Superior Marine Conservation Area, we really just scratched the surface on what there is to explore by land or water.

The Cold Deep: Ouimet Canyon

Our first stop was Ouimet Canyon Provincial Park. This is a landscape where the earth seems to have simply pulled apart. The canyon is 150 meters (almost 500 feet) wide and drops 100 meters (over 300 feet) straight down into a floor that is home to a rare ecosystem.

The canyon exists because of a colossal diabase sill—the same 1.1-billion-year-old “sandwich filling” found on the mesas—that once capped this entire region. Over time, a massive vertical crack or fault developed in this thick volcanic layer.

Geologists suggest two theories for the canyon’s formation. One suggests that the sheer weight of glacial ice caused the 1.1 billion-year-old diabase sill to shift and slide. The second theory proposes that meltwater from retreating glaciers entered a massive crack in the diabase and tunneled through the softer rock beneath until the surface finally collapsed.

Because the canyon walls are made of such thick, insulating diabase, the floor of Ouimet Canyon stays perpetually chilled, never seeing the full heat of the summer sun. This “geological refrigerator” allows rare arctic-alpine plants to survive at the bottom, thousands of miles south of their usual home in the Arctic.

Standing at the overlook, you are essentially looking at a giant fracture in the Earth’s crust: the top of the cliffs represents the hard volcanic “cap” of the rift, while the shadows below hold a microclimate that has remained largely unchanged since the end of the last Ice Age.

The views brought back memories of leading my first student trip here in May 2019. We saw a moose where the canyon floor transitions to swamp, and the students spent the afternoon throwing May snowballs into the depths. It was a bittersweet memory. In 2019, I was introducing students to this land. Now, having lost my faculty position, I was standing here as a visitor.

At the same time, I was dazzled by the fall colors on the background of the stormy skies. And being a visitor came with its perks. It meant I was free, and able to explore how Eugene and I wanted to, without having to take into account the course learning outcomes, a preset schedule, or the needs of students.

Like the landscape, my feelings were layered, and sometimes fractured.

The Last of The Mesas

We stopped in Nipigon for the essentials: gas and a visit to Canada’s smallest Canadian Tire. Eugene needed a hatchet (having realized his Sawzall was great for creating chunks of wood, but we still needed something for splitting firewood), and I needed a spatula that I forgot.

After a stop at Love, Coffee, XO for Eugene’s last “real” lattes of the week, we crossed the Nipigon River Bridge. This bridge is a modern engineering marvel and the only link connecting Eastern and Western Canada. Yet it spans an ancestral Anishinaabe water highway that predates the bridge by millennia. The Nipigon River is the largest river on the Canadian side of the Lake Superior watershed and is often considered the headwaters of the Great Lakes. Near the river mouth are more flat-topped diabase-sill mesas and cuestas formed by the Midcontinent Rift. We camped near the rivermouth, overlooking this stunning landscape in 2019.

Properly equipped and fueled, we continued driving. We explored a two-track near the northernmost point of the lake, and we also explored the main lookouts along Highway 17. These provide stunning views of the landscape as you head toward one of the most dramatic diabase sills on the trip (along with Mount McKay and the Sleeping Giant), the Kama Cliffs. This is the section of drive I absolutely fell in love with. I’ve driven it before but never had the time to stop and linger at the lookouts. On this trip, it felt like stunning vista after stunning vista, with just enough sun in the unsettled skies to make the lake come alive with shades of blue and turquoise contrasted against the moody backdrop.

The Trapp Cabin and the Light Shows

We stopped at Rossport and looked at the chain of islands (like Wilson Island and St. Ignace Island) that were the final eastern outposts of the 1.1-billion-year-old volcanic sills that had defined the landscape since we crossed the border.

As we continued east, the “tableland” topography disappeared. Eventually we would reach the ancient, twisted granites of Pukaskwa National Park and Lake Superior Provincial Park, but first, we encountered the Coldwell Complex at Neys Provincial Park.

Neys is the eroded root of a massive volcano that was active 1.1 billion years ago. While it is geologically connected to the mesas of Thunder Bay, the landscape here feels sharper, starker, and more open to the full fetch of the lake.

When we arrived at Neys we checked into the Trapp Cabin. After the windstorm at Sleeping Giant, the solid walls felt like a luxury. But the real luxury was the sky.

That first night at Neys the “Land, Lake, and Sky” theme of our trip put on a “grand finale” mid-trip. We witnessed the most gorgeous sunset I have ever seen—surpassing even the sunsets facing due west that we’ve seen from the dunes of Lake Michigan or the shores of Drummond Island. The sky danced in an array of pinks, purples, and oranges. The wet sand reflected the colors and clouds like a mirror, dissolving the horizon line entirely. We took off our shoes and danced around in the wet sand, taking in the splendor of it all. Something lifted off of me in that moment.

As if that wasn’t enough, the night ended with a northern lights show that rivaled memories from my childhood. Standing on the beach, watching columns of red and green dance over the water, I felt a profound sense of both awe and peace. The isolation of Neys healed something in me. It felt magical. But as I would soon learn, this beauty masked a history of profound confinement.

The Ghosts of Jackfish

The next morning, we woke to sea smoke rolling off the lake. We took our time in the morning, drinking coffee with maple syrup and cream, and taking in the misty sunrise. Our mission for the day was to stop at Aguasabon Gorge.

The water was low at the gorge compared to my last visit in 2019 when the winter runoff has it at high flow, but it was still impressive to see the geology. The rock itself tells a story of the Midcontinent Rift. The gorge is carved through massive volcanic flows where the interaction between lava and water created a complex mix of structures. The high walls of the gorge provide a “side-view” of the volcanic layers, allowing you to see how different flows were stacked on top of each other and the interaction of the river with the 1.1-billion-year-old rock that has exposed internal volcanic textures that are otherwise hidden beneath the surface.

Next we were headed to find Jackfish, a ghost town I had failed to reach on a previous trip with students in 2019.

Jackfish was born at the turn of the 20th century to serve the Canadian Pacific Railway. It was a coal dock: a place where fuel was offloaded to power the steam engines that conquered the Canadian West. Train engines switching from steam to diesel contributed to Jackfish’s decline. Several fires and the ecological disaster of the sea lamprey, which decimated the commercial fishery, sealed the community’s fate.

The road in was narrow and steep, but Eugene’s Tundra handled it. We found ourselves standing amidst the skeletons of the town: old abandoned cabins and the rotting pilings of the coal docks.

At Jackfish, you are standing in a dramatic “transition zone” where you officially step off the relatively young, 1.1-billion-year-old volcanic rocks of the Midcontinent Rift and back onto the ancient foundation of the North American continent. These rocks are part of the Canadian Shield, dating back a staggering 2.7 billion years. Unlike the uniform, massive volcanic Coldwell Formation found at Neys, the granites and greenstones here bear the scars of immense heat and pressure from the earth’s early history, often showing a “stretched” or layered texture known as foliation.

Because of its unique position on the shoreline, Jackfish Bay acts as a natural geological trap, creating pocket beaches that serve as a “sampler” of the entire North Shore’s history. As you walk along the shore, you aren’t just seeing local stone; you are sifting through a billion-year timeline of the Great Lakes region, where 2.7-billion-year-old “basement” rocks mingle with vibrant red jasper, banded iron formations, and the occasional agate carried here by the relentless power of Lake Superior. You also find plenty of polished glass and ceramics—ephemeral reminders of the shore’s human history.

An Unexpected Connection

There is a strange continuity to the North. While exploring, we met a man maintaining one of the few active summer camps remaining in the cove. We got to talking, and it turned out he knew my father. Stranger still, I had met his father years ago when I spent summers at Whitefish with my mom, trail riding on the Pee Dee.

Even here, miles down a rough road in a ghost town, the networks of the region held tight. It was a reminder that “abandoned” places in the North are rarely truly empty, just like they were never truly wilderness. They have been defined by relationships for generations across millennia.

He was also a high school teacher, and we stood there bemoaning the state of education. Even though we were talking about public and private systems on different sides of the border, the similarities were surprising, depressing, and comforting all at once. Having this discussion on the stunning shoreline with the shells of abandoned cottages peeking out at us from the woods was a strange juxtaposition.

Jackfish is a beautiful cove, but it is a dangerous beauty. We spotted wire and rusted metal snaking through the sand—the “refuse” of the coal era making the water unsafe for swimming. It was a different kind of physical manifestation of the industrial scars we saw at Black Beach.

Similar to Silver Islet, Jackfish embodies the extraction cycle. It grew to serve the railroad and the fisheries, but the transition to diesel engines and the devastation of the sea lamprey killed the town’s reason for being. Walking past the rotting wood and wire on the beach, I felt a resonance with my own situation. Jackfish didn’t fail because its people stopped working hard; it failed because the macro-systems around it shifted. Diesel replaced coal. Lampreys invaded the lake. The economy moved on, leaving the infrastructure behind. Standing in that quiet ghost town, the “boom-and-bust” of the North felt intensely personal.

Prisoner’s Cove: The Architecture of Confinement

We only planned to spend two nights at Neys, but we loved it so much we moved out of the cabin and into a campsite for an additional night. On our final day, we hiked the trail to The Point, passing through the area known as Prisoner’s Cove.

It is a jarring name for such a serene beach. During World War II, this park was Camp 100, an internment camp that held German POWs. In Canada, POWs were divided into categories: “greys,” who were largely ordinary citizens, and “blacks,” who were dedicated Nazis that were potentially violent and a higher escape risk. Neys was one of nine “Black Camps” in Canada, designated for Nazis considered high-risk for violence or escape. It was surrounded by three barbed wire fences 10 feet high, with a guard tower at each corner.

But the architecture of confinement here was repurposed. While Neys held German soldiers (and occasionally anti-Nazis), the region’s camps and road crews also held another group: Japanese Canadian internees.

The War Measures Act stripped Japanese Canadians of their civil rights, granting the government unlimited powers that could not be challenged in court. It labeled them as ‘enemy aliens’ and required them to carry ID cards until 1949. Canadian federal law mandated a ‘defense zone’ of 160 kilometers along the British Columbia coast, imagined as a buffer against covert communication with enemy submarines. As a result, many Japanese families were evicted and sent to camps that previously held POWs or assigned to road crews tasked with expanding highways.

In 1947, the province of Ontario bought the property, and in 1965, Neys Provincial Park was created. Walking the beach, the irony was heavy. I was here voluntarily, seeking refuge from the heartbreak of losing my job. I was free to walk the beach, cook enchiladas de pollo verdes over a fire, and marvel at the northern lights. Yet, less than a century ago, this same beach was a site of confinement for men who were forced to harvest the timber of the Coldwell Complex. Some of those men committed heinous acts of violence overseas. Others were imprisoned for their ethnic background, which unfairly marked them as the enemy.

On our final day, Eugene and I hiked The Point Trail and found the rotting hulls of the Pigeon River Timber Company boats. These vessels hauled workers (including POWs from Neys and the nearby Angler camp) up the Pic and Little Pic Rivers to logging camps.

Logging was dangerous work. Driving logs had its own set of risks. The weather can change quickly. Waves and wind can push boats off course. Rocky shoals beneath the surfacea were a constant threat to the boats. A boat without an engine was at particular risk—steering would be impossible in bad weather if it got separated from the tug.

Standing beside the boats on billion-year-old rock, watching the waves crash, I felt small. The lake felt immense, but the weight of the history felt even heavier. I thought about the networks represented here: German soldiers captured across the Atlantic, Japanese Canadians displaced from the Pacific coast, all converging on Anishinaabe land on this rocky point on the very North Shore of Lake Superior.

We continued east, hiking part of the Under the Volcano trail where you walk right over Magmatic Breccia—what I like to call ‘frozen violence.’ You can see sharp, shattered square blocks of ancient rock that were blown apart and trapped mid-melt in a matrix of bubbling magma. It is a stunning, tactile reminder of the sheer explosive force that created the Lake Superior basin.

On our hike back, we noticed wood chips washing up on the beach. We debated: were these fresh driftwood, chewed up by the violent lake? Or were they the century-old refuse of the logging operations, still cycling in the surf? At Neys, the line between natural and industrial is never quite clear.

Hook, Line, and Sinker

In the late afternoon sun, we took a drive to the mouth of the Little Pic River. We saw metal hooks still sunk into the rocks of the Coldwell Complex. These were the anchors where rafts of logs were held before being towed to sawmills. Today, this area is a popular launch for canoeists.

As we watched, a train roared down the CPR tracks overhead, a modern echo of the industry that shaped this place. Once again, I was struck by the contrasts. Recreation and industry. Past and present. These layers aren’t always visible if you don’t know what you’re looking for. That’s exactly the gap my new e-book The Lake Superior Circle Tour: A Historian’s Field Guide is designed to fill: it teaches you how to “read the landscape” at some of the most popular spots on the Circle Tour and shows you how to connect these sites into a logical itinerary that creates a meaningful trip.

On our drive back to our campsite, we saw a family of three well-fed bears. They were a reminder that while the prisoners and the guards are gone, the land has its own inhabitants whose ancestors have lived in the watershed for generations.

Neys is an important chapter in the story of many layers of Lake Superior history. For me, this complexity didn’t ruin the trip; it reignited my passion for the watershed. The “job loss” grief I had been carrying felt different here. The scenery was stunning, but the history was engaging. As a historian, I am drawn to the messy, uncomfortable stories: the treaty histories, the failed mines, the internment camps.

Neys hooked me. It is a place where the beauty draws you in, but the history makes you stay. It was the kind of place that reminded me of why I spent the time I did training to become a historian; the kind of place that reminds me why it matters to tell the stories of the intersections of human and land. And for the first time, I realized that I didn't need a classroom to tell these stories. The landscape itself is the syllabus, and maybe it matters more to teach it right here, out in the open.

In Part 4, we head to our final camping destination: Pukaskwa National Park, where the road ends and the “Wild Shore” begins.

Want to experience the Ontario North Shore like this?

As I mentioned, the best parts of the Lake Superior Circle Tour are often hidden in plain sight—like the history at Neys Provincial Park.

That is exactly why I wrote The Lake Superior Circle Tour: A Historian’s Field Guide.

Officially launching today, this 200+ page digital guide gives you my exact 8, 10, 14, and 21-day itineraries. It is packed with the deep history, “Reading the Landscape” geology lessons, and curated stops you need to stop guessing and start exploring. Grab your copy here!

Need more help?

• The Expert Route: Overwhelmed by the logistics? Book a 1-Hour Strategy Session to troubleshoot your itinerary with me.

• The DIY Route: Grab my Free Starter Guide.

Questions about your own Circle Tour or route? Let me know in the comments!

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In Part 1, we ended our journey on top of Mount McKay, looking out at the silhouette of the Sleeping Giant. Now, it was time to drive into that view.

Despite spending my childhood summers at Whitefish Lake and my grandparents’ camp at Dog Lake, I never visited the Sibley Peninsula with my family. For the first time on this trip, I was not revisiting memories. I was making new ones.

We left Whitefish and headed east, making the required stop at the Terry Fox Monument on the outskirts of Thunder Bay. The monument includes a life-sized statue. Looking across the water at the silhouette of the Sleeping Giant, you feel the weight of the layers of history. In the distance, you can see the Sleeping Giant—a geological formation created from eroded diabase sills at the tip of the Sibley Peninsula. It illustrates the predominant topography of the region (flat mesas or tablelands), but it is also distinctly unique. This particular mesa resembles a giant lying on his back. Anishinaabe stories describe the mountain as the shapeshifter and spiritual teacher Nanabozho. This is a place where the multilayered human history stretching back for generations is written across the rugged landscape.

The layer of history immediately in front of us was Terry Fox. He was a young man who lost his leg to osteosarcoma and attempted to run across Canada in a “Marathon of Hope” to raise money for cancer research. He ran a marathon a day on an artificial leg for 143 days before his cancer returned and forced him to stop near this very spot. There’s also a Visitor Center at the site with restrooms and plenty of brochures and maps.

Suspended at the Intersection of Land, Lake, and Sky: The Thunder Bay Lookout

We continued our drive to Marie Louise Lake Campground in Sleeping Giant Provincial Park. On the way, we made a detour to the Thunder Bay Lookout in the park. While the signs warned us about a rough road ahead when we turned off the main highway, we found it was very mild compared to where our UP trips take us. The lookout, however, got our heartbeats up.

The lookout features a steel platform that juts out over the cliff edge. Walking out onto it is a “trippy” experience. The mesh grate allows you to look straight down through your boots to the forest floor hundreds of feet below. It creates a visceral sense of vertigo, as if the ground has vanished and you are floating.

Back in Part 1, I wrote that the sign at the Susie Islands Overlook on Mount Josephine—'Land, Lake, Sky'—became the manifesto for our trip. Standing here on the lookout, that manifesto felt literal. We were no longer just looking at the sky; we were suspended in it.

The cliff we were hanging over is a nesting ground for Peregrine Falcons. These majestic guardians choose the sheer cliffs for similar reasons as the Animikii (Thunderbirds) do: high-altitude isolation and a commanding view.

Standing on that platform taking in this view, the scale of the Ontario park system also hits you. Sleeping Giant, founded in 1944, covers 61,604 acres. This makes it similar in size to Michigan’s largest state park, the Porcupine Mountains. However, in Ontario, Sleeping Giant is considered “modest.” For context, Algonquin Provincial Park is over 1.8 million acres, and it is only the third largest provincial park in Ontario. Polar Bear Provincial Park is the largest and is over 5.8 million acres, which is over half the size of the entire Upper Peninsula.

We finished our first day on the peninsula by setting up our campsite, where we were greeted with yet more views of the Sleeping Giant. We settled in around the fire and made grilled sausages with sauteed peppers and onions for dinner.

Hiking to The Sea Lion Through a Boreal World

The next day, we descended from the heights to the water to hike the 2.4 km (approximately 1.5 mile) round trip Sea Lion Trail. On the trail you travel across two billion years of history. The 1.9-billion-year-old seabed of the Rove shale is beneath your feet and the 1.1-billion-year-old volcanic “tooth” of the Sea Lion stands guard against the Big Lake.

While the nearby Sleeping Giant was formed by sills—magma sliding horizontally between sedimentary layers like the filling in a sandwich—the Sea Lion is a “dike,” a vertical rib of hard diabase that forced its way upward through a crack in the earth. Over the eons, the softer sedimentary rock of the Rove Formation that once surrounded this narrow wall was completely stripped away by the relentless waves and ice of Lake Superior, leaving behind a resilient fin of volcanic rock. The “lion” shape itself, including the distinctive arch, was eventually carved by the power of the lake hammering at a weak point in this ancient stone spine.

This geological history is the foundation for the layers of names and stories that describe the formation. European settlers christened it the sea lion for its resemblance to a profile of the animal looking out over the bay. The silhouette has changed over the years as the “head” eroded and fell into the water. Anishinaabe traditions hold the formation as a relative of Nanabozho, the cultural hero represented by the Sleeping Giant himself.

The hike toward the formation takes you through a boreal landscape of moss and old-growth birch and spruce. From this point on, our trip would take us deeper and deeper into this boreal world.

Silver Islet: The First Flash of the System

After the hike, we visited the Silver Islet General Store. This is a rare historic building from the 19th-century mining era still in active use. We treated ourselves to delicious pumpkin muffins and butter tarts. It was a modern comfort at a site once defined by high-stakes extraction. Then, we headed down to the shore.

Standing on the docks, the feeling is surprisingly intimate. You are not looking out at an infinite expanse of open water; you are looking directly at the jagged profile of Burnt Island. The view is framed with purpose: to the west, you see the opening to the literal Thunder Bay; to the east, the route leads toward Porphyry Island. It was a moment of our journey I vividly remember: standing on the wood planks, realizing I was at the intersection where the raw materials of this region were funneled out to the world.

This is where the industrial throughline of our trip truly begins. If the Pee Dee railroad was a failed attempt to extract iron, Silver Islet was the successful-yet-short-lived blueprint for extracting wealth from the lake.

Following the Robinson-Superior Treaty of 1850 when Anishinaabe people ceded the land in the Lake Superior watershed north of the border to British Canada (Canada becomes an independent nation in 1867), the Montreal Mining Company discovered a vein of pure silver in the Sibley Peninsula. For the Anishinaabeg, this was the home of Nanabozho, and the extraction was a violation of a sacred protector. For the newly created nation of Canada, it was the first proof that the western extents of Lake Superior held global wealth.

Between 1870 and 1884, miners fought the lake to extract millions of dollars in silver. They used pumps and built wooden cofferdams to hold back the icy waters of Superior. For a few years, the mine produced immense wealth for its stockholders. But like the Pee Dee railroad, this system was fragile. In 1884, a single missed coal shipment silenced the pumps, and the lake reclaimed the mine instantly. It was the ultimate boom-and-bust experiment.

The irony of 'Refuge vs. Refuse' surfaces here again. Similar to what we saw at Black Beach, where tourists lounge on taconite tailings, the residents of Silver Islet are finding refuge in a community formed around extraction. The layout of the village reinforces the immediacy of the water. The cottages are jammed right against the shoreline: it quickly turns from shore to road to cottage, with almost no buffer. The shore is armored with riprap and gabion cages to protect the structures from high-energy waves.

The people here live on the lip of the Big Lake at the tip of the peninsula. Beyond Burnt Island in the open waters lies the remains and refuse of the mine. Like so much of the history in the Lake Superior watershed, it is defined by resource extraction on Anishinaabe lands and waters.

Ephemeral Memorials: The Historic Cemetery

Another human side of this ambition is buried just behind the cottages. After our visit to Silver Islet General Store, Eugene and I hiked the Historic Cemetery Trail (1870–1937), which sits in the woods directly behind one row of summer homes.

It is a stark reminder that Silver Islet was not just a mine; it was the foundation of a village. Miners brought their wives and children to this jagged edge of the continent, trying to build a domestic life in the shadow of industrial danger. Their descendants continued to carve out a life here. The trail through the cemetery was narrow. The boreal forest felt thick, filtering the light even on a sunny day. Mushrooms emerged from rotting nurse logs, a vivid reminder of the intertwined relationship between life and death. The air felt still, and the layers of history felt personal.

Many graves were marked with wood; today, young trees grow directly through picket fences. Their roots are slowly merging with the memorials. The most tragic markers are for infants who lived only a few days. Even the “wealth” of the world’s richest mine could not provide the stability or medical care needed to save a newborn here. Standing on that bluff, looking at the birch trees reclaiming the graves, I felt a deep resonance. Systems rise and fall. Mines flood. Railroads rust. Colleges close. But the boreal forest returns.

The Survivors: Old Growth and Boreal Bogs

While much of the Sibley Peninsula’s history is industrial, its “soul” is found in the things that both predate and survive the extraction. Of course, there’s the Giant. But there’s also so much more.

We based our stay at the Marie Louise Lake Campground. Typically, Eugene and I avoid campgrounds with over a hundred sites, preferring the quiet of smaller, rustic locations. But Marie Louise is the only vehicle-accessible campground in the park. This is where the strategy of the shoulder season shines. In July, this place would be a bustling city of tents and RVs. In late fall, we had entire sections to ourselves. It allowed us to find solitude even in a “mega-campground.” And the reward was worth it: from our site, we had a direct, uninterrupted view of the Sleeping Giant.

Exploring different vacant sites in the campground, we stumbled upon a stand of old-growth cedar. Cedar (giizhik in the Anishinaabe language) is a tree of deep significance in the Great Lakes, known for its longevity and its role in Anishinaabe medicine. To find a stand that has escaped the logging saws of the last century felt like discovering a living archive.

To deepen this connection, we returned to the area near the Thunder Bay Lookout to hike the Bog Trail. This time, instead of looking out at the vastness, we looked down. While the cliffs are a place of wind and height, the bog is a place of springy sphagnum moss and acid-loving resilience.

We had the trail to ourselves. Walking over the lichen-covered hard Canadian Shield bedrock and stepping over exposed spruce and cedar roots on the trail, I thought about the woodland caribou that once roamed this peninsula. They were driven out over a century ago by the very settlement and logging we saw evidence of earlier. The lichen they rely on remains, but the ghosts of the herd are gone. Today, there are still small herds of caribou in the watershhed on the Slate Islands and the Michipicoten Island.

After spending time at the park, I think that these pockets of ancient life—the cedars, the bog, the falcons—join the Giant in being the soul of the peninsula.

The Wind of the Giant

Our time at Sleeping Giant ended with a reminder of Lake Superior’s power. When you camp on a peninsula in the Big Lake, it defines your weather even when you aren’t directly on its shores. A thunderstorm brought gusts over 70 km/h on our final night. We lay awake as the tent fabric of our Clam Tent snapped and wondering how well our tieouts and pegs would hold, listening to the Giant “breathing.” By early dawn the storm subsided, and while the winds stayed high, we drifted back to sleep until morning.

In the morning, we got up and congratulated ourselves on surviving the windiest night we’ve ever spent camping—a night when most campers in soft-sided tents fled. We packed up our site, showered in the park’s “comfort station,” and were ready to move on.

The storm, the bog, and the old-growth cedar were reminders: don’t let the provincial park signs fool you. This is a place where the spirits and non-human beings that have animated this landscape for millennia are still the most powerful and humans ignore them at our peril.

We said goodbye to the Sibley Peninsula and headed east toward Neys where the beauty of the sunset interacts with a dark chapter of Lake Superior history.

In Part 3, we travel to Neys Provincial Park to uncover the ghosts of Jackfish and the paradox of Prisoner’s Cove. We also visit “Ontario’s Grand Canyon” and drive what I think is the most striking section of the Lake Superior Circle Tour.

Planning your own journey to the Giant?

The Sibley Peninsula is one of the most complex logistical parts of the Circle Tour (especially if you want to book a campsite at Marie Louise Lake in July).

• Get the Basics: Download my Free Circle Tour Starter Guide.

• Get the Strategy: If you want to know which campsites have the best views of the Giant or how to time the Sea Lion hike to avoid the crowds, Book a 1-Hour Strategy Session.

P.S. I’ve been getting some questions about the specific maps and GPS coordinates for these stops. I’m putting the finishing touches on a comprehensive Navigator E-Book that includes detailed maps for the whole lake. I'm hoping to have it ready for you before the end of February—stay tuned!

Have you visited Sleeping Giant Provincial Park? What were your favorite parts Have questions about your own Circle Tour or route? Let me know in the comments!

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Throughout my life, I have lived in the rhythm of the Great Lakes watershed. From the rugged flat-topped diabase mesas of Thunder Bay to the nineteenth century limestone buildings in Kingston to the campus energy of the red-brick expanse of Ann Arbor to the bustling shores of Chicago and the sandstone cliffs of Bayfield. Throughout it all, the lakes have been my compass. I have led students around the Superior Circle Tour and spent over a decade camping in the hidden corners of the U.P. and Northern Wisconsin.

Yet, even for a lifelong resident and historian, there are always gaps. There are stretches of road seen through a windshield but where you haven’t spent sufficient time underfoot or haven’t yet had the chance to explore. For me, that gap was Highway 17 between Thunder Bay and Sault Ste. Marie. I’ve driven the highway about ten times, and I’ve even camped along this stretch. But I’ve never had the chance to truly take my time and explore.

Most people plan the Circle Tour for the height of summer. They cross their fingers for good weather and plan to make the most of the long days. But we have plenty of access to amazing beaches all summer on the South Shore of Wisconsin that are perfect for beating the heat. And because of my previous job as an assistant professor, we could never take long trips in the fall. So in late September, 2024, Eugene and I set out to show that autumn is the secret camping season of the North. The bugs are gone, the nights are crisp, and the lake takes on quickly, shifting moody, vibes you simply do not get in July.

This trip also marked a profound personal transition. Fresh from the heartbreak of losing my faculty position at Northland College—news I received, ironically, while leading students around this very lake—my connection to the water felt severed. For the first time, the lake didn’t offer refuge; it only mirrored my anger.

I needed this journey to find out if the water could still be my source of comfort without the title that had defined me. I needed to return not as a professor, but as a student of the water. Most of all, I needed to remind myself of how landscapes survive when the systems built upon them fall apart. And honestly? I needed a trip that would be fun and on my own schedule.

Refuge and Refuse: A Tale of Two Sands

Eugene and I began by leaving our home near Bayfield, Wisconsin and driving the Minnesota North Shore in a single day. I have driven this stretch countless times since childhood, so the challenge is finding the new within the familiar (with the time that we have available).

We stopped at Black Beach near Silver Bay for the first time. To the casual tourist, the dark sand is a scenic novelty. To a historian, it is a lesson in the material legacy of extraction. This beach is a man-made landscape formed by taconite (iron) tailings deposited by the Reserve Mining Company. Operating from 1956 to 1987, the company discharged 67,000 tons of waste rock into Lake Superior every day. That is the equivalent of a railroad car every two minutes.

Standing there, I contrasted the landscape with the Gay Stamp Sands on the eastern shore of the Keweenaw Peninsula. I had brought students to Gay several times during my years at Northland College. While Black Beach was created from iron, the sands at Gay are the waste product of copper mining. The scale of the stamps sands at Gay are terrifyingly vast. Over 22 million tons of coarse, dark sand have buried the natural beach and threaten Buffalo Reef, a 2,200-acre natural cobble off the eastern edge of the Keweenaw Peninsula and an important spawning grounds for lake trout and whitefish.

There is a deep irony here. For tourists and residents like myself, the lake is a place of refuge. Yet, as Black Beach and Gay prove, refuse has been foundational to this landscape in the wake of land cession treaties. Whether it is iron on the North Shore or copper in the Keweenaw, the scenes that draw tourists today are often built on the waste of yesterday’s industrial booms.

As we would find later in the trip, the line between waste and wonder is often just a matter of time and perspective.

A Found Manifesto

For me, Grand Marais, Minnesota marks a transition. After the bustling tourist town, Highway 61 gets quieter. Fewer vehicles venture further north toward the Grand Portage Anishinaabe Nation and the Canadian border.

Before crossing the border, we stopped at the Mount Josephine roadside overlook. We stood 400 feet above the water, and I felt like the trip truly began. I read a sign titled, “Land, Lake, Sky. The sign posed the unofficial manifesto for the rest of our trip. It asked: “What pieces of history, of your story, greet you?”

At that moment, I realized that as we moved north, the borders between land, lake, and sky were intensified. Unlike the sandy transitions of the South Shore, here it felt like the ancient rock of the Canadian Shield met the water with a stark precision.

I wonder if this precision is connected to isostatic rebound. While all shores of Lake Superior are rebounding from the crushing weight of the glaciers, the rate varies. The land on the North Shore is rising faster than the South shore. In some places, it rises up to half an inch a year. This slowly tilts the basin and reshapes the coast in a geological slow motion that we can’t see with the naked eye.

Our final stop before crossing the border was High Falls at Grand Portage State Park. The waterfall is on the Pigeon River that forms the international border today. I have visited this site many times, but it never gets old. It is a classic "cap-rock" waterfall where the hard diabase (created by the Midcontinent Rift) sits on top of the much softer 1.85 billion Rove Formation shales.

The hard diabase resisted the river’s path, and created a series of impassable waterfalls and rapids (the Cascades, Middle Falls, and High Falls). For 2,000 years, travelers including the Anishinaabe and the North West Company voyageurs, had to leave the river and carry their canoes 8.5 miles overland to bypass this exact geological “sandwich.”

Looking closely, you can see also see a more recent remnant of history at the falls. There are the remnants of a log flume on the Canadian side. As Canada and the United States worked to strengthen their hold on the region in the late 19th century—following the era of land cession treaties with Anishinaabe people—they targeted the resources of the area. They sought the forests and the minerals buried deep beneath them in the volcanic bedrock.

The Myth of the Wilderness: Re-reading the Borderlands

After we crossed the border, we continued toward my parents’ home in the Whitefish region down the remote Highway 593 (Devon Road).

Returning to my parents’ home in the Whitefish region wasn’t just a logistical stop; it was a chance to reconnect with them and my uncle who was visiting from Colorado. This was a place I spent my summers exploring as a kid and teen. It is a place that shaped my love of the outdoors.

As we followed the Pigeon River and then headed west, we drove deeeper into the boreal forest, crossing the Arrow River a few times and then roughly parallelling the Little Whitefish River. On our route from the border crossing to my parents we were essentially following the reverse route that logs would travel in the Cutover: through Whitefish Lake to the Little Whitefish River to the Arrow River to the Pigeon River.

For many, this drive feels like entering a “remote wilderness,” but my training as a historian has taught me to see it differently. Years ago, while studying under Michael Witgen at the University of Michigan, I read his work, An Infinity of Nations. I’ve reread it countless times since (and if anyone reading has read the entire book more than once, please reach out, because I feel like we’re probably a small a group and should connect!).

An Infinity of Nations fundamentally shifted my perspective. I stopped seeing the western Lake Superior region as a “frontier” and began seeing it as a sophisticated regional hub of Anishinaabe politics and power. While fur trade history often centers on Fort William—where my own paternal family history is rooted—the Anishinaabeg have maintained a complex network of trade, diplomacy, and stewardship throughout the region for centuries.

A Geological Transition

When you travel across the border and along the Devon Road, you also notice a striking difference in the geology. The Minnesota North Shore is mainly defined by the jagged shape of the Sawtooth Mountains. Along the Minnesota-Ontario border stretching northeast through Thunder Bay, the Sibley Peninsula, and Nipigon are flat-topped diabase sill mesas (also known as tablelands). Both of these formations were formed by the Midcontinent Rift, when the continent began trying to rip itself apart 1.1 billion years ago, but their unique stories led to distinctive shapes.

To understand this contrast, we have to look back nearly 1.9 billion years—long before the rift existed. At that time, an ancient sea covered the region, depositing iron-rich sediments that became the Gunflint Formation and a thick stack of flat, brittle shale known as the Rove Formation. Together, these formed a continuous belt of rock. However, when the Midcontinent Rift began to tear the continent apart 800 million years later, it acted like a geological wedge. A massive upwelling of magma—the Duluth Complex—punched through the center of this ancient belt, physically splitting it and pushing the Gunflint Range to the northeast and its sibling, the Mesabi Range, to the southwest.

While both the Sawtooths and the mesas share the same subterranean “plumbing system,” their final forms depended on whether the magma reached the sky or stayed hidden within that older foundation. The Sawtooth Mountains are the remains of extrusive lava flows. Vast blankets of liquid rock erupted onto the surface, stacking miles deep. As the center of the Lake Superior basin sank under this immense weight, the edges of these flows tilted inward toward the lake. Today, when you look at the “teeth” of the Sawtooths, you are seeing the broken, upturned edges of those ancient, leaning lava blankets.

The flat-topped sills of northwestern Ontario never actually saw the sky when they were born. They were intrusive, meaning the magma was injected horizontally into the “pages” of the pre-existing Rove shale. Like water being pumped into a closed book, the magma spread out between the flat sedimentary layers, creating a geological sandwich. Because they were shielded by these level layers, they remained flat rather than tilting.

Over the eons, erosion from wind, water, and ice acted as the great sculptor. In Ontario, the softer shale sitting on top of the sills was stripped away, but the erosion stopped once it hit the cooled, hard diabase. This left behind the iconic mesas of the Thunder Bay region—massive “stone umbrellas” of 1.1-billion-year-old rift rock protecting the 1.9-billion-year-old ancient seabed beneath them.

As Eugene and I drove the winding Devon Road through the mesas and cuestas, eventually we came to its intersection with Highway 588, and we passed the old train station at Silver Mountain. Originally built as a stop on the Port Arthur, Duluth and Western (PADW) Railway, locally known the “Pee Dee” Railroad, it was transformed into a restaurant and bar in the late twentieth century. Now it sits quietly closed. It is a reminder of the industrial past that once shaped this outdoors mecca.

Shadows in the Woods: The Pee Dee

The human history in the Northwestern Ontario borderlands is just as layered as the rock. My own coming of age history is layered on this land.

For decades, this trail has appeared in my life since my childhood. My mom used to ride horses along parts of the Pee Dee, and I’d explore other parts of it on foot with my older brother and our friends (a highlight for us was an old abandoned “army truck”). More recently, , as Eugene and I drove ATVs and vehicles through the backcountry, we were often following or crossing the paths of this old grade.

Built in the late 19th century, the Pee Dee was a small, regional ambition with a specific goal: connect the silver and iron mines of the Gunflint Range to the docks of Port Arthur. But it was operating in the shadow of a much larger reality.

At that time, Port Arthur and Fort William were booming (the two ports were later amalgamated into Thunder Bay in 1970). Following the Confederation of Canada in 1867, the government was desperate to consolidate its hold on the West, and Thunder Bay became the funnel. It received the grain from the prairie provinces to ship east through the Great Lakes to Canadian and American cities with connections to the Atlantic Ocean. From there, the grain could access the world.

This massive nation-building project strengthened Canada, but it did so by dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their lands. In 1885, the government used the unfinished Canadian Pacific Railway (a line aimed to connect the young nation of Canada from east to west) to rush troops westward. Their goal was to crush the North-West Resistance, a fight for rights led by Louis Riel and the Métis people against the rapid encroachment of settlers.

This military victory secured the prairies for the agricultural extraction that would feed the nation, but it came at a devastating human cost: the execution of Riel and the violent imposition of Canadian authority over Indigenous homelands.

The little Pee Dee railroad tried to tap into this bustling port economy by extracting iron from the Gunflint range. But it failed. The mines faltered, the company leadership was corrupt, and the economy shifted. It was a system built on assumptions that no longer held true.

That realization hit close to home. Like the academic world I was leaving, the Pee Dee couldn’t sustain itself against shifting realities. It was a structure built for a boom that had ended. And the leadership didn’t help matters.

Today, the “Pee Dee” is just a shadow in the woods. It serves as a reminder that in the North, the land outlasts plans grounded in unsustainable extraction.

The Place of Thunder

During our time visiting my parents at Whitefish Lake, we spent time in the city itself. This is a place whose very name is rooted in the sky. Thunder Bay is the English translation of the French Baie du Tonnerre, which appeared on 18th-century maps as a translation of the Anishinaabe name. To understand the roots of this name, you must look south to Mount McKay.

Known as Animikii-waajiw (Thunder Mountain), this is the northernmost peak of the Nor’Westers and a sacred site for the Fort William First Nation, a sovereign Ojibwe nation located adjacent to the city of Thunder Bay. In Anishinaabeg tradition, the mountain is the home of the Animikii, or the Thunderbirds. These are powerful spirits of the sky realm who create thunder with the flapping of their wings and lightning with the flash of their eyes.

Today, for a small fee, vehicles can drive up Mount McKay. The mountain itself is a classic example of the flat-topped cuestas and mesas the charactertize the region and it also gives you a stunning, expansive view of the topography that defines the region.

The more adventurous visitors can choose to take a set of trails to different vistas at the top. That is the route Eugene and I took. We took in the even more impressive vista, standing on a 1.1 billion-year-old diabase sill. It is a geological fortress that these sky spirits have chosen for their own. Taking in the brilliant fall colors, I could not help but feel that this was a particularly special meeting of land, water, and sky.

Standing there, I thought back to the sign at Mount Josephine. The history that greeted me here was not just in the rock or the sky or the lake, but in the relationship between all of them.

A Preview of the Future

This was one of many stunning views we would experience. It was also our first time taking in the beauty of the Sleeping Giant on our trip.

In Part 2, we will move from the Minnesota-Ontario borderlands to my first time exploring the Sibley Peninsula, including a discussion of the “world’s richest silver mine,” more multilayered human history, and, of course, great vistas.

Planning your own journey north? As I mentioned, the best parts of the Lake Superior Circle Tour are often hidden in plain sight—like the history behind Black Beach or the secret overlooks on Mount McKay.

I have two ways to help you plan your perfect trip:

1. The DIY Route: Grab my Free Starter Guide below.

2. The Expert Route: Overwhelmed by the logistics? Book a 1-Hour Strategy Session to troubleshoot your itinerary with me.

Get the Free Guide Here

Interested in customized support for your Circle Tour trip? Learn how you can work with me!

Questions about your own Circle Tour or route? Let me know in the comments!

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This piece is based on my own experiences and how I felt/feel about the situation at Northland based on the knowledge and information available to me. I know the exigency process and closure was a very complex and sad situation for many people. I’m sure other people affected by the events at Northland since March 2024 have different perspectives on what happened. I am not writing this to try and claim that this is the “true” or “correct” version of events. I wrote this piece to share my perspective: the perspective of one faculty member who was cut during the exigency process. While other faculty members who were cut might relate to some of what I’ve shared, I’m sure they’ve also had different experiences and would interpret the events differently.

I also want to acknowledge how my interpretations of others’ actions are based on the knowledge I have. I know that I might be missing information. Perhaps people I’ve judged believed they were making the best decisions from an array of horrible choices. Despite these limitations, I also felt the need to share my story. While most of the posts I write are aimed to be educational, this is a personal piece.

I have revised this author’s note to include my full name.

On Monday, March 11, 2024, my life changed.

It was the first Monday back to teaching after spring break at Northland College, a small college in northern Wisconsin. I had a quiet break, staying at home. I had submitted my tenure folder a few weeks before, and I felt like I really needed some time to rest. Tenure is essentially a permanent job status earned by professors after a rigorous multi-year period of being an assistant professor. The intent is to protect academics from being fired without severe cause, ensuring they have the freedom to research and teach controversial topics. I tried to prioritize rest over the break, but looking back, I can already see how burnt out I was. Little did I know what was to come.

I was teaching my afternoon class: an introductory class on Native American History of the United States. After the class, I had a usual routine: a short break, then a Faculty Welfare Committee meeting, followed by office hours before driving my twenty-five-mile commute home.

Students were working on an activity in the final ten minutes of class when my phone buzzed with an email alert. I glanced at it. I expected the usual: a student who wasn’t in class explaining their absence, a student from my class tomorrow giving me the heads up about not being able to attend, or a student requesting to meet to talk about an upcoming assignment.

Instead, it was a meeting request from the President’s Office for the Faculty Welfare Committee to meet in just over an hour, which was partway through our usual committee meeting time.

My heart sank. We’d only met with the President once this academic year, which was a meeting we lobbied for (to discuss changes to our benefits before they were finalized). My mind immediately went to the worst-case scenario. We were a small school, and we all knew our situation was precarious. Would closure be announced today?

I moved through the final few minutes of class in a daze. I headed to my office, texted my fellow committee members to make sure they saw the email, and tried to eat my lunch. While I feared the announcement was about closure, I was also confused. A month prior, the President gave a town hall talk to faculty and staff. We were told the college had challenges ahead, but we were ready to tackle them with new initiatives and the board’s support. I’d heard much grimmer announcements from previous presidents over my six and a half years as an assistant professor. A few days after the town hall, the President brought his family to a large, annual community event that the college helped sponsor. He casually socialized with the group of faculty that I was hanging out with. There were no indications of disaster.

I left my office and met with my other faculty committee members. Then, we met with the President, the Chair of the Board of Trustees, and the Dean of Faculty. We heard the news: Our school needed to raise $12 million in about three weeks, or it would close at the end of the academic year. This amount seemed insurmountable to me. Based on the knowledge I had, our school had never fundraised that much in a year in recent history, let alone in a matter of weeks. Maybe the urgency would help us? We were small, but I knew a lot of people cared about Northland.

Later that afternoon, the same announcement was made to faculty, staff, and students. Then, an announcement was placed on the College’s website. Insurmountable or not, the news was officially public.

The 12-Million Dollar Storm

This announcement set off a storm in our college community. While the announcement felt devastating, it also led to amazing community efforts that were some of the most inspiring work I’ve ever been a part of. From collaborative community sessions that led to a new and exciting vision for the college to grassroots fundraisers that brought together people who loved the school from near and far. It was an exhausting time, but it was also exciting.

My understanding is Northland never came close to fundraising the $12 million it needed to stay open. But throughout the process, it was hard for faculty to get clear answers about the fundraising totals from the administration. A lot of the money that came in was from local, community-driven efforts. Many faculty supported and volunteered at these events. We also lobbied for more updates and transparency from the President and the Board. To me, it felt like we were usually ignored.

At the beginning of April, on the date we were supposed to learn the school’s fate, students created humorous bingo cards for the announcement. Per usual, they were a big reason why I still had hope. Since the closure announcement, they made a lot of social media content, talked to the press, and helped organize fundraising efforts. They also planned events to support each other. Many of them were balancing trying to save the school, finishing their classes, and making plans in case the school closed, while also trying to care for themselves and each other.

At an awkward gathering in the gym, we all learned the board decided to delay their final decision and instead gave us three weeks to go through exigency to revamp the curriculum and create a new budget for the upcoming academic year. If we did these things and the Board approved what we came up with, the College would stay open.

At that moment, this decision seemed both impossible and like a lifeline. Until that announcement, we were told if exigency was declared, we would open the next academic year and go through the exigency process then. Faculty were told the original fundraising deadline was non-negotiable because students needed to decide about their next academic year. We were told extending the deadline was impossible because it would go against what was best for the students. A 3-week exigency process (that lined up with the end of our semester) was never even implied as a possibility. But, there we were. In hindsight, I believe that moment was the beginning of the end.

On the curriculum side of things, the faculty worked. Hard. We had evening meetings. We had early morning (6 a.m.) meetings. We had Saturday meetings. We had Sunday meetings. Many of us worked 7 days a week for much longer than 8 hours a day for weeks in a row. We hired a facilitator to try and make our sessions as productive as possible. We knew the end result would be some of us getting cut. But I believe we put that aside and did the work needed to create a very streamlined curriculum that we supported. It wasn’t perfect, but we believed it managed to stay true to the mission and give us the footing to be financially sustainable in the future. So, we supported it. We also continued to teach our classes, attend student events, and advise students about ways to best plan for their future amid so much continued uncertainty.

The budget work was largely left to an ad-hoc committee that was assembled by the President. The Faculty Handbook was the only institutional document that mentioned the exigency process. So, we had that to “guide” the curriculum side of things, although it was clearly never intended to be such a shortened process. However, there was no institutional policy or process guiding the budget committee.

The Faculty Welfare Committee advocated having three faculty members on the budget committee. Based on the knowledge I had, it didn’t seem to me like any administrators were willing to advocate for three faculty members.

We were told we could have two faculty members: our Faculty Council President and another faculty member that we elected as a body. This felt like the beginning of a trend: administrators who had very little experience with the current academic program or related aspects of it (the general education requirements, block programs for first year students, student internships, research assistantships etc.) were prioritized over the voices of faculty.

Then we heard from the Board. They wanted us to add certain programs back into the curriculum. It didn’t feel like we had much choice. It felt like the Board had all the power, and several key administrators (who had very little direct connection to the academic programs) supported the Board. According to the Faculty Handbook, the curriculum was under the control of the faculty. Yet, for many of us, the Board’s feedback—and some administrators’ support for it—felt like both an ultimatum and a betrayal. After all, the Board made it clear this wasn’t an ongoing negotiation: they would either approve the proposed budget and curriculum or not.

We made the requested changes. Then the Board dragged their feet to announce a decision. Eventually they shared this decision during the beginning of our four-week May semester: they agreed to the budget and the curriculum. Northland would stay open.

I was co-teaching a class for first-year students, in which we traveled around Lake Superior, often camping, for the May Semester. Myself and the professor who I was co-teaching with (and who was also a close friend) learned the news with our students our first night camping at Temperance River State Park on the Minnesota North Shore.

The school would stay open. But, since the school was in exigency, faculty members would be cut. The exigency committee, consisting of a small group of faculty and led by the Interim Dean (because the previous Dean resigned) decided which faculty lines would not be renewed for the fall. It’s obvious but also worth pointing out that these cuts were influenced by curriculum desired by the Board. From what I was told, the exigency process looked at faculty contributions from a narrow lens.

Faculty didn’t know when the cuts would be announced. It was like living in a weird purgatory while still being expected to teach and doing our best to support students. For myself and co-instructor/friend, we were living this purgatory while on the road camping with eighteen year olds who were also trying to cope with all of the news and how it affected their lives.

May 14: The Day I Was Cut

Just like I remember March 11, I remember the day I got the news that I was cut.

It was May 14, 2024. The middle of our May semester. Our Lake Superior travel course should have been just crossing the border back to the United States at Sault Ste. Marie, but we had paused our trip and returned to campus a few days prior because several students had issues that needed time and/or medical attention. The students were doing a great job caring for each other amid the turmoil, but it was a trip that required constant readjusting. I was so tired of making plans. I didn’t realize it, but at this point, I was pretty much beyond burnt out.

May 14 was the day we would be getting back on the road. I also had an online interview for the only job I had applied for (it was with a local school district, and a close friend suggested I apply). I hadn’t applied for other academic positions. Partly because the number of decent Humanities jobs I was a fit for available in March and April was very slim. But more importantly, I loved the Chequamegon Bay area. I had a life here. I wanted to stay, so I put my time and effort into trying to save Northland.

I planned to take the interview in my office mid-morning, then meet up my friend/co-instructor for the course and the students and leave together. But everything quickly began to unravel.

Around 8 am, a few hours before the interview, I received a meeting request through email from our interim Dean of Faculty. Our informal faculty information networks quickly confirmed that whoever received these meeting requests was getting cut.

I drove to my office on campus. The news weighed on me as I started my interview. Predictably, it didn’t go the way I wanted. It was my first time interviewing for a job outside of higher education in over a decade. And it’s hard to connect with the people interviewing you when you know you’re going to get fired shortly afterwards. Along with my mental state, the posted position lacked details shared at the interview’s start. These details made the position a much weaker fit for my strengths and, realistically, my interests.

Minutes after my interview ended, I got the call from the interim Dean. I was cut, and I wasn’t officially tenured. The faculty had voted to grant my tenure almost two months ago, but the Interim Dean informed me that the board was still not planning to act on any tenure or promotion cases during exigency.

Not having tenure had significant financial implications in terms of being cut. The interim Dean made no indication they planned to challenge this decision. When the previous Dean told me that the faculty voted to approve my tenure, they delivered the news that the Board had no plans to vote on any tenure cases during exigency, and they also made no indication to me that they would do anything about it.

I always knew it was possible I would lose my job. I wanted to believe that because the faculty kept emphasizing the importance of Native American Studies to other programs and the general education curriculum, my work would be seen and valued. I taught a course that was part of the Education major and required by the state. I taught in a popular interdisciplinary, experiential, and place-based program for first-year students. My classes were cross-listed in several majors and minors connected to the college’s mission. I was the faculty curator for the Native American Museum on campus which gave Humanities students practical experience that helped them secure excellent internships and jobs in the region. My research was also directly tied to the mission of the College.

When I got the news I was cut, it felt like none of that mattered. I was devastated. Heartbroken. I loved Northland. Really, really loved it. And I believed in it. And, just like that, my place in it was gone.

Based on what I heard in the phone call when I was cut, I did not have tenure. I would not get tenure. It felt like all my work and all my efforts were for nothing. Like I had given so much of myself and so much of my life. For what? To be tossed to the side? While teaching a time-intensive and emotionally draining field course where I was responsible for students 24/7?

No Escape in Nature

I was numb, and I did the only thing I felt I could do: I got back on the road with the students. I thought maybe being by Lake Superior would make me feel better.

I loved the areas I was bringing the students to, like Grand Marais, Michigan at the eastern end of Pictured Rocks, and the Keweenaw Peninsula. But, I couldn’t enjoy them. I had never felt like this before. No matter how stressed I had been in grad school or my years as an assistant professor, or how stressed I was from family issues, including the estrangement of my brother (first from my parents, and later from myself too), I had always been able to escape by Lake Superior. For the first time ever, I couldn’t.

I got even angrier. How could the place I loved so much also take this from me? The fact that Northland taught me to love the lake even more than I had when I first arrived felt like salt on the wound. What else did I have left? How could I get by? How could I be expected to teach while my professional and personal identity—what felt like almost my whole life—crumbled around me? How could the place I loved so much be so cruel to tell me I was cut while I was teaching a field course away from home and responsible for eighteen-year-olds?

Furthermore, this field course was mainly rustic camping with very limited internet access in most locations, which meant that even the few parts of me that wanted to forge forward and focus on the future felt stuck. Because if I had a glimmer of energy or belief in myself, it was very difficult to search for jobs or begin to update my resume. Everything felt impossible.

Predictably, I couldn’t really be there for the students. I also couldn’t be there for my co-instructor, who was one of my closest friends, but who also wasn’t cut and was a constant reminder to me of the faculty who got to stay. I also couldn’t be there for Eugene, my partner, who had joined us on the trip for support. I tried. I pushed myself to be there for others, desperate to feel like the person I used to be. But realistically, I couldn’t even look after myself.

I made it through the course, but just barely. I didn’t sleep much even though I was constantly exhausted. I broke down in tears several times, usually away from the students, but not always. When I finally got home from the travel portion, I struggled with basic tasks. Yet somehow, I managed to kind of hold myself together for the final end-of-the-academic-year events: cleaning out the van and trailer and returning gear; submitting grades; and going to the Champagne Toast to celebrate the graduating seniors.

I tried to use whatever energy I had left to begin hastily (and honestly, haphazardly) revising my resume and applying for jobs. I was in no mindset to do simple tasks, let alone more complex ones, but giving myself time to breathe didn’t feel like an option. I felt like all I could do was keep trying to forge ahead, despite how awful everything felt.

Then, on the day of commencement, there was a bright spot. I learned from the President that the Board had approved my tenure, although I was asked not to share this news with others yet. It was the first good news I had received since learning I was cut. I didn’t have my identity as an academic or my career, but I had some financial assurances for the coming year, including healthcare. And most importantly, all of my hard work—everything I had given Northland over six and a half years—didn’t feel like it was completely for nothing.

In my mind, now I could allow myself a pause. A break. Time to heal. Looking back, I know Eugene and my family would have supported me while I took a break no matter what, but at the time, having some kind of ongoing income felt really important to my self-worth while it felt like so much of my professional identity had crumbled.

When commencement weekend was over and the academic year was officially finished, I spent days sleeping and moving through the day in a daze. It was the very start of my healing.

A Different Kind of Fall

I wrapped up most of my academic projects and had a few interviews in June. The interviews didn’t lead to any job offers, so then, I really took some time for myself.

I still followed the Northland news. I rolled my eyes at leadership, trying to spin the changes created by the exigency process as leaning into the College’s mission and focusing on what makes the College unique. Personally, I didn’t believe any of it. But I also knew I was biased. And I had no energy to do anything about it except when ranting to friends and family. And what role was left for me anyways? I was cut. My relationship to the place had changed.

I spent lots of time with friends who were leaving the area. Many of them weren’t cut, but they still made the very hard decision to leave Northland. Some described it as a heartbreaking decision. More than one faculty member emphasized to me that they weren’t leaving for a “better” position. They left because they felt (for various reasons) that they had to, even though they loved the students, the Northland community, and this region. They said that they made this difficult decision because they had major concerns about the long-term stability based on the College’s plan. They had lost trust in leadership and didn’t see the leadership presenting a clear path to regaining that trust or actively taking steps to regain that trust.

When summer wrapped up and September 2024 started, I was worried. I thought the fall would be excruciatingly hard for me because the season would be a reminder I would probably never teach in this region as a full-time faculty member ever again. Fall has represented the start of an academic year for me for decades of my life.

But when I visited my office on campus to sort through and downsize my things, I felt feelings I didn’t expect. So many faculty and students who I loved made that hard decision to leave. And the campus felt different. Quieter. Sad. Even on sunny fall days, barely any hammocks were hanging on the mall. It was rare to see them occupied with one person. In years past, there were groups of hammockers, slack-liners, or circles of students hanging out in the grass. I missed that activity. While hubs like the Hulings Rice Food Center and the Indigenous Cultures Center were still operating, the absence of the specific faculty and student mentors who had poured so much extra time and effort into them made the spaces feel fundamentally different.

I tried to focus on things I love, like hiking and camping. Eugene and I took two and a half weeks to do the Lake Superior Circle Tour, focusing on parts of the Ontario shore that we hadn’t explored before. I also took time to write for myself and not for any academic reason. That felt strange and novel. I began to grapple with just how much I gave up for academia. That started in grad school, years before I arrived at Northland. The decision to focus on writing that brings me joy is what led me to create this Substack.

The End of an Era

On February 19, 2025, Northland College announced it would close on May 31, 2025. It was over. At least the announcement came before March 11, 2025. I was dreading a one-year anniversary of the “$12 million or closure” announcement with Northland still existing in limbo. It was one small bright spot amid the devastating news.

I got the closure announcement while I was at my new job. It’s a very different job, and it’s not what I would have predicted for myself, but for the most part, I enjoy it. I’m learning a lot. And it’s slowly sinking in just how much of myself I gave to Northland and just how much the people with power undervalued my labor and the labor of other faculty, particularly those of us doing “invisible labor” supporting our students who are deeply involved in multiple aspects of the campus community.

But despite my complicated feelings for Northland, my heart broke yet again when I heard about the closure. While I didn’t have much optimism about the college’s future after everything I’d seen, I continued to wish for the best. I still cared. How could I not?

Hindsight is a funny thing. When I lost my faculty position, I was crushed. I began the process of mourning a career and reevaluating my relationship to higher education. I faced the reality that if I wanted to stay in the place I loved with a community I cared deeply about, I would not be able to be a professor of Native American Studies, History, or a related field. This wasn’t an easy choice, but it was clear what I needed to do. I no longer had faith in traditional higher education to provide a stable career. I deeply believe the Humanities matter, yet the reality is they are constantly underfunded and undervalued.

I’ve realized that even though I’m not working in academia, I can continue to be a historian. Afterall, that’s what this Substack is all about. I am still plugging away at a book project (the one academic project I haven’t wrapped up), and I’m glad to be diversifying my work experiences. While I don’t want to think the worst, I don’t know what the future holds for higher education, especially the Humanities; I don’t think they will be valued more highly any time soon. Increasingly, I question whether traditional higher education is effectively illustrating the benefits of the Humanities to the broader public.

Of course, a part of me still misses Northland. It was the most transformative educational institution I’ve ever been a part of. It shaped me. It was my first time really being part of a community I had shared values with as an adult. And beyond its impact on me, there’s the impact of its loss on the region. There’s unlikely to ever be a liberal arts institution of its size in the area again.

I feel like I’m making good progress toward moving on, including focusing on my new job, and what I love, including writing and spending time outdoors. I’m also honored to be part of efforts to continue the heart of Northland in a smaller, more financially nimble structure. That is a big part of what is giving me hope for the future.

Another part of that hope is finding new ways to share the beauty and complexity of this watershed with others, by helping them connect to the lake that has shaped so much of my own story. In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing the stories and history from the trip around Lake Superior focused on reconnection with the lake and the landscape.

To learn more about the closure of small liberal arts colleges on the south shore of Lake Superior in a historical context, read my piece, Crepe Paper and Copper.

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Author’s Note: This story has been on my mind since I first learned about the Italian Hall Tragedy in the fall of 2017, but it feels particularly heavy this December. Following the closures of Northland and Finlandia Colleges, I have found myself thinking deeply about what it means for a community to “make do” and the human cost when systems that have shown plenty of warning signs of failure finally give out. This essay is a reflection on the 1913 strike in the Copper Country, and the tragedies that ensued including the Seeberville murders, the Painesdale murders, and the Italian Hall disaster. It is also a tribute to the the resilience of the Copper Country. Thank you for walking this path with me on such a somber anniversary.

The Architecture of Winter

It is a cold mid-December Sunday in Calumet, Michigan. The high temperature hovered around 10°F and windchills dipped well below zero. Lake effect snow started Friday night, and fell in rhythmic waves over the thirty-six hours. In the Keweenaw, snow is not just weather. It is the architecture of winter. To the north, the giant snow gauge on US-41 illustrates just how much snow this region gets.

I trudged through the plowed mounds and stood quietly before a lone sandstone archway in a snow-covered lot that used to be the site of the Italian Hall. I remembered visiting this site in May 2021 with a close friend and fellow professor. Unlike the gray December day, that day was sunny and clear. We were co-teaching a class about the human histories of the Lake Superior watershed, and he read “On the Scrap.” It is a poem by M.L. Liebler about the copper miners’ strike in 1913. It was an emotional moment we shared with our students. Hearing the poem at the site of the Italian Hall made the history feel visceral in a way no reading could.

Northland College, where we taught together, closed in May 2025. Finlandia College, just south of Calumet in Hancock, met the same fate a few years earlier in 2023. Like Northland, it was a small, private liberal arts college with a rich history grounded in social justice. Finlandia was founded as Suomi College in 1896 as a Finnish language seminary for the children of miners. Northland began as the North Wisconsin Academy in 1892 with the commitment to teach students of all backgrounds how to live a deeper life on lands that used to be forested but were now cutover in the wake of the logging industry.

Visiting the Keweenaw in the winter, I thought of Carolyn Dekker’s North Country and her chapter “How We Make Do.” Dekker was an English faculty member at Finlandia and she wrote about the school’s struggle to survive and maintain its mission before the closure, noting: “This year we all live with the ghost-town feeling of broken windows and dust and the promise of renewal just around the corner.” I remember making dark humor jokes with my friend about the eerie similarities to Northland’s postponed repairs. My friend had a hole in his office ceiling that leaked and was never fixed. It turns out neither college was able to make do, despite their deep histories and service to the Northwoods.

This December was my first time visiting Calumet in winter. Eugene was keeping warm in the truck, so I stood alone. The stillness was heavy. The streets were quiet and the snowflakes fell. When a wind gust kicked up, it was the loudest sound on the street. As I listened closely, I could still hear the lines my colleague read lingering on the gusts of the wind:

74 people, mostly children, lay buried in a twisted heap Of bones, blood, skin, and hair. A Working-Class Nightmare in the Home of the the Brave.*

*The poem says 74 people, but the National Park Service and other accounts list the total as 73

The Heart of the Copper Boom

One hundred and twenty-five years ago, these streets never slept. To understand the stillness of modern Calumet in the winter, you have to understand the noise that came before it.

The Treaty of La Pointe in 1842 transferred this land from the Anishinaabe to the United States. Often referred to as The Copper Treaty, it was the legal mechanism that transformed Indigenous homelands into industrial assets. It marks the beginning of a manufactured scarcity where the region's vast natural wealth was funneled into corporate profit while the community on the ground struggled to "make do."

The Keweenaw copper boom was fueled by the inventions of the Industrial Revolution and the demand for raw materials as the nation expanded. For almost a century after the land was ceded to the United States, copper was the heartbeat of the peninsula’s economy.

Known at the turn of the twentieth century as Red Jacket, Calumet was the undisputed hub of the copper world. It was home to the Calumet and Hecla (C&H) Mining Company. C&H did not just operate a mine. They built an entire world, which included grand stone buildings like the C&H Public Library and local schools. For many families, “making do” meant accepting these company-funded amenities in exchange for their labor and their silence about the working conditions.

Electric streetcars clanged 24 hours a day to shuttle a global workforce to and from the pits. Trains roared into the depot, bringing families from across the globe. First, the families came from Cornwall. Later they also came from places like Finland, Sweden, Austria, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Poland, Croatia, Lithuania, Italy, Armenia, Russia, and China. They were all ready to build a life in the rugged landscape surrounded by the cold waters of Lake Superior. At its height in 1910, Calumet had a population of almost 40,000 people.

It was a landscape of deafening industry. Church bells from dozens of denominations competed with the relentless pounding of stamp mills. There were no dark or quiet nights. There was only the glow of the furnaces and the “Company Town” reality where C&H owned the mines, the houses, and the very air the miners breathed.

Today, Calumet is a small community of approximately 700 people. Its downtown stores, cafes, bars, and historic sites draw tourists. The village also serves as a satellite to Houghton and Hancock. While Finlandia closed, Michigan Tech University in Houghton continues to fuel the regional economy. In my experience, cities and villages in the Lake Superior watershed that are located inland and don’t have any waterfront have particularly quirky personalities, and I think Calumet demonstrates that pattern.

In the summer and fall, Calumet pulses with life. But in the winter, it seems to catch its breath. It slips into a quietude that lets the past feel a little closer to the surface. No matter what season I visit, I’m always reminded that the legacies of the copper industry remain etched in the ground I’m standing on.

The Strike of 1913

By the summer of 1913, the noise changed. The machinery’s thump was joined by the rhythm of marching feet. The miners were striking for an eight-hour day and a three-dollar wage. Most of all, they were fighting the “widow-maker.” This was the nickname for the one-man drill. This technology cut costs but left miners alone in the dark. If a rock fell, there was no partner to call for help.

At the front of these marches was Annie Klobuchar Clemenc, often known as “Big Annie.” Standing over six feet tall and carrying a massive American flag, the 25-year-old Slovenian immigrant became the face of the resistance. She was a key leader of the Women’s Auxiliary Local No. 15. This group was formed to support the strikers and bridge the gaps between the town’s many ethnic groups.

The tension turned bloody quickly. C&H manager James MacNaughton refused to negotiate with the strikers. Instead, he brought in the Waddell-Mahon detective agency. These were armed strike-breakers that the locals called “Waddies.”

In August 1913, some Waddies and sheriff’s deputies followed John Kalan to the boarding house in Seeberville where he lived. They planned to arrest Kalan for “trespassing” on company property while taking a shortcut home. Kalan resisted arrest and fled inside the boarding house. In response the Waddies and deputies fired inside and killed two men, Alois Tijan and John Bezic. Their gunfire even grazed the face Antonia Putrich’s baby, who was held by her mother.

The violence did not break the strike. On September 13, Big Annie led over 1,000 strikers through Red Jacket. When confronted by deputies and Waddies, Annie was knocked down and a horse stomped her flag. She continued to hug the fabric to her chest even as a cavalryman tried to rip it away.

Annie was arrested three times and spent a total of ten days in jail. One of these times was on November 8. Annie was arrested along with ninety-nine others and incarcerated in the Calumet and Hecla jail.

Arrests of the strikers were common. In fact, over 400 strikers were arrested between October 23 and November 15. Usually, they were released in a few days or even a few hours. In contrast, only four people were ever sent to jail for violence toward the strikers: two Waddies and two Sheriff’s deputies. All four were eventually convicted for the Seeberville murders.

A Harsh December

As the winter deepened, the violence in the Copper Country increased. On the dark morning of December 7, 1913, shots were fired from the woods into a boarding house in Painesdale, a mining community focused on the Champion Mine about 20 miles southwest of Calumet. The bullets killed Thomas Dally and two English immigrant boarders who were brothers, Arthur and James Jane. The men were shot in their beds as gunfire pierced the thin walls of the house.

Bullets were also shot into the Nicholson household that was attached to the boarding house. Two bullets struck thirteen-year-old Mary Nicholson; one grazed her head while the other inflicted a more serious wound in her shoulder. The two other Nicholson children narrowly escaped injury or death when bullets hit the pillows they were sleeping on.

While the Seeberville murders were an act of company-led violence against strikers, the Dally-Jane murders were widely believed to be a retaliatory strike against those who crossed the picket lines. This event sent a new shockwave of fear through the region. It led to an even heavier presence of the National Guard and a sense that no one was safe, regardless of which side they stood on. Men who continued to work for the mining companies during the strike were caught in an economy that forced impossible choices upon them. Their deaths are a tragic reminder that in a landscape defined by extraction and strike lines, ‘making do’ was often the only option left. It is a sobering reality that this survival strategy could also prove fatal.

The Italian Hall Tragedy

The Copper Country was frayed by months of cold, hunger, and the constant threat of gunfire. Strike funds were nearly empty and communities across the Keweenaw were increasingly divided. It was this desperate atmosphere that motivated Big Annie and the Women’s Auxiliary to organize a Christmas Eve party. They wanted to provide a flicker of joy for children who had spent months watching their parents struggle. The women spent weeks sewing scarves and mittens and making little bags of candy. The party would be held on the second floor of the Italian Hall. Because money was so low, the Christmas trees were decorated with crepe paper and just ten cents worth of tinsel.

Over 400 people, mostly children, crammed into the hall. They sang carols and watched a Mother Goose play. For a few hours, the bitter strike was forgotten. Then, at the height of the festivities, a man shouted “Fire!” Some reports claimed he wore a Citizens’ Alliance button, which was an anti-union organization.

Annie and other adults realized there was no smoke and screamed from the stage that there was no fire. However, the panic was beyond control. The crowd surged toward the steep and narrow staircase. Someone tripped. Within seconds, the stairwell became a death trap as hundreds pushed from behind and people suffocated.

When the screaming stopped, 73 people were dead. 59 of those were children. Doctors said most of the deaths were instantaneous.

The community did not celebrate Christmas. Instead, it prepared for a mass funeral. On December 28, Big Annie picked up her flag once again and led a line of 73 coffins toward Lake View Cemetery. Tears streamed down her face and her flag was draped in black crepe.

From Land Cession Treaties to Company Towns to Tragedies

The strike ended in defeat in April 1914. As described in “On the Scrap” by M.L. Liebler:

The Calumet newspapers reported that miners won Nothing of significanceduring the Great Strike. They went back to work without their babies, Without a raise, without better working conditions, and without Recognition for their union. All of that was buried In 1913 in the cold Michigan earth.

The Italian Hall was controversially torn down in 1984 and only the sandstone archway remains. There is also a memorial listing the names of the people who died along with interpretive signs by the Michigan Historical Society and the Keweenaw National Historical Park that give an overview of the strike and the tragedy.

Earlier this month, I wrote about the murder of Giishkitawag, also known as Joe White. He was an Anishinaabe leader in Wisconsin who was killed by state game wardens. That murder is a clear example of how the state used violence to target Anishinaabe communities as they established American control of the northern Great Lakes after the land cession treaties.

The strike in the Copper Country in 1913 is another example of that same era. The extractive economies that developed such as logging and mining depended on violence to maintain control. These systems targeted recently arrived immigrant communities whose cheap labor was integral to the profits of mining and logging stockholders. The murder of Joe White was a state sanctioned act of violence to enforce conservation laws while the murders at Seeberville were company sanctioned acts to enforce industrial order. Both demonstrate how violence was used to protect the interests of the powerful in this watershed.

The infrastructure the United States needed for westward expansion relied on two things: access to Indigenous lands through treaties or force, and cheap labor provided by (depending on the region) recently arrived immigrants and Black Americans. The Copper Country shows how viewing this history in simple terms of “White people” misses the complexity. There were European-descended people who profited greatly from these mines, and they relied on the exploitation of other European-descended immigrants to do so.

A Living Legacy in the Snow

The Italian Hall might be a historic site, but it is not dead. It is a piece of living history. Every year, the Calumet-Laurium-Keweenaw Rotary Club places 73 luminaries in the snow. These stretch from the archway into the empty lot. Each flame represents a life lost.

There are still questions about what happened on Christmas Eve in 1913. Some academics who have studied the event in the twenty-first century describe it as Michigan’s largest mass murder. The Keweenaw National Historic Park takes a more cautious stance and explains that the details are still up for debate.

But what I know is that “making do” has its limits. The miners made do with the “widow-maker” drills until they could no longer bear the risk. The families made do with ten cents worth of tinsel, intending to give their children a moment of joy. And over a century later, our colleges made do with drafty, leaky buildings while those with power postponed repairs and meaningful plans for financial sustainability until the doors finally had to close. It felt like a modern echo of that earlier era, where the communities that provide the labor and the life of this region are the first to suffer when the institutions they rely on are managed toward a breaking point.

There are no easy answers for why some things survive and others do not. But as I stand looking at the archway with the wind whipping off the lake, just like I can hear my friend reading “On the Scrap,” I can hear the echoes of Woody Guthrie’s song, “1913 Massacre”:

And the town was lit up by a cold Christmas moon,
The parents they cried and the miners they moaned,
"See what your greed for money has done."

I hope to see the luminaries reflect off the snow one day. In the meantime, I do my best to visit the doorway whenever I am in the area to pay my respects. Remembering the tragedies that shaped this land and honoring those who died is the least I can do as a visitor who enjoys the communities of the Keweenaw today.

If you have family roots in the Copper Country or stories passed down about the 1913 strike, I would be honored to hear them in the comments below. Similarly, to former students, staff, and faculty from Northland and Finlandia: I would love to hear your memories of this landscape and the moments we shared in these historic places. Remembering is an act of community. Thank you for being part of mine.

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For more information on Big Annie, the Italian Hall Tragedy, and life in the Keweenaw Peninsula see:

• Jerry Stanley, Big Annie of Calumet: The True Story of the Industrial Revolution.

  • An accessible and engaging overview of the growth of the copper industry during the Industrial Revolution, the 1913 Strike, and Big Annie’s involvement.

• Lyndon Comstock, Annie Clemenc & the Great Keweenaw Copper Strike.

  • This is a great book if you are interested in taking a deeper dive into the life of Annie Clemenc. It includes plenty of historic photographs and primary source excerpts.

• Mary Doria Russell, The Women of the Copper Country: A Novel.

  • A deeply-researched historical fiction novel that brings the work of the women of the 1913 Copper Strike and the greed of James McNaughton to life.

• Carolyn Dekker, North Country: A Pedagogical Almanac.

  • A beautiful reflection on teaching and living in the Upper Peninsula that helped me process the closure of Finlandia and Northland.

• Ronald Reikki (editor), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing.

  • An edited anthology of writing from authors in the Upper Peninsula in a range of styles covering a range of topics, including life in the Keweenaw. This is the collection where “On the Scrap” is published.

• Please consider visiting any of the Keweenaw National Historical Park sites during your visit to the region!

Follow The Outdoors Historian on Facebook and Instagram for more photos and field notes from the Lake Superior watershed. You can read more about my experience in the Keweenaw here.

He was not just a man walking through the woods; he was a member of a sovereign nation exercising a legal and inherent right.

But in 1894, the State of Wisconsin did not see a sovereign leader. They saw a poacher and a threat to American authority.

When Deputy Game Warden Horace Martin and his assistant, Josiah Hicks, intercepted the group, they weren’t just enforcing “conservation” laws. They were enforcing American authority in the Northwoods. They arrested Giishkitawag for hunting deer out of season, using a state statute to illegally supersede federal treaty stipulations.

At first, Giishkitawag complied. But when the wardens attempted to handcuff him, criminalizing him, the situation escalated.

The forensic evidence and eyewitness accounts tell a brutal story, one that contradicts the official report. They show that the wardens clubbed Giishkitawag in the head with a rifle. As he fled for his life, Deputy Martin raised his weapon and shot him in the back from nearly 30 yards away.

Giishkitawag died two hours later. The wardens claimed self-defense, alleging Giishkitawag had a knife. No knife was ever found on his body or at the scene.

The War on Subsistence

To understand why Giishkitawag was killed, we have to look beyond a single violent encounter. We have to look at the treaties themselves.

Giishkitawag’s ancestors had signed treaties in 1837, 1842, and 1854. In these documents, the Ojibwe ceded vast tracts of land to the United States but explicitly retained their usufructuary rights—the right to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded lands.

“The privilege of hunting, fishing, and gathering the wild rice, upon the lands, the rivers and the lakes included in the territory ceded, is guaranteed to the Indians, during the pleasure of the President of the United States.”

— Treaty of St. Peter’s in 1837

These were not gifts from the government; they were stipulations of sale, as legally binding as a property deed. However, in the wake of these treaties, states in the Northwoods sought to erase Ojibwe sovereignty. They used “conservation” laws as a bludgeon to force Ojibwe people off ceded lands and confine them to reservations.

The strategy was economic coercion: by criminalizing the seasonal rounds that included hunting, the state attempted to starve Ojibwe people into compliance. If a hunter was jailed, he could not feed his family. If Ojibwe people were confined to reservations, the vast timber resources on ceded territory were left open for private logging companies and newly arrived immigrants.

Giishkitawag was a target because he refused to be confined. He lived the reality of Ojibwe sovereignty: working in logging camps on ceded territory and feeding his family off the land, regardless of state lines.

From Long Lake to the Supreme Court

The murder of Giishkitawag was followed by a failure of justice that resonates to this day. Although the district attorney filed murder charges, the trial revealed a deep racial fracture in the community.

On one side, several white men took the stand in Giishkitawag’s defense. These were men who had worked alongside him in logging camps or knew him from the community; they testified to his character and contradicted the claim that he was dangerous.

But the jury was not composed of his peers. It was composed largely of recent immigrants and newcomers who knew Ojibwe people only through the racist caricatures in the press. To them, the wardens were protecting state resources, while Giishkitawag was merely an obstacle to progress. They found Martin and Hicks acted in self-defense and declared them innocent.

The local press celebrated the verdict with chilling callousness. In an article headlined “Justifiable Homicide,” The Rice Lake Chronotype declared the acquittal was justice for everyone, “with the possible exception of the tax-payers of Washburn county, who have had a needless bill of expense saddled upon them.”

The message from the press was clear: Giishkitawag’s life was not even worth the cost of a trial. The article concluded that “the taking of Joe White’s life was not only justifiable, but an imperative necessity.”

For the Lake Superior Ojibwe, Giishkitawag’s death was not an isolated tragedy. It marked a state declaration of war on their treaty rights.

Throughout the 20th century, Ojibwe people continued to be persecuted for fishing and hunting, but they refused to stop. This resistance culminated in landmark decisions like Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Chippewa Indians v. Lester P. Voigt (1983). The federal courts reaffirmed what the Ojibwe had known since 1837: state law cannot override federal treaties. The rights Giishkitawag died for were valid, living laws.

Yet, the court’s decision sparked a new wave of backlash. In the 1980s, racist protests broke out at boat landings throughout the Northwoods. With slogans threatening violence against Indigenous fishers, Wisconsin gained national infamy as “The Mississippi of the North.”

It took years of federal intervention and Ojibwe resilience to quell the violence. Today, the state of Wisconsin and Ojibwe nations have entered an era of co-management, guided by organizations like the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC).

The Legacy

If you call northwestern Wisconsin home or visit it today, you are moving through a landscape defined by this history. The transition of this region from an Ojibwe-dominant space to an American state where white people were the demographic majority wasn’t a peaceful evolution. It was achieved through the pressure of removal, the imposition of state game laws, and, too often, the barrel of a warden’s gun.

As people who love the outdoors, we often celebrate the conservation movement. But we must honestly reckon with its origins. At the turn of the 20th century, conservation wasn’t just about saving deer; it was about controlling who belonged in the woods.

If you believe outdoor history is about more than just gear and conquest, subscribe to The Outdoors Historian. I explore the complex, often hidden histories of the landscapes we love in the Northwoods.

Further Reading

• The Murder of Joe White: For a deep dive into this specific history, I highly recommend Erik Redix’s book, The Murder of Joe White: Ojibwe Leadership and Colonialism in Wisconsin.

• The Legal Battle: To understand the 20th-century fight for treaty rights, watch the Ogichidaa Warrior series by the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission.

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Monthly Favorites is a series for paid subscribers where I share things I enjoyed the previous month. Each month you’ll learn about ten things I enjoyed, including places, activities, foods, beer, tequila, books, camping gear, local businesses, experiences, etc.

There is something about the arrival of snow that invites us to slow down and appreciate our surroundings, whether that’s a plate of pie from Castle Danger or the view from the living room window. This month’s favorites are a mix of outdoor adventures and indoor retreats that helped me embrace the transition toward winter. Here is what has been bringing me joy lately.

1. The first snow: Whenever there’s the first accumulating snowfall, I think of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved: “Softly, suddenly, it began to snow, like a present come down from the sky.” And if I get to stay at home during the first snowfall with a fire in our woodstove? Magical.

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To help with that, I’ve pulled together a collection of beginner-friendly resources divided into five categories:

• The Indigenous histories of Thanksgiving

• Indigenous cookbooks and foodways

• Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes

• Indigenous peoples of the United States

• Tools to identify whose land you live on

My goal is to provide multiple pathways into the subject. Learning about Indigenous politics and history can feel overwhelming, often because the material is unfamiliar or contradicts what we learned in school. For many non-Indigenous people, this can trigger feelings of guilt or shame.

However, we must push past that discomfort. You simply cannot tell the history of the United States (or Canada) without Indigenous peoples. To understand our own political science, civics, and nationhood, we must understand the Indigenous nations that shaped—and continue to shape—this continent.

A crucial distinction: We have a responsibility to learn the history and political reality we share with Indigenous peoples. This is different from feeling entitled to access all forms of Indigenous cultural knowledge. Too often, settler engagement involves extracting cultural practices while ignoring treaty responsibilities.

This list is designed to help you engage respectfully with the history, the land, and the political reality of the nation around you. Most resources are focused on the United States, however, some resources also look at the Canadian side of the border. Let’s dive in.

Resources to Learn About Thanksgiving

Free Resources

If you are looking for immediate context before dinner starts, these free articles and podcast episodes are the best starting points.

• Philip Deloria, “The Invention of Thanksgiving: Massacres, Myths, and the Making of the Great,” The New Yorker.

  • The Gist: A concise breakdown of how the holiday went from a local harvest feast to a national myth involving “massacres and myths.” I reread this every Thanksgiving.

• Ben Tumin, “Professor David J. Silverman on the Thanksgiving Myth,” Skipped History Substack.

  • The Gist: An accessible interview with the author of This Land Is Their Land, covering the Wampanoag perspective often left out of common renderings of Thanksgiving.

• Matika Wilbur. “ThanksTaking or ThanksGiving?” All My Relations Podcast.

  • A dynamic discussion on how Indigenous people navigate the holiday today, balancing family gatherings with the reality of historical trauma.

Books

For a deeper dive into the specific history of the Wampanoag, the Puritans, and how the “First Thanksgiving” was constructed, these books are essential.

• David Silverman, This Land Is Their Land: The Wampanoag Indians, Plymouth Colony, and the Troubled History of Thanksgiving

  • Why read it: If you only want to read one history book about Thanksgiving, make it this one. It is the definitive account of the Wampanoag side of the story, dismantling the “friendly meal” narrative.

• Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War

  • Why read it: Brooks re-maps the history of New England, showing how Indigenous networks and geography shaped the conflict that nearly destroyed the colonies.

• Christine Delucia, Memory Lands: King Philip’s War and the Place of Violence in the Northeast

  • Why read it: A fascinating look at how we remember (and misremember) violence through monuments and plaques, and how those physical markers shape our understanding of the past.

• Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England

  • Why read it: O’Brien explains the intellectual mechanics of erasure—how 19th-century New Englanders convinced themselves that local Indigenous people had “vanished” so they could claim the land and history for themselves.

Resources to learn about Indigenous peoples of the Great Lakes

As a historian living in the Great Lakes, this is the region where my work is grounded. It is a landscape defined by fresh water, wild rice, and the enduring sovereignty of the Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee, and other nations.

Too often, popular American history skips over the Midwest, focusing instead on the colonial East Coast or the “Wild West” of the Plains. This erases the complex treaty history and modern political power of Great Lakes nations.

Below, I’ve compiled my previous writing on regional treaties, followed by the best free resources and books to help you understand the history of this specific land.

My Free Substacks

• These Histories are Intertwined

  • An introduction to why we simply cannot tell the history of the Great Lakes (or the United States) without understanding Indigenous history by focusing on the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.

• Ozhaawashkodewekwe and the Treaty of Sault Ste. Marie

  • How a powerful Anishinaabe woman leveraged her diplomatic connections to shape the outcome of the 1820 negotiations.

• The 200 Year Anniversary of the Treaty of Prairie du Chien

  • A look back at the massive diplomatic gathering in 1825 that established borders between Native nations and laid the foundation for future land cession treaties.

• The Treaty of Fond du Lac and Ojibwe Leadership in the Lake Superior Region

  • Examining how Ojibwe leaders navigated American demands for mineral rights just a year after the Prairie du Chien agreement.

• The Treaty of Washington

  • How this 1836 agreement paved the way for Michigan statehood while retaining the crucial hunting and fishing rights still exercised today.

• The Pine Treaty: A Turning Point in Wisconsin History

  • Exploring the 1837 cession driven by the insatiable American hunger for timber

• The Copper Treaty Demonstrates the Present-Day Impact of Treaties

  • A breakdown of the 1842 treaty focused on mineral wealth and why its legal provisions remain relevant today.

• Understanding the Robinson Treaties in Past and Present

  • Discusses the historic 1850 treaties in Ontario and the ongoing, multi-billion dollar legal battles over unpaid annuities.

• The Treaty of La Pointe in 1854: A Landmark Moment for the Western Lake Superior Watershed

  • The pivotal moment when Ojibwe bands secured permanent reservations in Wisconsin and Minnesota, effectively ending the U.S. government’s policy of removal in the region

Free Resources

• The Ogichidaa Warrior series on the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission YouTube Channel

  • What it is: A short documentary series chronicling the fight for Ojibwe treaty rights in the late 20th century.

  • Why watch: If you want to understand the legal reality of hunting and fishing rights—and the intense racism Ojibwe people faced during the “Wisconsin Walleye Wars”—this is the essential history.

• Dr. Alan Ojiig Corbiere’s YouTube Channel

  • What it is: Deep dives into Anishinaabe history by one of the region’s leading historians and language experts.

  • Why watch: Dr. Corbiere is a master at explaining wampum belts and treaty councils. He takes complex primary sources (like old letters and belts) and brings them to life.

• Kai Minosh Pyle’s Land Body Mind Substack

  • What it is: A newsletter exploring Métis and Anishinaabe history, language revitalization, and Two-Spirit identity.

  • Why read: It provides a crucial look at Two-Spirit history in the Great Lakes and challenges the erasure of Métis people in the Midwest.

• Dustin Dwyer, “Look about you. What ideas do you see inscribed on the land of Michigan?” Michigan Radio.

  • What it is: A short article focusing on Indigenous histories of Michigan.

  • Why read: It features historian Michael Witgen (whose book is on the list below) and offers a clear, accessible explanation of how Indigenous and settler concepts of “land ownership” clashed to shape the state of Michigan.

• The Ways

  • What it is: A collection of high-quality short videos on contemporary Native culture and language.

  • Why watch: It breaks down stereotypes by showing modern Indigenous life in the Great Lakes, covering topics ranging from traditional wild rice harvesting to modern hip-hop.

Books

• Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community

  • Why read it: History often focuses on men and war; this book centers the women who held the communities together through labor and leadership.

• Louise Erdrich, Tracks (Fiction)

  • Why read it: While this is a novel, Erdrich accurately captures the emotional and community impact of allotment and land loss in a way that non-fiction sometimes cannot.

• Mary Siisip Genuisz, Plants Have So Much to Give Us, All We Have to Do Is Ask

  • Why read it: A perfect bridge between history and science, teaching the botanical and cultural history of the region.

• Susan M. Hill, The Clay We Are Made Of: Haudenosaunee Land Tenure on the Grand River

  • Why read it: A crucial look at the Eastern Great Lakes and the deep history of Haudenosaunee land rights.

• Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits

  • Why read it: It challenges the idea that slavery was only a southern issue and highlights the complex history of Black-Indigenous relations.

Looking to go deeper? Consider these scholarly deep dives!

• Heidi Bohaker, Doodem and Council Fire: Anishinaabe Governance Through Alliance

  • Why read it: Essential for understanding that Indigenous nations had (and have) complex political structures and governance systems long before European contact.

• Erik Redix, The Murder of Joe White: Ojibwe Leadership and Colonialism in Wisconsin

  • Why read it: A griping micro-history that illustrates how the American legal system was used to dismantle Indigenous leadership.

• Michael Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

  • Why read it: Witgen shows how Indigenous power dictated politics in the Great Lakes long after 1787 and how the United States is built on extracting resources from Indigenous lands

Indigenous Cookbooks

Food is a powerful entry point for understanding culture, but for Indigenous nations, it is also a matter of sovereignty. These cookbooks go beyond simple recipes; they connect you to the land and the people who cultivate it.

Additionally, many of these authors provide resources on how to source ingredients directly from Indigenous food producers. This allows you to move beyond passive reading and use your purchasing power to support Indigenous economies.

Free Resources

These are excellent ways to learn about Indigenous food systems without spending a dime.

• Chef Yazzie TV YouTube Channel

  • The Gist: Chef Brian Yazzie (Diné) shares accessible, high-energy cooking videos. He focuses on healthy, Indigenous ingredients and often highlights food justice work.

• I-Collective

  • The Gist: An autonomous group of Indigenous chefs, activists, and herbalists. Their website and multimedia projects focus on food sovereignty as a tool for resistance and healing.

• Toasted Sister Podcast

  • The Gist: The longest-running podcast dedicated to Indigenous food. Host Andi Murphy interviews chefs and producers, covering everything from traditional farming to modern restaurant culture.

Indigenous Cookbooks

Buying these books is a direct way to support Indigenous authors. Many of them double as history books, teaching you the ecology of the ingredients.

• Freddie Bitsoie and James O. Fraioli, New Native Kitchen

  • Why read it: Bitsoie (Diné) makes Indigenous ingredients accessible for the modern home cook. These recipes are about delicious, contemporary meals.

• Shane Chartrand, tawâw: Progressive Indigenous Cuisine

  • Why read it: Visually stunning and deeply personal. Chartrand (Cree) explores his own identity through high-end culinary art. “tawâw” translates to “Come in, you’re welcome, there’s room.”

• Pyet DeSpain, Rooted in Fire: A Celebration of Native American and Mexican Cooking

  • Why read it: Winner of Next Level Chef, Pyet brings a unique fusion of her Prairie Band Potawatomi and Mexican heritage. A great pick for those interested in the intersection of Indigenous cuisines across borders.

• Heid E. Erdrich, Original Local: Indigenous Foods, Stories, and Recipes from the Upper Midwest

  • Why read it: Erdrich is a poet, and it shows. This is a beautiful mix of memoir, history, and recipes that specifically celebrates the foodways of the Great Lakes and Dakotas.

• Andrew George Jr., Modern Native Feasts: Healthy, Innovative, Sustainable Cuisine

  • Why read it: A follow-up to his classic Feast!, this book focuses on healthy, sustainable eating and is very practical for everyday cooking.

• Tashia Hart, The Good Berry Cookbook: Harvesting and Cooking Wild Rice and Other Wild Foods

  • Why read it: This is the definitive guide to manoomin (wild rice)—from the canoe to the table.

• Sarah Calvosa Olson, Chími Nu’am: Native California Foodways for the Contemporary Kitchen

  • Why read it: A vital resource for the West Coast. Olson (Karuk) focuses on the diverse and often overlooked food systems of California tribes.

• Sean Sherman, The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen

  • Why read it: The book that changed the industry. Sherman (Oglala Lakota) cuts out colonial ingredients (dairy, wheat, cane sugar) to showcase a truly decolonized diet.

• Thomas Pecore Weso, Good Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir

  • Why read it: Part history, part cookbook, this is a distinct look at Menominee life in Wisconsin. It captures the humor and community of eating together.

• Alanna Yazzie, The Modern Navajo Kitchen

  • Why read it: A celebration of Diné (Navajo) comfort food. It bridges the gap between traditional family recipes and the ingredients available to most modern families.

Resources to learn about Indigenous peoples in the United States

When we talk about “Indigenous Peoples of the United States,” we are talking about a massive, diverse group of sovereign nations—over 574 federally recognized tribes, plus many state-recognized and unrecognized nations.

Too often, the American education system treats Indigenous history as a footnote to the “real” history of the Founding Fathers. The resources below challenge that narrative. They argue that you cannot understand the Civil War, the Constitution, or the modern economy without understanding the central role of Native nations.

I have selected a mix of broad historical surveys, modern fiction, and podcasts. These works move beyond the “tragedy narrative” to show that Indigenous people are not just victims of history, but active political players, creators, and contemporaries.

Free Resources

• All My Relations Podcast

  • Essential listening for contemporary relationality and issues

• Indian Country Today

  • One of the best ways to keep up with news written by Indigenous peoples and about Indigenous peoples

• This Land Podcast

  • The best primer on the legal reality of sovereignty and Indian Child Welfare Act

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, “The Serviceberry,” Emergence Magazine. (There’s also an audio version available at this link!)

Books

• Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

  • Why read it: It puts Indigenous history back at the center of American politics, arguing you can’t understand the Constitution or the Civil War without understanding Native power.

• Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

  • Why read it: An unapologetic, hard-hitting counter-narrative to the history taught in most US high schools.

• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

  • Why read it: A gentle but profound guide to viewing the land not as a resource to extract, but as a relative to care for.

• Tommy Orange, There There (Fiction)

  • Why read it: A Pulitzer-finalist novel that explores the “Urban Indian” experience, shattering the myth that all Native people live on reservations.

• David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present

  • Why read it: A direct response to Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this book argues that Indigenous history didn’t end in 1890; Indigenous history is an on-going story of survival and adaptation.

• Matika Wilbur, Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America

  • Why read it: A stunning visual journey across 562+ Native nations. If you only buy one book for your coffee table to start conversations, this is it.

Resources for learning about whose land you live on

Many of us don’t know the specific history of the ground beneath our feet. Was the land ceded by treaty? Was it unceded and seized? Was it shared by multiple nations?

I suggest starting with these two tools:

1. Invasion of America

• Best for: Visualizing the timeline of land loss in the United States.

• Why use it: This interactive map allows you to click on your location and see exactly which treaty (or executive order) transferred the land from Indigenous to US control. It links directly to the text of the treaties, allowing you to read the specific promises made—and often broken—by the government.

2. Native-Land.ca

• Best for: Understanding the overlap of territories, languages, and treaties across the Americas (and the world).

• Why use it: This is the best tool for breaking out of the rigid “state lines” mindset. It visualizes the fluidity of Indigenous territories.

• Important Note: This data is crowd-sourced and approximates boundaries. It is a starting point, not a legal document.

A Final Word on Research: Digital maps are only the first step. Once you identify the nations near you using these tools, go to that Tribal Nation’s official website. Look for their Tribal Historic Preservation Office (THPO) or Culture Department to read how they describe their history and territory.

Read more, support local

The books I’ve suggested also make great gift ideas (for others or for yourself) for the holiday season! If you are planning to buy a book, consider supporting a local bookstore. I’m lucky to live in a community with several awesome bookstores (like this one, and this one, and this one). But, if you don’t have a local bookstore in your community, you can order from an Indigenous-owned bookstore like Birchbark Books or support one of my local bookstores (they all have options to ship) or use BookShop.org.

Keep the Conversation Going Beyond Thanksgiving

This list might feel like a lot. That’s okay. You don’t need to become an expert overnight, and you certainly don’t need to finish this list by the end of the holiday weekend.

Think of this post as a library you can return to throughout the year. The goal is simply to start. Pick one podcast episode for your drive, one book for your nightstand, or one recipe to try next week.

I’d love to hear where you are starting. Which resource caught your eye? Let me know in the comments, and let’s keep learning together.

As we drove north up the Keweenaw Peninsula in mid-October, there was a strong northwest wind blowing off Lake Superior. It cut sharp, a reminder of the more hazardous weather that was soon to come with the Gales of November.

On a practical level, we came to the Keweenaw Peninsula to test our still-fairly-new-to-us Toyota Tacoma. But we were also in search of many kinds of magic that you can’t find just anywhere. Stones that glow like embers in the dark. A campsite tucked away from the world. The brilliance of peak fall colors, and what feels like endless possibilities of exploration.

History was not the point of our trip. But you also cannot explore the Keweenaw without stumbling over its ghosts. This rugged peninsula that juts into the largest freshwater lake in the world, holds layers of stories from ancient Indigenous miners, fur traders, Anishinaabe peoples, and a diverse range of boom-town immigrants around the turn of the twentieth century. I also have my own ghosts tied to this place, but those are stories for another time.

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Before the Journey

Eugene and I have made several visits to the Keweenaw Peninsula since my first trip over eight years ago. I have brought students to the area on about half a dozen trips, and we have also made about half a dozen personal trips. For the latter, our favorite way to explore is dispersed camping. We have camped at High Rock Bay and the Rocket Range in the past. This time we wanted to go to Keystone Bay, an area we stumbled upon once when driving trails in the region in 2020. It is hard to access with most full-size vehicles because of the narrow, muddy, twisty two-track to get there. Now, with our recently purchased 2013 Tacoma, we were confident we could visit again.

But before we could go looking for magic in a land shaped by ghosts of the past, we had to deal with a problem in the present. Our timeline for our departure day was tight. We were getting new rear shocks on our Tacoma, and the mechanic who handles alignments had called in sick on Thursday. We had to wait until Friday morning to pick up the truck. I hovered on the edge of postponing the whole thing to the following weekend, but the weather forecast was too perfect to waste, the fall colors were peaking, and Eugene was motivated.

So, we got up early on Friday morning and drove the fifty-mile round trip to the mechanic to retrieve the truck. We made a quick stop at a grocery store for last-minute supplies. Luckily, Eugene had developed an efficient packing system using interlocking Makita cases, so once we had the Tacoma at home, we were soon ready to get on the move, test out the new shocks, and compare them to what we felt on our September trip to the eastern UP.

The irony was that despite our productive early morning we did not officially get on the road until noon. And the questions nagging at us were practical: Did we remember the correct route to Keystone Bay? Would we have enough daylight to set up camp?

Traveling Backwards Through Time

The Keweenaw was formed by geologic events over a billion years ago when the continent tried to rip itself apart (known as the Mid-Continent Rift), causing massive flows of lava to erupt, forming thick of volcanic rock that underlie much of the current lake basin. Eventually, the lave stopped spewing out, but the weight of the layers caused the rift’s center to sag, and the ends to life and tilt, exposing the deposits of volcanic activity.

Since the ice retreated over 10,000 years ago, people have been drawn to the Peninsula for its rich copper veins. Indigenous peoples mined deposits of pure copper in pit mines along the surface. Usually, copper binds with sulfur to form ores like chalcopyrite. But the low-sulfur environment where these basalts formed meant the copper remained in the form of pure, native copper. In the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, miners from a range ethnicities including Cornish, Polish, Italian, and Finnish, dug deep shafts, following the angles of the volcanic layers formed during the Mid-Continent rift to access copper deposits.

In the present-day, going to the Keweenaw requires intentionality. It is not a place you tend to stumble across. Copper Harbor is the northernmost point of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (Isle Royal National Park—an island in Lake Superior, is the most northern point of the state). If you are traveling directly across the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, there is no need to travel into the Keweenaw. You are not going to accidentally end up at Copper Harbor on a road trip to another destination. The northern beginning of US-41 is just past small mining community turned tourist town—the pavement ends here.

While many visitors cross the Mackinac Bridge to reach the Keweenaw, we approach from the west, driving through the dense canopy of the Ottawa National Forest until we hit the rocky curved spine of the peninsula. On this trip, the fall colors danced before us. Vibrant yellows and oranges interspersed with occasional reds beckoned us, each turn revealing a new canvas painted by nature.

As we drove across the landscape, I thought about the Anishinaabe people who have stewarded these lands and waterways for centuries. I also reflected on the Anishinaabe name for this place: Gakiiwe-wewaning, which means “where a portage is made” and “the crossing place.” We were relying on our truck’s new suspension to navigate the tip of the peninsula, but for millennia, waterways were the most efficient way to travel across this region. Miles off the coast of the tip of the peninsula are Gull Island and Manitou Island. Together the Peninsula, the islands, the rocky shoals around them, and intense winds create strong currents. So, while navigation by waterways can be efficient, it can also be very treacherous.

Share The Outdoors Historian

To avoid the most dangerous waters, when Indigenous peoples were traveling along the south shore of Gichigamiing, the Anishinaabe name for Lake Superior, they usually cut across the center of the Peninsula along a series of lakes and portages. They used these routes long before French fur traders and missionaries arrived in the late seventeenth-century.

In the Civil War era, this route was transformed into the Keweenaw Waterway (commonly referred to as the Portage Canal): a series of canals that allow ships to cut across the Peninsula. The first section was completed in 1860, and the last section was completed in 1873. Like most visitors, we crossed the Keweenaw Waterway on the Houghton Lift Bridge, which links the cities of Houghton and Hancock.

As you climb up the hill through Hancock, the Quincy Mine Hoist House appears, towering across the landscape. This is just one example you see that remind you of the copper boom that exploded in the area after the United States acquired the Keweenaw and the rest of the western south shore of Lake Superior in 1842 by signing a land cession treaty with Anishinaabe peoples. This treaty was signed after Douglas Houghton led an expedition in the area, identifying the potential for mining copper and other metals, like iron. While this treaty ceded land to the United States, it was not a removal treaty--Anishinaabe people remained in the region. In 1854, the United States signed another treaty with Anishinaabe people and created a created reservation at Keweenaw Bay. Both treaties recognized Anishinaabe peoples ongoing usufructuary rights, or in other words, their right to continue to hunt, fish, and gather on ceded territory.

We stopped for gas in Calumet and continued on US-41, which winds its way up the Keweenaw, following a series of ridges that make up the peninsula’s bony spine. After a series of curves through a tunnel of colorful canopy of leaves, the driver took us by the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge, and we descended a hill and entered the small tourist town of Copper Harbor.

I love Copper Harbor. It is one of my favorite small towns on the Lake Superior Circle Tour, but we did not have a reason to stop at that moment, and we were on a time crunch. The questions from earlier continued to echo in our heads: Did we remember the correct route to Keystone Bay? Would we have enough daylight to set up camp?

A few miles later, we passed Fort Wilkins. Now a state park, the United States military built the fort in 1844, because of American’s fears of Anishinaabe peoples attacking the newly established copper mining communities. These fears were based on the racism and fear of American officials who misunderstood Anishinaabe people, rather than any basis in reality. Later, the fort housed soldiers waiting for the end of their enlistments after the Civil War.

Not far past Fort Wilkins, the pavement ends at the end of US-41. Our route continued on the gravel and dirt logging roads that extended out in maze. Logging operations started after the U.S. acquired the land in 1842 to feed the timber demands of the mines. Today, logging continues to be an important industry in the region, and as you continue past Copper Harbor off pavement, logging trucks or other signs of active operations are a common sight.

Sanctuary Along the Shore

Having traced the peninsula’s rich history, we were eager to immerse ourselves in its present beauty. By the time our tires hit the turn-off to the narrow two-track leading toward Keystone Bay, we drove through the quiet aftermath of all that industry. Now, the main questions that had nagged us in the driveway—did we remember the route? Will we arrive before sunset? – were finally answered.

We made one wrong turn, hitting a dead end causing us to backtrack and try another route, which had a shallow water crossing. The terrain suddenly looked familiar. “I remember this,” I told Eugene. “We’ve been here before.’” After many tight turns and some mud, which we both remembered, we rolled into Keystone Bay with just enough daylight to spare.

The contrast was immediate. While high winds whipped up the lake at Copper Harbor, Keystone Bay felt like a secret held close by the land. Tucked away south of the peninsula’s tip, the bay was sheltered from the wind and the water calm.

We set up camp in the fading light, soaking in the peaceful sunset and establishing our temporary home in this special place.

As we lit the tiki torches, the solitude was briefly, and pleasantly, interrupted. A husband and wife pulled up in an SXS, their engine cutting through the quiet. They were not just passing through; they were returning from a hunt. They showed us their haul; they had filled the back of their buggy with “Yooperlites,” aka fluorescent sodalite. To the naked eye, the rocks blend in with a million other grey stones on the beach, but they hold a fiery secret. Under a UV beam, they erupt with a bright orange glow, looking for all the world like embers that refuse to cool.

We have casually hunted Yooperlites since 2019, and we had brought our UV flashlight on this trip. We knew Keystone Bay was sandy, but we hoped we would find some rocky areas of the shore to hunt at either end of the bay.

As luck would have it, the couple generously offered us tips on where to look in this specific area. They also complimented our site, mentioning they wished they were staying the night. It was a brief intersection of lives, a reminder that even in the remote corners of the Keweenaw, there is a shared camaraderie among those willing to make the trek.

With the tent pitched and the visitors gone, we turned to the second priority of the trip: dinner.

Our philosophy on camping food is that “roughing it” should not apply to the menu. We made campfire fajitas—a system I have perfected. I had prepped and seasoned the thinly sliced chicken, bell peppers, and red onion at home, so they hit the pan ready to sizzle.

But the pièce de résistance is the cheese melting technique. In the middle of the woods, miles from the nearest power line, Eugene pulled out his blowtorch. He blasted the cheddar cheese atop the fajitas until it was perfectly molten. We loaded the filling into tortillas, topped them with premade guacamole and pico de gallo, and feasted. It was a meal that felt almost defiant: it was easy but also had a touch of luxury.

Hunting for Fire, Reading the Rocks

After dinner, the darkness around Keystone Bay was absolute. These were the reasons we had come here: dark skies illuminated by a just-past full moon and millions of stars, the sound of Lake Superior waves on the beach, and the potential to find hidden treasures along the shore.

We grabbed our UV flashlights and headed for the shoreline. We walked along the beach, heading east toward where the couple directed us beyond a basalt point. The shoreline got rockier. We had arrived.

This first night was a learning experience. Walking the rocky, unfamiliar shoreline past the point in the pitch black required a different kind of focus. We found a few glowing rocks, or more accurately, pebbles. They were small successes that proved the magic was real, but we were mostly getting our “sea legs,” learning the terrain of the beach.

As we returned to our campsite, the lights of a freighter heading west, probably to the Twin Ports of Superior, Wisconsin and Duluth, Minnesota, or maybe to a smaller port like Two Harbors, Minnesota, interrupted the darkness of the horizon. Since the first lock opened in Sault Ste Marie in 1855, shipping has been the major method of transporting raw materials around the lake. The copper boom was over, but other mining industries persist, including taconite along the Minnesota North Shore of Lake Superior and limestone from Lake Huron.

We decided to call it a night early, resolving to scout the terrain by daylight tomorrow before returning for a serious hunt the next evening. We settled into our tent, moonlight streaming in through windows, lightly illuminating the inside. We listened to the rhythmic waves of Lake Superior, as we drifted to sleep in the crossing place after traveling over layers of history we were only just beginning to explore.

The next morning, we woke up to the glow of a beautiful sunrise. We enjoyed the glittering morning sun and returned to the shoreline to see what we had been walking on. We hiked further than the previous night, thoroughly scoping out the area and enjoying the scenery of the rugged coast and the sound of small waves lapping at the shore.

We also noticed a mountain bike trail that was just inland, up the small bank and in the woods, parallel to the shore. This made it much easier (and quicker) to walk back to the campsite, rather than navigating the rocky beach again. We found a handful of beautiful old white pine along this trail that somehow managed to escape over a century of logging unscathed.

As we crossed over the basalt point, heading back to the beach and our campsite, I paused to reflect on the geology. These volcanic rocks are a humbling reminder of scale; they show us how small our lives are compared to the immensity of geological time.

Hitting the Trails

After soaking in the geology, we swapped hiking boots for tires. When you explore the Keweenaw, you drive across layers of geological history that tell a story more than a billion years old. And the same forces that created copper had left behind a topography that is a premier off-road destination on the American side of Lake Superior.

We stocked up on snacks, hopped in the Tacoma, and backtracked from our campsite through the twisty turns and water crossing to the wider logging roads, eventually taking the turn off to Horseshoe Harbor. We continued past the popular nature preserve, eventually reaching a point where private property lines drew a hard stop. This section of two-track offered a variety of challenges, including a kind of “micro rock crawling” that you rarely find in this region. The highlight—and the challenge—was navigating a series of rocky steps and a deeply rutted, off-camber section that demanded focus behind the wheel. Experienced drivers would consider it no big deal, but it is one of the more technical challenges I have driven, and I was grateful to have Eugene acting as both a spotter and coach.

We also stopped and visited a rocky basalt point that juts north into the lake and a small “dune” made of polished rocks from the lake. From this point, Eugene took over driving, and this means we really tested out the shocks, and they did great. We took a tight, muddy trail over to High Rock Bay and the historic Keweenaw Rocket Range. The road to High Rock Bay ends on a spacious point of dark, hard basalt, which creates a rugged, jagged shoreline east toward the Rocket Range. To the west stretches the cobble beach of High Rock Bay. It is an extremely popular spot for dispersed camping and destination for groups of people riding ATVs and driving SXSs.

At the nearby Rocket Range, we ran into a family in a Jeep whom we had spotted at a rest station and gas station on the drive up, which was another fun moment of connection. The Rocket Range is another interesting historic site. Like High Rock Bay, it is a popular destination for dispersed camping and people driving trails. But between 1964 and 1971, it was one of six launch pads scattered across North America used to collect meteorological data and measure solar X-rays. Today, there is a concrete pad and an engraved stone sign recognizing the site’s history.

It was a great afternoon. But the popularity of High Rock Bay and the Rocket Range was a reminder of why we chose our camping spot. They are beautiful, but busy. Turning the truck back toward Keystone Bay, we felt a wave of relief returning to our sanctuary. It was quieter, secluded, and felt like our own special spot. In fact, we did not even realize there was another vehicle (a Toyota 4Runner!) parked at the opposite end of the bay from us, until I took a walk looking for leaves to put in my dried flower/leaf press.

Surf, Turf, and Stone

As we settled into camp after our adventures, we were hungry for the main event. If the previous night’s fajitas were “glamping,” tonight was pure backcountry luxury.

The menu was steak, lobster, and orzo. We planned this meal when one of Eugene’s friends was planning to join us for our previous trip. The meal was going to be our birthday present to him. We had all the ingredients, so we figured we might as well enjoy the meal ourselves.

We set up a stainless-steel pan over the grate of the campfire, searing the steak and steaming the lobster tails over the wood coals. On the side, I fired up the propane stove to reheat the orzo, stirring in pesto and Boursin cheese for a creamy, herb-filled finish.

There is something primally satisfying about eating a much more gourmet meal than what is available at most of the local restaurants in our area while sitting in a camp chair, smelling woodsmoke and pine. By the time we ate, the light was not great, so I decided to enjoy the moment, rather than trying to get a picture.

With our bellies full, we were ready for the sequel to last night’s hunt. This time, we had a strategy after scouting the terrain by daylight. We returned to the shore, UV lights in hand, and the difference was night and day. The shore lit up with the orange glow of sodalite—hidden fires revealing themselves to us one by one. It was one of the most successful hunts we have had. As we scanned the shoreline in the past, I was reminded that these rocks, born of ancient geological forces, hold secrets of past lives and untold stories.

Crossing Paths With Ghosts

The next morning, we woke up to an even more beautiful sunrise than the previous day. I headed to the point at the end of the bay to get a clearer view.

Then we focused on dismantling our temporary home. Once we were packed up, we headed back to Copper Harbor. We made an overlook in Fort Wilkins State Park to visit one of my favorite signs on Lake Superior about life on the ship the John Jacob Astor and the subsequent wreck after it was caught in a gale and ran aground in September in 1844 when it was making a delivery of supplies to Fort Wilkins. The remains of the Astor lie in about twenty to thirty feet of water and it is the oldest known shipwreck in Lake Superior. I plan to write more about the Astor and the signs at another time, so definitely make sure you are subscribed if you are intrigued as to why I love these signs so much!

We couldn’t leave the northernmost point of the peninsula without one last epic drive—this time on pavement. We drove up Brockway Mountain and stopped at the lookouts to take in the sweep of fall colors. The 9-mile paved road is the highest paved road between the Allegheny Mountains and the Rocky Mountains. The Keweenaw County Road Commission created the road with the help of federal highway funding in the wake of the Great Depression. Most of the laborers were unemployed copper miners. The road was finished in 1935.

We took in the beauty of the lookouts in the fall. Before our eyes, the fall leaves draped the ridges of the Peninsula in a tapestry of golden and crimson maples and oaks mixed with dark green conifers extending around you and running down to the vast blue of Lake Superior.

From that point on, the main adventure was over. We stopped at Keweenaw Coffee in Calumet for coffee and lunch. The return to “real life” from any camping trip gives me mixed feelings. I am sad to leave behind the campsite we made into a home and the adventures we had, but I also get excited by the taste of a hot latte prepared by someone else, and the promise of a warm shower later that night. I also love the area we live in. And I know we will have the opportunity to return to the Keweenaw and make more memories.

We headed south over the Lift Bridge, crossing the Keweenaw Waterway to trace the rocky spine to the base of the Peninsula before turning west. As we left the Keweenaw behind, I thought about the layers of history we passed through and how we were just a tiny blip on this timeline. The lands we traveled were shaped by geological events that happened over a billion years ago. The tire tracks we left in the mud will wash away with the next rain, erasing the remnants of our weekend. They were brief, fleeting markers of our visit.

Yet as I explore the shores, trails, and dirt roads in the crossing place, I sometimes feel like I cross path with ghosts of those long gone, echoes of their impressions etched in the land. Like tire tracks, people are much more ephemeral than the rocks that create the network of trails and roads. And people are also the heart of a place. Seeing people in the present is something we do every day. But seeing people from the past takes intentionality, just like arriving in the Keweenaw. These ghosts are there when I listen closely. Copper miners who arrived when the ice receded. Anishinaabe peoples and fur traders traveling over old portage routes. Remnants of turn of the twentieth century mining communities. The winds we felt throughout our trip whisper of journeys past.

The people who live here in the present deal with the legacy of these ghosts. Some of these legacies are good, like the resilient communities that survive and adapt. However, other legacies illustrate the harm caused by the boom and bust copper industry. Entire beaches have been replaced by stamp sands, which are another form of mining waste which is particular harmful since the small particles are pulled by waves into the lake where they cover the reefs where trout spawn. There are fish advisories for some lakes connected to the Keweenaw Waterway because they high levels of heavy metals levels because copper mining waste, including stamp sands, heavy metals, and other industrial byproducts, were dumped into them for decades. While all people who live in the Copper Country deal with these legacies, they are particularly impactful for Keweenaw Bay Anishinaabe Nation whose ancestors have fed their communities with the fish from these waters long before Europeans arrived.

To explore the Keweenaw is to step into a conversation between the living and the dead, where history’s whispers move on the currents of the wind and are carried into the future. This is a place we visit to touch the past for a moment, to mingle with ghosts as we lose ourselves in exploration and remind ourselves of the bigger picture. On our trips, we continue to see the impacts of the industrial copper boom. Yet we also feel the ancient rocks under our feet and tires, and feel small compared to the immensity of geological time.

Have you visited the Keweenaw? Where are your favorites places to explore? Do you have questions about its history?

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This month I talk about several camping items that make our trips more enjoyable both budget-friendly and luxury, some of my favorite food establishments we’ve visited recently, and some of my favorite recent activities! I also talk about some of my writing projects and what’s been helping me with them. Since this is a combined list for September and October, it has got 15 + items on it!

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