We woke up late after yesterday’s long drive and got right down to loafing. After some more loafing, we gathered up our discovery stuff and went for a drive. We thought a good place to start was to find an official visitor information center so we could get maps and shiny brochures about the stuff the locals consider amazing and worthy of an entrance fee paid exclusively by out-of-towners. Our quest to find any visitor information center was repeatedly sent down unrewarding pathways until we finally came to the conclusion that, other than northbound lanes across the toll Mackinac Bridge there was no other way to get to the visitor information center run by the state of Michigan DOT. Since we were already in St. Ignatz, on the north side of the bridge, we would have had to find our way onto the bridge, pay a toll of $4.00, continue south over the bridge to Mackinaw City, turn around, pay another $4.00 toll, drive north over the bridge and finally arrive at the visitor center.
We begged off out of frustration and took off without the benefits of Michigan State Department of Transportation maps. We drove north and east along the shores of Lake Huron, all the while intending to go to Sault Ste Marie, which the locals allege is pronounced “Soo San Marie.” I don’t know what it is about the French that would make them spell a word pronounced as “Soo” like Sault in Michigan but Souix in North Dakota. They may be a strange race of people.
We drove over flat almost arrow straight road sections until we arrived in Sault Ste Marie, home of the Soo Locks between Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Sault Ste Marie has some neat old houses down by the locks but a lot of the rest of it is associated with activity around the locks and shipping. Lots of steel crane booms, bridges and fencing installed by Homeland Security so ordinary taxpayers have to be inconvenienced or denied access to assets owned by the U.S. – you know – you and me. Operation of the locks is pretty interesting if you happen to be there when a ship is going through.
From Sault Ste Marie we changed direction and went west to the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum at the end of Whitefish Point. This facility is an old Coast Guard Light Station located at the last bend in Lake Superior before the downstream ships start getting lined up for the locks in Sault Ste Marie. A whole bunch of ships wrecked in this area of Lake Michigan, primarily through running into each other. Lots of the wrecks were wrecked by another ship driving over them, sometimes repeatedly. A British-flagged ship called the Alberta ran down 4 other ships within the space of a couple months under the premise that “She is the Crown’s ship and everyone else needs to get out of her way.” The captain had his license revoked for 2 whole months.
The Edmund Fitzgerald, an enormous ore hauler, broke up and went down about 15 miles from Whitefish Point. Since the ship was ultimately found in two big pieces on the bottom, hull failure seems to be a pretty good guess about the source of it’s demise and the death of the 28 crewmen aboard. A singer, Gordon Lightfoot, commemorated the event in a tune I can’t remember the name of and museum visitors will hear it numerous times while perusing the collection housed in this $13.00 per head one-room display hall. It is pretty tiny. There is a light tower facility you can ascend if you have an appointment and pay an extra $4.00 a head and are not wearing any kind of open-backed shoes nor be less than eight years old and be willing to sign a hold-harmless document signing away all your rights. There is a gift shop where Peggy picked up a shot glass and a T-shirt at reasonable rates. There is a nice deck overlooking the shore of Lake Superior and the water was crystal-clear. The beach is coarse sand and small cobble. There are no waves. Access to the deck and the restrooms is free.
Lake Superior has some great stats: deepest lake of the Great Lakes, by far the largest surface area, one quarter of the available fresh water on earth, many shipwrecks considering the traffic, amazing quantities of shipping from a tremendous number of commodity suppliers dealing in food and minerals and a very long drive to get to the place regardless of the point of origin.
From the shipwreck museum we drove about 20 miles south and west and arrived at a state park called Tahquamenon Falls. Attempts at the pronunciation of these….uhh…Falls would be speculative on my part. It is $9.00 per car to enter the park and we started by going to the Lower Falls. It is about a 200 yard walk from the parking lot to the first viewing area. Our initial view was of some small riffles in the river, nothing too exciting as some of the cascades dropped as much a 2 feet. Off to one side of us we could spot a falls section that dropped about 6 feet and the brink of this falls section was mobbed by many visitors. Looking up the flat sections of the river between little cascades one can easily see many fishermen, waders, boaters, and other folks that have become soaked while attempting to remain dry. Fully sated with views of the Lower Falls, we hopped back into Charlotte and drove another 4 miles down the road to the Upper Falls. It is about a third of a mile from the parking lot to the brink of the Upper Falls which are much nicer than the Lower Falls. The Upper Falls are a real waterfall that drops maybe 50 feet and the whole river drops over at one edge that runs from bank-to-bank. It is pretty spectacular and certainly the best dollar spent on touristy stuff here in the Upper Peninsula or UP. Locals here are referred to as Yoopers.
From Unpronouncible Falls, we got on a state highway to return us to our camp spot in St. Ignatz. It takes a while to get anywhere in the UP, primarily due to very long travel distances and a maximum speed limit of 55.