Month: August 2023

We spent a nice lesiurely morning at the campsite. It was pretty cool for August so not many mosquitoes at all. Nerd hobbies alert: Jeff put his Ham radio intennea up to try to connect with other operators, while I did some cross stitching. How old are we?

We went in to the town for lunch and some cell signal so we could catch up with the world’s news and so I could upload photos for the blog. I enjoy giving up social media during these remote camping trips, but it is frustrating when I want to look something up and can’t. Example: What rock/plant/tree is this? or What is this random cool looking ruin in the middle of no where and why was it built here? I have an inquiring mind and want to know things! LOL

After lunch and grocery shopping, we drove around the island. Most of it is gravel roads and privately owned. Jeff found the road that becomes an ice road in the winter when the lake freezes over too much for the ferry to run. There is another fort that we could have gone to see, but the teens with us were protesting because “all forts are the same!”. They are not wrong!

We got back to our campsite mid afternoon and read or did our nerdy hobbies, and then Jeff cooked grilled pork tenderloin sandwiches for supper. The winds finally started dying down about sunset, but the beach remained deserted.

Today was a rare day in our road trip traditions. Jeff did not have to drive at all! Our campground was surrounded by a beautiful trail and Fort Wilkins, one of the most un-strategic forts that the American military ever built in this country.

We walked to the trail from our campsite and followed it around to the beach very near the end of the Keweenaw Peninsula. We zoomed in our cameras to take pictures of the Copper Harbor Lighthouse (you have to take a boat cruise to get up close to it). The beach was all rocks and pebbles so we all had fun trying out the Rock Identifier App to find out the kids of cool rocks we were finding. A lot of it was basalt, but we also found different kinds of jaspers, sandstone, rhyolite, and a few agates.

The trail led to Fort Wilkins, built in 1844 as way to keep law and order during the Copper Rush and as a result of the treaty where the Ojibwe lost their land to the United States. The Ojibwe survived by assimilating and moving inland to more remote areas rather than violence, and the fort was so remote, not many white settlers actually settled there. Meanwhile, all the soldiers left in 1846 to go fight in the war against Mexico and then the Civil War. It was used for a few years after the Civil War and then was abandoned by the military. In the 1920’s it became a Michigan State Park and a lot of reconstruction was done during the Great Depression by the Works Project Administration (WPA).

It was not crowded at all and had lots of informative signs to look at as you walked in and out of the buildings. After we were done with our wanderings, we went to the Campground store to get ice cream, then walked back to our campsite to relax. A nice relaxing day!