After the go, go, go of the previous two days we had a more relaxing day of playing it by ear, driving west across the Upper Peninsula towards the Keweenah Peninsula, a true peninsula sticking out into Lake Superior. We drove about 1.5 hours west to the historic town of Ishpeming for a short geology hike I heard of. Through a series of steep streets (and past lots of rusty red rock buildings and red dirt ground) we reached Jasper Street and started hiking past old mine diggings and up the small hill of Jasper Knob. At its crest was a slight clearing with about a half-acre of glacially polished banded iron formations, something I had not seen in the wild before. Banded iron formations (BIFs) are unique sedimentary rocks with alternating layers of iron oxides (hematite, magnetite) and silica (jasper, chert) that only really formed in the Precambrian when Earth still had an oxygen-poor atmosphere. Here the BIFs had silvery hematite and red jasper in interesting post-deposition folds. From the hilltop clearing we could see the downtown of Ishpeming; instead of church steeples and belltowers there were strange obelisks protruding which I later learned were the 1920s Egyptian Revival-styled concrete headframes of an important iron mine. This area in the central Upper Peninsula was a major global producer of iron ore and essentially kickstarted America's Industrial Revolution and fueled major war efforts. On the way back down the hill we ducked through a cut fence and checked out a small flooded iron mining pit occupied by some happy green frogs.
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| Banded iron formation (BIF; and below) |
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| Ishpeming, iron country |
On the way out of town we stopped at a self-proclaimed tourist trap rock shop. Copper and iron specimens were in abundance. There were nice labels describing many of the local specimens but every one was also exaggeratingly labeled very rare or one-of-a-kind with prices relatedly out of touch. Onward, we pulled into a very busy parking lot at the Canyon Falls Roadside Stop for a short detour to break up the drive. A short hike led down alongside a ledge-y creek, which abruptly plunged over the wide sheet of Canyon Falls into a dark and mysterious little canyon. Vertical walls, lots of rock shelves, deep tannic waters, and lush greenery continued horizontally for over a thousand feet in what is apparently unironically referred to as the grand canyon of Michigan. After walking to the bottom I scouted a natural waterslide I wanted to try and I took the first plunge before I went in. It was too bumpy to really be fun but I went a second time just to be sure. After, I suggested we instead migrate to the pool just below Canyon Falls when Heather noticed I was coated (coated!) in small wriggly black things (from sliding) she was convinced were leeches. I knew they were larvae of mosquitos or some other bug but still was happy to remove them as fast as possible. Eventually I managed to convince her to slide into the pool below the falls for a brief soak before we continued on. It was quite a pleasant little roadside wonder.
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| Canyon Falls |
Out of iron country and into copper country, we drove through Houghton, the main town at the base of the Keweenah Peninsula, to Michigan Tech's A.E. Seaman Mineral Museum. I had heard good things but was really not prepared for what turned out to be a truly excellent museum. There were fantastic and unique specimens from around the world and a very nice fluorescent display, but the easy standout was the vast collection of Michigan minerals, most of which were collected within a 50 mile radius. Large, shiny, ornate and crystalline forms of copper were in abundance and on a scale and quality I have seen nowhere else in the world. A favorite was a one of a kind specimen of featherlike copper crystals that transitioned into a feather of silver crystals. Other local treasures included Lake Superior agates, strange howlite-like nodules of pastel-colored datolite, and highly fluorescent sodalite granitics I hoped to find on the beaches nearby at night. I took quite a few photos at the museum but my favorites were the textures more than the specimens including a Widmanstatten-patterned meteorite and the finest variscite I have ever seen. We stayed in the museum until just before closing time and then on the way back to our car spotted a strange pavilion. Inside was a 19 ton piece of copper found by scuba divers and dredged up from lake Superior, the largest known single specimen. The museum was a nice introduction to the importance of copper production in the region's history.
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| Meteorite |
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| Variscite detail |
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| No big deal, just a 19 ton chunk of nearly pure copper |
After the museum and grocery store we drove out to Trail's End Campground near Copper Harbor at the top of the peninsula. First we checked out Agate Beach at Hunter's Point Park. Here we saw about thirty people very deliberately hunting for agates on the beach. I took this as a clear sign the beaches would be very picked over for agates and the fluorescent sodalite pebbles ("yooperlites" as popularized locally but potentially better named "canuckites" since glaciers dragged them here from Canada) I hoped to find. Sure enough this was the case, but at least the beaches were very scenic with clear waters and a long crisp horizon over Lake Superior.
We found our campground to be a weird place with lots of their workers living there, weird buildings and projects in various states of construction, and lots of electrified gardens plots. Between weather and my interest in trying to look for UV minerals at night (and late sunsets...), we struggled to figure out a plan for our next couple days. An ambitious option was to drive on to Wisconsin to check out some of the Apostle Isles, which would be neat to see but a lot more driving. We decided to hike out to the end of Hunter's Point and packraft the narrow 300ft gap over to Porter Island (frontispiece), which I hoped would be less picked over. We did not really find all that much but it was a beautiful beach and a pleasant night to be out paddling. Returning under a nearly full moon, we opted to paddle the half-mile back to the carpark instead of walking.
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| One of many beaches named Agate Beach |
Shaping up to be a mellow day, we drove through Copper Harbor the next morning and stopped briefly at Fort Wilkins State Park for some interesting old historical buildings and exhibits then to Astor Shipwreck Park and a return drive along Brockway Mountain Road.
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| Fort Wilkins |
We drove a bumpy road out to Gratiot River County Park, another surprisingly busy beach for agate collecting. The beach had a nice bank of pebbles and cobbles and we did find a few agates and interesting rocks. In hindsight it probably would have been the better place to look for UV minerals than where we ended up. I unsuccessfully tried gathering an assortment of granitic rocks to hide under my hat to check with my UV light.
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| Gratiot River County Park |
We visited one of the stranger, more deranged, and expensive rock shops I have ever been to then walked around Calumet a bit. Eventually we drove to Calumet Water Works Park, again a busy beach with everyone seemingly looking for rocks. We hung out here for a good long time waiting for dark so I could look for some fluorescent sodalite. Eventually it came and we walked to the beach to find dozens of UV lights shining up and down the beach. It was supremely silly and I was about to be the worst of them all. With considerable effort I suited up in my wetsuit/boots/hood, donned my mask and snorkel, and skimmed over the rocks in the shallows with my waterproofed UV light. For all that effort I turned up one small pebble of sodalite; with less effort Heather found a single one too. After all that we crashed late at a campsite in Hancock Recreation Area, setting us up for a late morning.
We stopped in at a cafe in Houghton and Heather took the initiative to schedule us a tour of the Quincy Mine, one of the area's major historic producers of copper. The tour was actually quite interesting, showing off several generations of hoists including one that was the largest of its kind in the world, well-designed buildings, and a cog railcar that took us down the hill to a horizontal adit we walked 2000 ft into at the 7th level of the mine. The cool 43F air blasting out the adit was particularly notable. Interestingly a lot of the copper fissure veins were too large and too pure, taking days, weeks, and months to extract the malleable copper so the mining instead switched to extraction of lower grade amygdaloidal basalt deposits. Essentially the ore body was too good and worked against them! Probably the thing that impressed me most was seeing the map of the mine with its nearly dozen shafts to 9260 ft, 92 different levels, and realizing that all that volume was completely flooded up to the 7th level we toured. After the tour we found a nice rock shop in downtown Houghton and then began our drive back across the Upper Peninsula. We zigzagged through a bizarre series of backroads to eventually reach the very primitive one site campground of Iron Jaw, completed with horrendous flies.
Our last Upper Peninsula stop within sight of the Mackinaw Bridge was to stop to try a pasty, a folded crusted pie the area is supposedly famous for. They were fine. Another long drive across the mitten and we were back. A huge thanks to Heather's parents for our home on wheels and to Heather for helping put together a pretty chill week of experiencing this mysterious Upper Peninsula I had been hearing about.
