Starved Rock State Park ’20

Posted on July 27, 2020 by admin

Hot-and-sweaty weekend until a steady warm wind came on Sunday afternoon, a baby sirocco you might call it, and blew away the humidity. That left the golden glow of dusk warm but dry.

All of us, dog included, took an in-state overnight (30-hour) trip over the weekend, with Starved Rock State Park as the prime destination. Been a while since we’d all been there together, but each of the girls had visited with friends in more recent years.

That isn’t a postcard of mine, though if the state sold it at the park, I’d buy one.

The 2,630-acre Starved Rock SP hews close to the south banks of the Illinois River in LaSalle County, its distinctive topography a creation of long-ago floods and glacial movement. The state acquired the land in 1911 and (of course) the CCC did park infrastructure work during that agency’s short existence. It’s a popular place, more so now than ever. Guess that’s because driving destinations are the thing at our moment in history.

We waited until after the highest early afternoon heat had passed on Saturday to take our hikes. Late afternoon was still steamy, but tolerable, especially under trees. When we came to this fork, we took the path to French Canyon.
It isn’t long before the French Canyon walls rise around you.
Before long, you reach a waterfall. Just a trickle in late July.
Doubling back to the fork, we then followed a trail that’s mostly boardwalk, plus a lot of stairs that I didn’t document.
To the view from Lover’s Leap.
The nearby Eagles Cliff vista, looking upriver.
Look a little downriver and you see why the Illinois is so wide just below Eagle Cliff.
The Starved Rock Lock and Dam, also known as Lock and Dam No. 6, completed in 1933 and operated by the Army Corps of Engineers.

We might have walked further into other canyons after that, or up to the Starved Rock feature, but the heat and stair climbing spent our energy. Mine, anyway. We ought to go back some cooler day in the fall. I’ve been visiting the place since the late ’80s and still haven’t seen some of the other canyons.

Wyalusing State Park

Posted on July 7, 2020 by admin

On the morning of July 4, we left Prairie du Chien and drove a short distance to Wyalusing State Park, a thickly wooded Wisconsin property at the confluence of the Wisconsin and Mississippi rivers.

The first order of business at the park: a drive to a place called Henneger Point at the end of the winding and not-too-wide Cathedral Tree Drive. A fitting name, with massive maples and other trees towering over the road.

Before getting to the point, you arrive at the Spook Hill Group of mounds, looking very much like the ones across the Mississippi at Effigy Mounds NM, and more distinct in person than via photograph.
Henneger Point offered us a nice view of the river and Iowa across the way, behind a summer blaze of lilies.
A picnic shelter stands close by. The sign on the shelter said it was closed, though I imagine enforcement is a mite spotty.
CCC. Has to be, at least originally. Later, I found out that CCC Camp Nelson Dewey #2672 existed in the park from 1935 to ’37. Men living there built park facilities and improved its roads and trails, so they probably did the shelter, though later in the day I noticed a Wisconsin Conservation Corps sign on a small bridge on a trail. That’s an existing nonprofit that does similar work as the CCC of old.

We walked a half mile or so along the wide Mississippi Ridge Trail, one of whose trail heads is at Henneger Point.
In theory it’s suitable for bicycles, but we were absolutely the only ones on it. Talk about social distancing.
Later, we drove to the trail head of Sugar Maple Trail and did its 1.5-mile loop. The map didn’t warn us how steep it would be, though if I’d thought about it, I would have figured it out, since the trail loops down to near the river.

Only slightly down at first.

Then much further down, along the edge of a ravine cut by a creek-tributary of the Mississippi.

Going down wasn’t so bad, but I knew that meant we’d have to go back up. So we did.

Tiring, but not as tiring as the day before at Effigy Mounds, even though I believe the change in elevation and the ambient temperature were about the same. Steep and hot, respectively.

At one point along the cascading creek near the trail is a waterfall. Above the waterfall was a nice place to sit.
Elsewhere in the park is a memorial to the passenger pigeon, but I didn’t have the energy to seek it out after our long morning hike. Another time, perhaps. Until then, here’s Aldo Leopold on the passenger pigeon.

Devil’s Lake State Park

Posted on June 22, 2020 by admin

Over the weekend we visited Devil’s Lake State Park in Sauk County, Wisconsin. We drove up one evening, spent the night at a motel in Madison, and then the next morning continued on to the park, which is about 45 minutes to the northwest of the capital. After spending most of the day in the park, we drove home from there.

The closest town is Baraboo, which we last saw in 2007 — home of the delightful Circus World Museum. This time we drove by the museum. Even if we’d wanted to go again, which we didn’t, that wouldn’t have been possible. At least it’s still there. I hope Circus World manages to reopen sometime.

Devil’s Lake is a pleasant-looking, 360-acre lake with a couple of beaches and other lakeshore amenities, but those aren’t the main draw. What makes it the most popular Wisconsin state park are the Quartzite bluffs on two sides of the lake, east and west, relics of the most recent ice age. Rising to as high as 500 feet, they offer quite a view.

First, of course, you have to follow a trail that takes you up to those views. We picked the one on the east side of the lake, the fittingly named East Bluff Trail.
Up it goes.
I wondered what the people ahead of us were carrying on their backs — note the black and green rectangular packs. They turned out to be crash pads. For the sport, or activity, of bouldering. That is, climbing boulders. I knew people climb rock faces, but that was a variation I’d never heard of. Guess the people ahead of us were out for a day of bouldering. Takes all kinds.

I’ll bet Devil’s Lake SP is a good place for that. There are many, many boulders.

Like some other recent uphill hikes, it took me longer than the rest of the family. Rests were necessary. But I made it to various vistas.

There are a couple of named rock formations near the East Bluff Trail. One is the impressive Devil’s Doorway.

Looks solid, but surely the formation doesn’t have long to exist in geologic terms. Fleeting as a firefly on that scale. So is the whole bluff, come to think of it.

To provide a sense of scale.

Near Devil’s Door, the East Bluff Trail meets the East Bluff Woods Trail, which has a much gentler slope. We returned via that trail.

In June, the trail passes through a lush forest in the first flush of a septentrional summer. Past occasional fern fields.

Do ferns consider flowering plants a pack of johnny-come-latelies? That’s the kind of deep-time thing I wonder about when wandering through a forest, dog-tired from climbing a Holocene-vintage bluff.

Bay City State Park

Posted on September 8, 2019 by admin

It’s near Bay City, Michigan, but even so Bay City State Park strikes me as a misnomer. It isn’t that near, for one thing — you have drive some miles to reach the edge of the city. Saginaw Bay State Park would be better, because that’s the salient feature of the park.

Though it’s a bit of a walk to take in the view. That’s what we did last Sunday morning.
Worth it.
“Bay City State Park, situated on the shores of the Saginaw Bay, is home to one of the largest remaining freshwater, coastal wetlands on the Great Lakes, the Tobico Marsh,” the Michigan DNR says. “More than a thousand feet of sandy beach and over 2,000 acres of wetland woods, wet meadows, cattail marshlands and oak savannah prairies make it an ideal staging area for migratory birds.”

We spent time on the beach, but also walked around the nearby lagoon, which took the better part of an hour.
The air was neither hot nor cold, no mosquitoes bothered us — hard to believe, considering some of our mosquito experiences in Michigan — and the place wasn’t crowded at all, even though it was Labor Day weekend. The dog was happy to sniff along but didn’t pull too hard. Occasionally we’d hear a motor in the distance, but the hum of traffic you hear from every direction in the suburbs wasn’t there. Birds, bugs and wind are most of what you hear in a place like that, if you leave your noisemaking gizmos behind.

Even better than all that, we’d come some distance to be there. That seasoned the experience for the better. All in all, a near perfect walk.

Point State Park & Pittsburgh Walkabout

Posted on July 14, 2019 by admin

RIP, Patricia Deany, mother of our dear old friend Kevin Deany, and a kind and gracious lady. She passed last week at age 90.

At the confluence of the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers is Point State Park, a 36-acre triangular patch of land that may well be featured in every bit of tourist literature ever published about Pittsburgh since the park’s creation nearly 50 years ago.

But that’s no excuse not walk over to the park from downtown Pittsburgh and make a circuit around the fountain at the tip of the park, which is what we did after lunch at the Oyster House on July 5.
That image makes it look like no one else was there, which wasn’t true at all.
The park offers views of various other parts of Pittsburgh, such as Mt. Washington and the Duquesne Incline.

Or Heinz Field, home of the Steelers. There ought to be a giant ketchup bottle in there somewhere.

Away from the fountain, there’s a view of the Fort Pitt Bridge, which carries I-376 across the Monongahela. It replaced the Point Bridge, which was destroyed, along with the Manchester Bridge, to make way for the park.

Besides being a pleasant green space with views, the park makes various nods to the early history of Pittsburgh. An irregular path of sidewalk follows the outline of Fort Duquesne, the French outpost. Elsewhere other sidewalks mark the outline of the somewhat larger Fort Pitt, the succeeding British outpost, also in the classic star (Bastion) shape.

The U.S. flag is a little unusual. Not in having 13 stars, but in that they aren’t the circular arrangement you usually see. Then again, no one specified how the stars in the canton should be arrayed in those days (and maybe we should go back to that).

On one edge of the park is the Fort Pitt Block House, Point State Park’s only surviving structure from colonial times, built in 1764 as a redoubt of Fort Pitt. It has endured since then in its original spot, for many years as a residence, more recently as a relic.

Our walking tour of downtown Pittsburgh started at the Block House, led by an energetic young woman, native to Pittsburgh and eager to talk about various places and buildings, though less about design and more about history.

Naturally, the names of Pittsburgh robberbarons Andrew Carnegie and Henry Clay Frick came up a lot, including the story about a dying Carnegie writing a letter to the estranged Frick asking for a meeting, presumably in the spirit of reconciliation.

Les Standiford tells the story, via NPR. A man named Bridge, who delivered the letter, was Carnegie’s assistant.

“Frick’s ire was, after all, legendary. He’d gone toe-to-toe with strikers, assassins, and even Carnegie himself, and had rarely met a grudge he could not hold. Long before Frick had constructed the mansion that would dwarf Carnegie’s ‘Highlands’ up the street, he had gone out of his way to purchase a tract of land in downtown Pittsburgh, then built a skyscraper tall enough to cast Carnegie’s own office building next door in perpetual shadow.

” ‘Yes, you can tell Carnegie I’ll meet him,’ Frick said finally, wadding the letter and tossing it back at Bridge. ‘Tell him I’ll see him in Hell, where we both are going.’ ”

Whatever else you can say about the steely-eyed bastard Frick, at least he had no illusions about his benevolence, as Carnegie seemed to have had. Our guide also mentioned the taller Frick building next to Carnegie’s, and in fact pointed them out. They are both now overshadowed by more recent Pittsburgh buildings, of course.

At one point, we passed by a building associated with both Carnegie and Frick, along with a lot of other Gilded Age and later tycoons: the Duquesne Club on Sixth Ave.
Founded in 1873 and still a social club for the wealthy, its current home, a Romanesque structure designed by Longfellow, Alden & Harlow, opened in 1890. Just in time for Carnegie and Frick to discuss, possibly over brandy and cigars, the busting of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers.

Speaking of labor history, not far away from the club, I noticed this historic marker.
The founding convention of the AFL was in a Turner Hall. Our guide didn’t mention that, and I asked her about the Turner Hall. She hadn’t heard it. To be fair, I’d never heard of Turner Halls until recently either. To be extra fair, I’m not guiding walking tours of a major American city, so I consider that a small lapse on her part.

The Turner Hall in Pittsburgh, unlike that in Milwaukee, is no more. The site is now called Mellon Square, a 1950s park-like creation paid for by the Mellons to go with the development of Alcoa’s new headquarters building at that time.

Alcoa isn’t there any more, and the building is now known as the Regional Enterprise Tower, but it still has its distinctive aluminum skin. The New York modernists Harrison & Abramovitz designed it.

I’ve read that a Beaux-Arts palace of a theater, the Nixon, was destroyed to make way for Alcoa, causing some consternation even in the tear-it-down midcentury.

Another historic marker that I noticed (that also wasn’t on the tour).
Why Pittsburgh? I wondered. I looked it up later. NPR again: “Slovak culture is everywhere in the Steel City. It’s home to the Honorary Slovak Consulate, a handful of social clubs, cultural centers and annual holiday festivals dedicated to maintaining and celebrating Slovak traditions.

“ ‘Allegheny County has the highest percentage of all of the counties in the United States, not just Pennsylvania, of people who claim Slovak heritage,’ said Martin Votruba, head of Slavic studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

“Slovaks and Czechs formed a group called the Czecho-Slovak National Council of America. Because there were so many Slovak immigrants living in Pittsburgh, Votruba said it seemed like the perfect location to have a big meeting on Memorial Day in 1918.”

Along the way, we looked at a work of public art in Pittsburgh, a 25-foot bronze fountain centerpiece at Agnes R. Katz Plaza by Louise Bourgeois, completed in 1999. The eye-like smaller bronzes are actually benches, though it’s hard to tell from this angle.

By the time we got to the U.S. Steel Tower, the tallest building in Pittsburgh, a light rain was falling. It would continue at varying strength through the rest of the walk.

No aluminium for this behemoth, rather steel and lots of it. This too is a Harrison & Abramovitz design. The company made steel for its own building, a newish product at the time, corten or weathering steel, which ends up with a dark brown oxidation over the metal to protect the structure from the elements and obviate the need for paint. (The steel still has many surprising uses.) According to our guide, however, until recently the building skin had an unfortunate habit of spitting granules of this rust onto the sidewalks and people below.

Aluminium, steel and then glass. Fitting for the HQ of PPG, also a stop of the tour. Founded in 1883 as Pittsburgh Plate Glass, these days PPG is a supplier of paints, coatings, optical products and specialty materials.

The complex is actually six buildings, all opening in the early 1980s as part of the effort to revive downtown Pittsburgh. By that time, Johnson/Burgee were the go-to NY architects, so they designed the PPG. Rain prevented me from making a good image, but the tallest of the buildings towers over a plaza that features an ice rink in colder weather. It looks like this on a sunny day.

Toward the end of the tour, we made a stop at a place on Smithfield St. that has no marker of any kind and in fact isn’t distinctive in any way, except for one thing: it was the site of an early nickelodeon, thought to be the first theater anywhere devoted exclusively to movies, as opposed to a live theater with a few machines tucked away to separate patrons from their coins.

“The first exclusive moving pictures theater in Pittsburg and the world was opened in 1905 by Harry Davis and John P. Harris in the Howard Block, west side of Smithfield street, between Diamond and Fifth avenue,” one E. W. Lightner wrote in 1919.

Diamond St. is no longer called that. Oddly enough, the change to Forbes St. was made as late as 1958. I’d imagine that would have been hard to do.

Lightner continues: “Curious to say, the second exclusive picture theater of the world was opened in Warsaw, capital of Poland, by a Pittsburg Polander, who saw the Davis-Harris adventure and recognized the possibilities of presenting so wonderful and profitable a development in his native country.”

“The original and only ‘Nickelodeon’ was opened at 8 o’clock of the morning and the reels were kept continuously revolving until midnight. A human queue was continuously awaiting the ending of a performance and the emptying of chairs. Inside an attendant would announce, ‘show ended,’ and spectators would be hustled gently to the street and new spectators welcomed, seated as quickly as possible, and the picture would again respond to the magic reel.”

As you can see, it was pretty much a nothing site when Google Images came by.

Still looks that way in July 2019. There ought to be a marker there at least, or maybe even a hipster bar with a nickelodeon theme.

Aztalan State Park

Posted on June 12, 2019 by admin

After tooling around Lake Mills, Wisconsin, for a few hours, we got around to the original reason for driving up to southern Wisconsin for the day, a visit to Aztalan State Park. The park is a few miles east of the town, occupying 172 acres near the banks of the Crawfish River.

It’s a small version of Cahokia in Illinois, near modern-day St. Louis. The comparison isn’t idle, since both settlements were created and occupied by Middle Mississippian Indians more than 1,000 years ago.

Like Cahokia, Aztalan features manmade mounds and a rich archaeological legacy, despite 19th-century depredations. The Indians at Aztalan similarly and mysteriously abandoned it like those at Cahokia, centuries before the coming of Europeans.

The name is a misnomer in the sense that in the 19th century, one of the ideas about the prehistoric people who lived here saw them as ancestors of the Aztecs. The ancestors of the Aztecs were thought to be from a place north of Mexico called Aztalan. So the name was applied to the site, even though the Mississippians are no longer believed to be Aztec ancestors.

Then again, what the people who lived here actually called their settlement is unknown. I’d speculate that it was some variation of Our Place or This Here Place in their language, but who knows. Aztalan is as good a name as any in our time.

But why did they settle in the future Wisconsin? The Milwaukee Public Museum posits: “Things such as copper, lead (for white paint), deer, and certain types of stone materials such as Hixton Silicified Sandstone, were the basis of Mississippian trade interests in the northern frontier, and may have influenced the location of Aztalan as a Mississippian outpost in Wisconsin. Trade and other social and political processes expanded Cahokian influence out into much of the Midwest, as well as eastern and southeastern North America.”

Aztalan State Park sports tall grass, mounds and stockade posts, with mowed paths connecting different areas.
The stockade posts are 20th-century reconstructions, but I understand they were placed in the original holes.
One of the mounds. The second largest one, I think.

The path to the largest of the mounds. Large and small are relative terms for the mounds at Aztalan. Compared with Cahokia, they’re all pretty small.

Another path leads down to the Crawfish River, which I assume supplied Aztalan with its water and some fish.
Near the river is what I take to be an active archaeological dig, complete with screens for sifting the soil.
I don’t think I’d have the patience for that kind of work. But I’m glad there are people who do.

Two Harbors and Gooseberry Falls State Park

Posted on August 8, 2018 by admin

It occurs to me that it’s been 40 years this week since I visited Wisconsin for the first time — and Minnesota for that matter, though I only passed through that state. I was on a bus full of other San Antonio high school kids on the way to the 1978 Mu Alpha Theta national meeting in Stevens Point, Wis.

So our recent trip up that way was a 40th anniversary tour for me. More or less. More less than more, since I didn’t go near Duluth in ’78, but never mind.

Northeast from Duluth, Minnesota 61 hugs the coast of Lake Superior, offering a number of sites to see. More than we had energy for, unfortunately, since a drive up 61 all the way to the Canadian border — all the way to Thunder Bay, though it’s Ontario 61 up that way — would make for an excellent few days, not an afternoon.

Still, on the afternoon of July 29, we made our way to the town of Two Harbors and Gooseberry Falls State Park. At Two Harbors, we spent time at the rocky shore.
3M was founded in Two Harbors. Unsurprisingly, the company has no presence there any more, though the corporate “birthplace” is a small museum that we didn’t visit.

Rather, we spent a few minutes at the Two Harbors Light Station. Or Light House, depending on the source.
Up the road from Two Harbors is Gooseberry Falls State Park, reportedly the most-visited state park in Minnesota, and I can see why. The place is drop-dead gorgeous even before you get to the falls.
As promised, the park sports plenty of falls as the Gooseberry River cascades toward Lake Superior. Here are the Upper Falls.
The Middle Falls.
The Lower Falls.
I understand that the flow of the falls depends entirely on runoff, since the relatively small Gooseberry has no headwaters. So I guess it’s been a rainy summer in this part of Minnesota.

Who developed much of the park infrastructure? Here’s a clue.
The lads of the CCC, of course.

Near the Upper Falls is an unusual, and sad, plaque. It’s both a warning and a memorial.
I looked up Richard Paul Luetmer, who has missed out on being alive these last 40 years. He went diving in the river and hit a submerged log. RIP, Richard, but I have an editor’s nit to pick with the plaque editor: In Memoriam, not In Memorium.

Palo Duro Canyon State Park

Posted on May 3, 2018 by admin

Last Friday, I drove from Amarillo to Palo Duro Canyon State Park. It took only about 30 minutes: south on I-27 and then east on Texas 217, which ends when you get to the park entrance. Until very close to the entrance, it’s easy to look around and think, “Canyon? There’s a canyon around here? How is that possible?”

People — ignorant people, that is — are known to think “Texas is flat.” Some of it is, though, such as the Panhandle near Amarillo. A steppe’s a steppe. I’d read that Palo Duro was quite the canyon, but until I got there, it was a little hard to picture, driving down a mostly empty two-lane highway through terrain devoid of rises.

That’s just an example of my ignorance. If I’d done any kind of research beforehand, I would have found out that Palo Duro Canyon is enormous. Park literature calls the canyon the “second largest” in the United States, and a look at Google Maps, using the satellite image function, supports that idea, at least in terms of square miles of canyon floor.

The Grand Canyon is certainly deeper, and actually more grand — that’s in the name — but as the runner up among major U.S. canyons, Palo Duro is quite impressive. Here’s the kicker: the state park, even at 20,000 acres, is only a fraction of the entire canyon, which is about 120 miles long and averages six miles wide. The rest is private ranchland and maybe not much different than in previous centuries

You pay your entrance fee, a reasonable $5, and pretty soon you’re overlooking the sweep of the canyon, a long irregular groove carved in the flatness of the Texas Panhandle.

Made not by a mighty river like the Colorado, but one with a less formidable name, the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River. Unlike the bigger canyon in Arizona, visitors to Palo Duro SP have the option of driving to the canyon floor, 800 or so feet down. That’s because the CCC built a road into Palo Duro once upon a time, along with other structures.

So I drove in. I also got out and walked. Not on the longest of trails available, but a few miles on shorter ones.

I liked the Rojo Grande Trail. Rojo all right, in places. At least the kind of red you get in rocks.

Along with views of the canyon walls.

Plus plenty of semiarid-region flora and even a little fauna (a rabbit, in my case). Also, the occasional mark of man, besides the works of the CCC and the Texas Parks & Wildlife Department.

All along the park road, drivers are warned about flash flooding. There seemed little risk when I was there, but the potential is real.

Almost 40 years ago, heavy rains flooded the canyon, killing four people. According to the sign, water crested at 21 feet above the nearby low water crossing. Hard to imagine that much water gathering in a place that seems so dry, but nature’s capricious. Best to stay out of her way if possible.

Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park (The Waterfalls)

Posted on July 11, 2017 by admin

Yesterday I wondered why people travel distances and spend money to see good vistas. I’m included in such people. Today, why do we do the same to see waterfalls? Why is Niagara the attraction that it is (was)? It can’t be on the strength of “Shuffle Off to Buffalo” alone.

Rugged and well-watered, both Porcupine Mountain Wilderness State Park and the surrounding Ottawa National Forest feature a lot of waterfalls. Not long after arriving near the park, on the afternoon of the 30th, we sought out Gorge Falls and Potawatomi Falls on the Black River, which flows through Gogebic County and into Lake Superior. From a parking lot off Black River Road — a National Forest Scenic Byway, and justly so — a looping trail of about a third of a mile takes you to both.

Gorge Falls.
The Black River above Gorge Falls.
Potawatomi Falls.
Ann was determined that we walk further upstream from Potawatomi Falls, saying that “I’ve been in a car all day.” True enough. It was a good path. I made sure that she knew that a blue diamond, or sometimes a rectangle, marks a trail.

The next morning we drove to up M-519 to a parking lot on the west bank of Presque Isle River. Go down a fair number steps on a boardwalk and you soon come to a wooden suspension bridge across the river.
The other side of the bridge is described as an island, but it looks like a peninsula on the maps. Whatever its geographic classification, it was pleasantly wooded on the approach to Lake Superior.
Back across the suspension bridge, the trail on the west bank of Presque Isle River leads to Manhabezo Falls.
The trail at that point is also part of the North Country Trail, which we’d happened across a number of years ago in Manistee National Forest, in that other part of Michigan. The trail goes all the way from upstate New York to central North Dakota, or vice versa, some 4,600 miles, with a fair chunk of it through the UP.

We’d planned to take the trail to another parking lot along the road, and then walk on the road the short distance back to the parking lot where we’d left our car. A bridge crossing a small gully allows you to do that, except when it’s been hit by a falling tree.
Not sure when that had happened, but it couldn’t have been too long before. So we scurried down the side of the gully and back up again, crossing a stream small enough to step over, and encountering a lot of mud on the way. At one point the sticky mud was so thick it pulled Ann’s shoes off. What’s a hike, even a short one, if you don’t get a little (or a lot) of mud on you?

Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park (The Vistas)

Posted on July 10, 2017 by admin

What is it about vistas that people like? Assuming we can agree that vista refers to an aesthetically pleasing view from a high position. People drive distances, climb stairs, take elevators, pay money and sometimes even take risks for a good vista. I do those things, though the risks are never that great. I like a good vista, but I can’t quite say why.

That question triggers others. Did Petrarch really climb Ventoux for the view? Or is vista-awe actually a more recent invention, maybe a sprig of the Romantic movement or a Victorian fixation? These questions aren’t so burning that I’m going to do much research, but I do wonder. I suspect the feeling is fairly modern, and probably not universally shared even now, any more than a taste for coffee or soccer or rock and roll.

And it doesn’t just apply to views from mountains. Now that manmade towers are so plentiful, so are those vistas. At Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in the UP on July 1, we enjoyed one vista of each kind: a tower top, though that was atop a high hill reached mostly by walking, and a view from a the bluff of a high hill, though we reached that mostly by driving.

The park has a lot of hiking trails through a lot of wilderness, about 59,000 acres with a Lake Superior coastline. The mountains of the name aren’t really much in the way of mountains, but it is rugged terrain: dense old-growth forests, never logged because of its inaccessible ruggedness. I read some years ago that the area was to have been a national park, but the federal government was too distracted in the early 1940s to get around to it, so the state of Michigan went ahead and created a state park in 1945.

I can’t pretend we did any serious hiking in the Porkies. The time and energy weren’t there. But we did some excellent short hikes. Off the South Boundary Road, a side road plunges into the park and ends at a parking lot for the Summit Peak Tower Trail. It’s only half a mile to a lookout tower atop a high hill.

The trail rose gradually for a time. Except for muddy spots, no difficulties.
Eventually, the grade increased and sometimes there were boardwalks and steps.
I had to rest for a minute or two a number of times — and my family kept getting further ahead of me — but before long even I’d made it to the tower. A sign at the base warns: Keep Off During Thunderstorms. Well, yes.
More steps to the vista we’d come to see. It was worth the effort, even if it’s romantic moonshine invented by the Romantic poets. I’m all in.

The other vista we decided to see is in the north end of the park, easily accessible by road: the Lake of the Clouds. A sign outside the park along M-107 pointed the way.
As for the End of the Earth, it didn’t look like anything special. Talk about anticlimactic.

From the the Lake of the Clouds parking lot, a trail only a fifth of a mile leads to the first of two grand vistas.
Note the people somewhat higher. The trail continues to that level, which is a rocky surface behind a short wall, overlooking for one of the fine vistas of the UP.
It’s a wow. The Lake of the Clouds view reminded me of some of the exceptional Canadian vistas we saw in ’06, though those were among mighty mountains, rather than picturesque hills.
Ann pointed out that in the fall, the view would be entirely different, and I think entirely worth the risk of running into early-season UP snow to see its multicolors.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: State Parks