Isle Royale - Rock Harbor and Scoville Point

We'd made it to Rock Harbor on Isle Royale.  It was about noon on Friday, September 14.  Now what?  Well, first things first - attend a discussion with a ranger about back country camping on the island, and leave no trace (LNT).  All back country campers and hikers need to attend this meeting.  Then, each party registers with a ranger - how many are in our group, where do we expect to be each night, do we have to pay any fees?  We took care of that, and then, it was time to find a camping area.  We had decided as a group to stay put in Rock Harbor for the night, and eat dinner that night and breakfast tomorrow at the restaurant.  We were all looking forward to a cold beer that night.

We looked for a shelter, but they were all taken, so we snagged a couple of tent sites and put up our six little tents.  It was a tight fit in places.

There are no bears on Isle Royale, so I thought that food storage would be easy.  Not so - we saw a number of comments about the red squirrels, how they will chew into a hanging bag or even through a tent to get food.  So, somewhere along the way, I decided that we would all need bear canisters.  Here is mine, which added 2.6 pounds to my pack.  Somehow, I was the only one who determined that we would need these.  Everyone else saved the weight, and was fine.  No ravenous red squirrels consumed any of their food.  Ah, well!

Some of the crew went to lunch at the restaurant.  I ate a Cliff bar, and then went over to see them.  Along the way, I stopped into the visitors' center and looked at the moose skulls that had at one time been living bull moose that had decided that they needed to see who was more powerful.  Well, the antler tines locked together, and they slowly starved, which must have been terrible.  Or maybe wolves found and killed them.  In any event, many decades ago, two young guys from Purdue University were working there for the summer as technicians on the wolf - moose research project and found them.  The locked skulls are in the museum:

And the photo of the finders, without any identification, were in the visitor center.  They are Ron Bell (left) and Steve Ruckel (right).  How do I know this?  Well, Ruckel was one of my best friends in graduate school, and he told me the story, and I resolved if I ever got back to Isle Royale, I would look for the display.  Imagine carrying 100+ pounds of moose bone and antler out of the bush?

After I had a snack of blueberry cobbler at the restaurant, a few of us went for an afternoon hike of about 4.5 miles.  We walked a loop trail out to Scoville Point.  We walked out on the trail closer to Lake Superior (red arrow) and walked back on the inside trail (orange arrow).

It was a beautiful hike - the part along the coast reminded me of the Maine Coast a bit.

We saw rose hips here and many other places.

I'd hoped that we would see spectacular fall foliage this far north, but we were here too early.  Now and then, we got a flash, like this maple leaf.

Here are some more scenic views of the Lake Superior shoreline.

At this point, a woman was apparently swimming somewhere, as there were women's clothing scattered along the shore.

This is about as far as we could walk - Scoville Point.

The hike back was along a bay, also very scenic.

After the hike, I noted that the Ranger III had arrived.  It is the largest piece of equipment in the National Park Service (648 tons), and makes the six hour trip from Houghton to Isle Royale twice a week.  Since it takes six hours, it cannot make the trip back the same day, unlike the Isle Royale Queen IV.  So it would be leaving Saturday morning, taking anyone staying at the lodge tonight, as well as many of the staff for the hotel and restaurant.  A skeleton crew would stay behind for two weeks, closing everything down and preparing for winter.  And as things turned out a week later, man oh man was I glad that they did!

We had dinner at the lodge - they were out of beer, which was a bummer - and afterwards, I went to a talk on the six bat species on the islands, which is one-third of the mammals on Isle Royale.  Then I walked back to camp, where everyone was preparing for bed by 8:00 or so.  By 8:30. I decided to do the same.  In my sleeping bag, I listened to the hauntingly beautiful calling of loons, and later, I heard the two remaining wolves on the island howling somewhere.  I slept fairly well until a huge thunderstorm rolled in in the middle of the night with huge thunderclaps and flashes of lightening.  We would have wet tents to carry in the morning!  Morning, when we would start our hiking for a week by heading towards Lane Cove (I had planned).

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