Superior's North Shore, Revisited

A great wilderness rises out of Lake Superior, somewhere out there:

Way out there, beyond the curvature of Earth.

From the beginning, fall has been our preferred Northwoods season. The nights are cool, biting bugs are down. The forest comes ablaze in autumn dress and light is often sublime, if with some frequency chill.

So naturally, the first trip Heather & I dared take up and over Superior was in September. Then at the end of a real long day on the road we found the place we'd planned to stay closed for the season. It's a different world, up there.

Going forward we adjusted and have treasured our summer visits since. But never have I explored the region with such frequency and depth as during 2012, when I logged now uncountable miles during multiple trips along the Trans-Canada Highway on my own.

This summer we'll head west to east, pausing here or there for another look. Better to make a start in Minnesota I think, not an end.

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Minnesotans like to call their admittedly bucolic sliver of Superior "the North Shore." Except any fool with a map can see it's no better than Northwest. Such is the importance of branding to sustainability, I guess.

Take Hwy 61 out of Grand Portage MN and soon enough you reach a manmade border. No lengthy portage necessary, lest you've run afoul of some law or the other. First stop along the way from there is the city of Thunder Bay.

Thunder Bay's nice enough I suppose, but isn't yet sufficiently post-industrial for me. There, mighty Superior remains largely inaccessible – cut off from casual contact by rail lines and remnant industry, just as was the case in nearly every city on the Great Lakes, once upon a time.

We'll stop at Old Fort William in Thunder Bay just long enough for me to say yet again that of all the places I've been, the canoe shop where craftsman make birchbark canoes much like Voyageurs did, has consistently provided the richest, most reliable interior light of any place I know.

There's manifest integrity in that light. Damned glad to have worked it as often as I have, first time to last.

Leave lingering industry and reconstructed history behind, then after a few miles of relative nothing you come to the Sibley Peninsula. Sleeping Giant Provincial Park is there. Detour as far south as the road through it goes and you'll spy the old Silver Islet Mine.

In this little spit of rock poking out of the freshwater sea is a flooded hole. From within that hole, men scabbed silver out of stone buried deep beneath a dark, water-bound wilderness.

What a miserable, dangerous job that was. Could they ever have paid me enough? I think not. Still, times and sometimes collective needs must, then folk risk lives to meet them.

Back on the Trans-Canada Highway it's not so long as the crow flies before over your shoulder on a good day, perhaps you'll see why First Nations People named the sweeping mesa you just left for the spirit Nanabijou.

That's the Spirit of Deep Sea Water to you and me, now turned to stone because the secret location of the silver under the little flooded rock was once disclosed to white men, who then spirited away as much precious metal as was profitable, right until the day it wasn't.

Because that's what conquering white folk did, and many people all over the world still must.

Some miles of slowly rising terrain northeast from sleeping Nanabijou, rests another Ojibwa spirit forever consigned to rock.

From the accessible upper edge it's hellaciously difficult to photograph Ouimet Canyon and I've never been entirely successful. It's said the canyon's so steep and deep that the undisturbed flora and fauna living along its bottom are more typical to Hudson's Bay, yet another 1,000 km or so still farther to the north.

Ouimet is considered a Canadian national treasure so rare that travelers are forbidden from hiking in to see for themselves. Not sure I could make it all the way down and back these days anyway and am content to know it's there, protected by law, both natural and not.

At the end of the road out of Ouimet, hang a left and you're well on your way to Superior's true north. It's still a far wild piece from there to the distant and civilized Soo, with only intermittent good & services available between. So be prepared.

The Trans-Canada Hwy up and over the north shore of Lake Superior is among the continent's greatest drives.

Were it always easy and/or routine, that simply wouldn't be true.