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In the end, I’m assigned the copilot seat (which has rudder pedals but no yoke due to the Beaver’s single throw-over yoke design). Behind, my wife and our two teenagers occupy the middle row, while a young couple has the three-seat aft row to themselves. As we don headsets, the Pratt & Whitney R-985 radial starts and falls into a gentle chugging idle. Without brakes, we are immediately water taxiing to the takeoff area while completing pre-takeoff checklist items. As the throttle is opened for takeoff, all 450 horsepower are unleashed and the corresponding noise and vibration envelop us. Climbing at a sedate 500 feet per minute, we’re soon crossing the southern shoreline of Lake Superior on our way to one of the least developed, most remote and most pristine national parks in the continental U.S. – Isle Royale.
The unique Isle Royale archipelago
Situated in the northwest corner of Lake Superior, Isle Royale is within Keweenaw County, Michigan, despite being more than 50 miles across the water from the Keweenaw Peninsula. Oddly, the island is closer to Minnesota and Ontario, Canada, than to the state it is officially part of. Some of its associated islands are less than 10 miles from small Canadian islands also within Lake Superior.
Over the course of roughly a million years, hundreds of eruptions from deep within the earth released lava here, which hardened into basalt. Thereafter, equally powerful
Isle Royale is an island in the northwest corner of Lake Superior. It is part of Michigan, though it’s closer to Minnesota and Canada.
geological forces cracked and shifted the basalt, creating the tilted layers that today protrude from Lake Superior to form the Isle Royale archipelago. Copper and wooden artifacts and tools found within Indian mounds have been carbon-dated to more than 6,500 years old. Ancient people appear to have used the island for hunting, fishing and copper extraction for millennia. Reaching the island would have required a canoe journey (or an ice crossing during winters cold enough to create ice bridges). For such journeys to have been as short as possible, they would have landed on the island’s northwest shores after no less than a 13-mile crossing from modern-day Minnesota or Ontario mainland. Nonetheless, cross they did, leaving evidence of their copper mining activities in the form of hundreds of pits and trenches, some dozens of feet long.
In more modern times, Indigenous people referred to the island as Minong, as noted in the writings of visiting missionaries as early as 1669. Ojibwa and Chippewa tribes both laid claim to Minong, while Great Britain became the first non-native nation to do so and named it Isle Royale. Great Britain gave Isle Royale to the United States in 1783, but it wasn’t until the mid-1840s that the Ojibwa and Chippewa officially ceded all claims to the island to the U.S. via a series of treaties.
Neither Native Americans nor early Americans settled on Isle Royale year-round. Both used the island for copper and fish, but mainly during the short summer season. While industrial copper mining was attempted in the mid-19th century, small deposits combined with harsh and
JANUARY 2025
KING AIR MAGAZINE • 25
PHOTO CREDIT: ADAM JOHNSON | BROCKIT INC.