Mosquitoes can be a problem into August in rainy years. Black flies can be a problem from June through August. Water in the backcountry must be filtered because of potential contamination with parasites and bacteria. Hikers are forced to stick to existing trails by boggy terrain and thick underbrush that makes cross-country hiking impossible. The trail, rocky and rugged, features wooded glades, sunny meadows, hot exposed ridges and killer views of the main island, 200 surrounding islands and the Canadian shoreline in the distance. It is a moderate ridge-top hike that takes three to five days. 1 trail is the 42.2-mile cross-island Greenstone Trail that stretches from Windigo in the west to near Lookout Louise near Rock Harbor in the east. For information, call 90 (in season) or go to The park has 165 miles of trails. It is pricey but so is everything about Isle Royale because of its isolation.Ī peak-season room costs $256 a night for double occupancyĬoncessionaire Forever Resorts also offers guided excursions and water taxi service to island visitors. It features bare-bones motel rooms and 20 small cottages. There is a 60-room lodge at Rock Harbor at the eastern end of the island. Most visitors get off the ferries, get a wilderness permit and head off on foot to hike and camp. Isle Royale also has a very high percentage of repeat visitors, more than most national parks. The typical visitor spends about four days at Isle Royale, far longer than most visitors to America’s other national parks. That means the typical Isle Royale visitors has invested heavily just to get to the island. The seaplane is $310 per person round trip. A round trip from Copper Harbor is $136 for an adult. You can also ship out of Houghton, Mich., and Grand Portage, Minn. The park service advises passengers that stormy conditions may force them to stay on the island longer than planned or delay their arrival on Isle Royale. When the lake gets choppy, the ferry ride can become a real stomach-churner. When Superior is calm, it is an easy trip. You then board a ferry for a three-hour trip across 55 miles of Lake Superior to Isle Royale. Reservations for ferries and island lodging are required months in advance.įrom Akron, it’s a 15-hour drive to Copper Harbor at the northern tip of the Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula. Such trips will take from 3.5 to 6 hours. There are four ferries and one seaplane that runs to the island. It takes a major investment of time, money and effort to get to Isle Royale from ports in Michigan and Minnesota. The island has a rich history of lighthouses, copper mining, Great Lakes shipping, lumbering, commercial fishing and vacationing in the late 1800s and the early 1900s. The Ojibwa called the island minongor, “a good place.” It is a place of boreal forests of birch, spruce, balsam and aspen, rocky shorelines, stunning summer wildflowers, quiet coves, noisy loons, 46 inland lakes, bald eagles and ospreys. It has a limited season from mid-April through October, although some facilities open later. It covers 572,000 acres of land and water. The park gets about 17,000 visitors a year. You can get around by boat, by seaplane and on foot. It is very remote and isolated, a roadless backcountry. There are no roads, no vehicles, no bikes and few signs of man. You can learn more about wolves and moose from Michigan Technological University in Houghton at Isle Royale is 45 miles long and up to nine miles wide. They are most likely to be spotted at the western and eastern ends of the island closer to people. The moose are one of the best reasons to hike around the island. You may hear them and you may find piles of droppings along trails.Įveryone wants to see a moose. A wolf pack will kill a moose every four to 10 days. Typically about 15 percent of the moose population is killed annually by the wolves. That could result in the moose population continuing to grow, followed by starvation and a population crash. Their numbers have doubled since 2005 to about 1,300 this year.Īnd those numbers are growing by 20 percent a year. The drop in wolves has resulted in more moose. Warmer Midwest winters prevent any new wolves from coming to the island. The wolves peaked on Isle Royale at about 50 but inbreeding and freak accidents have cut into those numbers.
What would likely be required is importing an entire pack of wolves to replace the wolves. The issue is likely to be heavily debated.Ī decision is not expected until late 2017, at the earliest. Importing predators like wolves would be a precedent-setting move for the park service. The island is a federally designated wilderness and that means that nature is supposed to prevail on its own without help from man.
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