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I want to write up my day before I forget about parts of it!
I got up early in the morning to try to photograph the sunrise from the top of Brockway Mountain. However, despite it being dark enough that I felt a little bit unsafe trying to drive in thick fog on unfamiliar winding roads in the dark on my way there, I'd only made it about halfway before the sun rose. I'm debating trying again tomorrow morning.
I still got some lovely pictures from the top of the mountain. The valley to the southeast was partially shrouded in fog, and Lake Superior looked great in the morning light, as did the lake near Copper Harbor to the east.
While at the top, I investigated a footpath marked with an official sign reading "On the Edge". At least, I thought it was a footpath. When I got far enough in, I saw that it was actually a mountain bike path that there were pictures of in one of the brochures I picked up yesterday. The pictures were of these circuitous winding platforms that switchback their way down a valley in the cliff side for bikers to use to descend. Despite the fact that making a turn too tightly or too loosely would be enough to send you over the edge of the platform and down five or ten feet, that part of the trail looked less dangerous than the part that connected with the roadway at the mountain summit. There, a slip and fall to the right would end up in pretty unquestionable death. I even felt a little nervous walking it, and I can't begin to imagine biking it. I did chat with a guy who showed up with a bike just as I was getting ready to leave. He was looking for the track I'd just found, so I pointed him in the right direction. He didn't seem to be perturbed by the possibility of imminent death. Of course, I was out walking it too, so I can't point fingers.
I drove eastward along the bluff toward Copper Harbor, stopping for occasional photographs. At the bottom, I drove out to the northern terminus of highway 41, and then onward to the logging road that heads to the end of the peninsula. It was in much better shape than the last time I was up there, and I was willing to try driving it for a while. Sadly, I didn't have any information with me this time on where the Keweenaw rocket range was located, so I didn't drive very far in. One of these days I'll get out there.
I drove back into the city and took a break at a small park at the water's edge and enjoyed the peaceful quiet of the wind over the lake as the city began to wake up. I drove west again, stopping at a naval museum, but it was closed. I used the opportunity to poke through the bunch of brochures I'd picked up yesterday. Hotels, cruises, historical attractions...here we go. Waterfalls! Yeah, I think I'll go see some waterfalls.
There was one nearby, just slightly west and then north. I found Manganese Falls with little trouble, but the view wasn't so spectacular. There was only a little water at the bottom of the gorge, and it was hard to see through the trees. I decided to see if I could get to the bottom and set off down a little path near the viewing area, warded with signs reading "Caution: Steep Cliff". I scrambled up and down for a bit until finding a way down along the sandstone walls of the gorge to the bottom. I made my way back upstream toward the falls, climbing a small wooden dam and following the small flow of water until I was at a steep section that I couldn't make progress up. The trip didn't result in any very interesting pictures, but it was fun.
From there, I decided I'd find Hungarian Falls. It sounded pretty spectacular from the brochure, but it said it was in the town of Tamarack City which was not on any of my maps, including the one in the brocure! I drove west out of town on route 26, because it did say that Tamarack City was on 26. Along the way, I passed a few interesting places. There was Jacob's Falls, which I'd passed before on Sunday with Greg, but I had better light this time. I stopped to shoot a few pictures. As I did so, a guy came scrambling down a dirt slope next to the falls. "The view is much better up there!" he told me. "It makes these falls look kind of lame."
So up I went, after locking my car up. I got up to the top of the falls visible from the road, and there was in fact more to see up there. The way was made easier by roots to grab on to that had clearly been used for such a purpose many times over. I've done quite a lot of rock scrambling with my camera this trip! Again, I'm not sure if the pictures were really worthwhile, but it was a fun bit of climbing.
Further along the road were a couple of rest stops, including one that![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
moiracoon and I had stopped at when we were up here, climbing up to the top of the steps carved into a rocky outcropping and sitting in the bench at the top, looking over Lake Superior. Though I get a little bit sad when doing things that trigger memories like that, I had a fun time walking around and taking pictures. I also chatted with a guy who was there with his wife and walking his dog about the Keweenaw, and about Wisconsin, where he was from.
I stopped at The Jam Pot, which is a bakery and store run by the Society of St. John, an order of monks who have a monastery nearby. They make all the products themselves locally. I bought a jar of wild rosehip jelly and a muffin. I asked if I could photograph the inside of the store, partly as an excuse to photograph the monk who was working at the counter, and with permission, did so. I wish the picture of the monk had come out better. He looked...well, like a monk. Plain robe, long full grey beard, and a very nice guy. After rock scrambling plus getting up and down over and over photographing a cemetery, I needed some food. I don't know if it was just the hunger, or the monks are really good bakers, but that muffin was one of the best muffins I have ever eaten. Probably both.
Oh! Yeah, I was photographing a cemetery. It's the cemetery for Eagle Harbor, west down the road from Copper Harbor. It's an amazing kind of place. It looked nearly abandoned; even the parts that housed newer graves were overgrown with a lot of ferns and small pine trees. But the older graves were sometimes nearly obscured by plants. Many graves from the mid-eighteen hundreds were there, and many of miners, some of who died in the mines. And so many children. My heart hurt for all the parents who lost young ones back then. At the same time, it was a peaceful sort of place. I like the idea of resting under all that new life, growing back over earth. So many gravestones were on the edge of illegibility. It's odd to think of them weathering away completely and these people having no earthly remnant, except perhaps photos. It reminds me of the pioneer cemetery on the Fermilab grounds, though there there are scores of buried dead who don't have even that much.
I've decided that I really like gravestones with little bits of poetry on them. Some of it is, to be quite honest, doggerel, but I still rather like reading them. I may actually make up a gravestone rubbing kit for deciphering inscriptions that are a little too worn to make out visually.
After the graveyard, and The Jam Pot, and scrambling around Jacob's Falls (in that order) I stopped in at The Jam Lady's house cum shop. Though the guy serving me clearly was not the fabled Jam Lady, I still bought a jar of thimbleberry jam. See, I'd never heard of thimbleberries until this weekend, but on Sunday Greg was picking then off the bushes and giving a few to me to eat. Despite the fact that they have little hair looking things on them like most berries do and that those kind of weird me out, I ate them. And they were yummy! Tart, but sweet enough to counteract it, and yummy! I wanted some jam to take home and share with folks.
While I was at Jacob's Falls earlier, I chanced to overhear some folks talking about where another waterfall might be found. I went over and asked and it just so happened that they were talking about Hungarian Falls! It turns out that Tamarack City is basically the same place as Hubbell, and Hubbell was on my map! So after buying jams, I continued down 26 toward Phoenix, which was kind of on the way and would also let me go along Cliff Drive.
Cliff served the Cliff Mine back in the boom days of copper mining. Cliff was the first mine to make a profit, and it was a big one! I knew that there was very little left of it, but I was hoping to find something. Sadly, I did not; I think I probably wasn't willing to go far enough off the beaten path. I started exploring one path on foot; there was a sign on the road pointing to it that said Cliff Cemetery. I even walked through a sort of pond that the path went through that was about a foot deep with a rocky bottom. I think it was supposed to be an ATV path. But after a short way in I found nothing and turned back. The internet tells me there's a lot more to it than that though. I'll have to put exploring Cliff more thoroughly on my list of things I still want to do in the Keweenaw.
I drove on from there down to Ahmeek, then through Copper City to Lake Linden and Tamarack City. Following the instructions from my brochure and the helpful guy at Jacob's Falls, I went on an adventure, driving up sixth street and into the hills. And it was quite the hill. Percy the Swift has really gotten exercised this week, with quite a lot of hill climbing, dirt-roading, and rock-avoiding.
I missed the branch road to the falls on the way through, but I stopped and asked someone else who was sitting in his car about how to get where I was going and he pointed me at a road I'd overlooked because it seemed way to ill-kept and dodgy. No way was I dring on that road; there were some rocks that were easily potential tire-poppers. I parked and made my way about a quarter mile to the falls. I went toward the upper portion first and was disappointed to find that the water splashed down a spillway between two concrete walls. This was Hungarian Falls? I moved on downstream and it started getting better.
There is a series of three waterfalls going downstream from there, each one prettier and more impressive than the last. More rock scrambling was involved as I followed a couple more photographers who were winding their way down the dirt paths along the river. To find the first two, we'd walk on fairly level ground for a short distance, then come upon waterfalls and find a way to climb down to the new lower river level and move on. The next to last one I got to was particularly impressive, with a drop of maybe fifteen feet into a bowl-shaped depression with a pool at the bottom. I shot a few photos there and moved on to the last falls I could reach, which were probably twice the height of that one. It was really impressive, and rather scary to stand near the edge of the gorge it flowed into.
Sadly, not only was there no good way down the walls of this particular canyon, but there wasn't even a good place to photograph the falls from. Trees or rock faces blocked most of it from wherever I could manage to get to and still be halfway safe. I'd really like to find a way to get to the same area from downstream, but again, that's for another day. It was getting lateish and I was hungry! I climbed, walked, and scrambled my way back to the car and headed for Hancock. There, I met up with my host and we drove to Houghton for Chinese buffet. Yum! I hadn't eaten anything that day except a muffin; food was awesome.
I realized a few times today that I was doing thing that were potentially harmful or fatal. I mean, nothing horribly unsafe in terms of probability of my getting hurt. But in several places, along the tops of waterfalls or narrow paths winding along the top of a bluff, I realized that if I were to, somehow, fall over in the wrong direction, I would very likely die. And yesterday there was the abandoned building full of big openings in the floor down to a flooded basement full of rusting machinery too. It's not likely. How often do I really just randomly trip and fall completely over? And beyond that, I was paying much closer attention to my surroundings than I typically do. I knew, mentally, I'd be fine. But being in that position was, on occasion, very much on my mind. Maybe it has to due a little with dealing with the death of someone I cared about in the recent past. It's a strange feeling that I'm not sure how to describe.
Tomorrow, I plan to visit Redridge and see one of the few remaining steel dams in the US, as well as a stamping mill ruin I understand is in the area. I'm not sure what else I'll be doing; I'll figure it out tomorrow I suppose.
I got up early in the morning to try to photograph the sunrise from the top of Brockway Mountain. However, despite it being dark enough that I felt a little bit unsafe trying to drive in thick fog on unfamiliar winding roads in the dark on my way there, I'd only made it about halfway before the sun rose. I'm debating trying again tomorrow morning.
I still got some lovely pictures from the top of the mountain. The valley to the southeast was partially shrouded in fog, and Lake Superior looked great in the morning light, as did the lake near Copper Harbor to the east.
While at the top, I investigated a footpath marked with an official sign reading "On the Edge". At least, I thought it was a footpath. When I got far enough in, I saw that it was actually a mountain bike path that there were pictures of in one of the brochures I picked up yesterday. The pictures were of these circuitous winding platforms that switchback their way down a valley in the cliff side for bikers to use to descend. Despite the fact that making a turn too tightly or too loosely would be enough to send you over the edge of the platform and down five or ten feet, that part of the trail looked less dangerous than the part that connected with the roadway at the mountain summit. There, a slip and fall to the right would end up in pretty unquestionable death. I even felt a little nervous walking it, and I can't begin to imagine biking it. I did chat with a guy who showed up with a bike just as I was getting ready to leave. He was looking for the track I'd just found, so I pointed him in the right direction. He didn't seem to be perturbed by the possibility of imminent death. Of course, I was out walking it too, so I can't point fingers.
I drove eastward along the bluff toward Copper Harbor, stopping for occasional photographs. At the bottom, I drove out to the northern terminus of highway 41, and then onward to the logging road that heads to the end of the peninsula. It was in much better shape than the last time I was up there, and I was willing to try driving it for a while. Sadly, I didn't have any information with me this time on where the Keweenaw rocket range was located, so I didn't drive very far in. One of these days I'll get out there.
I drove back into the city and took a break at a small park at the water's edge and enjoyed the peaceful quiet of the wind over the lake as the city began to wake up. I drove west again, stopping at a naval museum, but it was closed. I used the opportunity to poke through the bunch of brochures I'd picked up yesterday. Hotels, cruises, historical attractions...here we go. Waterfalls! Yeah, I think I'll go see some waterfalls.
There was one nearby, just slightly west and then north. I found Manganese Falls with little trouble, but the view wasn't so spectacular. There was only a little water at the bottom of the gorge, and it was hard to see through the trees. I decided to see if I could get to the bottom and set off down a little path near the viewing area, warded with signs reading "Caution: Steep Cliff". I scrambled up and down for a bit until finding a way down along the sandstone walls of the gorge to the bottom. I made my way back upstream toward the falls, climbing a small wooden dam and following the small flow of water until I was at a steep section that I couldn't make progress up. The trip didn't result in any very interesting pictures, but it was fun.
From there, I decided I'd find Hungarian Falls. It sounded pretty spectacular from the brochure, but it said it was in the town of Tamarack City which was not on any of my maps, including the one in the brocure! I drove west out of town on route 26, because it did say that Tamarack City was on 26. Along the way, I passed a few interesting places. There was Jacob's Falls, which I'd passed before on Sunday with Greg, but I had better light this time. I stopped to shoot a few pictures. As I did so, a guy came scrambling down a dirt slope next to the falls. "The view is much better up there!" he told me. "It makes these falls look kind of lame."
So up I went, after locking my car up. I got up to the top of the falls visible from the road, and there was in fact more to see up there. The way was made easier by roots to grab on to that had clearly been used for such a purpose many times over. I've done quite a lot of rock scrambling with my camera this trip! Again, I'm not sure if the pictures were really worthwhile, but it was a fun bit of climbing.
Further along the road were a couple of rest stops, including one that
moiracoon and I had stopped at when we were up here, climbing up to the top of the steps carved into a rocky outcropping and sitting in the bench at the top, looking over Lake Superior. Though I get a little bit sad when doing things that trigger memories like that, I had a fun time walking around and taking pictures. I also chatted with a guy who was there with his wife and walking his dog about the Keweenaw, and about Wisconsin, where he was from.I stopped at The Jam Pot, which is a bakery and store run by the Society of St. John, an order of monks who have a monastery nearby. They make all the products themselves locally. I bought a jar of wild rosehip jelly and a muffin. I asked if I could photograph the inside of the store, partly as an excuse to photograph the monk who was working at the counter, and with permission, did so. I wish the picture of the monk had come out better. He looked...well, like a monk. Plain robe, long full grey beard, and a very nice guy. After rock scrambling plus getting up and down over and over photographing a cemetery, I needed some food. I don't know if it was just the hunger, or the monks are really good bakers, but that muffin was one of the best muffins I have ever eaten. Probably both.
Oh! Yeah, I was photographing a cemetery. It's the cemetery for Eagle Harbor, west down the road from Copper Harbor. It's an amazing kind of place. It looked nearly abandoned; even the parts that housed newer graves were overgrown with a lot of ferns and small pine trees. But the older graves were sometimes nearly obscured by plants. Many graves from the mid-eighteen hundreds were there, and many of miners, some of who died in the mines. And so many children. My heart hurt for all the parents who lost young ones back then. At the same time, it was a peaceful sort of place. I like the idea of resting under all that new life, growing back over earth. So many gravestones were on the edge of illegibility. It's odd to think of them weathering away completely and these people having no earthly remnant, except perhaps photos. It reminds me of the pioneer cemetery on the Fermilab grounds, though there there are scores of buried dead who don't have even that much.
I've decided that I really like gravestones with little bits of poetry on them. Some of it is, to be quite honest, doggerel, but I still rather like reading them. I may actually make up a gravestone rubbing kit for deciphering inscriptions that are a little too worn to make out visually.
After the graveyard, and The Jam Pot, and scrambling around Jacob's Falls (in that order) I stopped in at The Jam Lady's house cum shop. Though the guy serving me clearly was not the fabled Jam Lady, I still bought a jar of thimbleberry jam. See, I'd never heard of thimbleberries until this weekend, but on Sunday Greg was picking then off the bushes and giving a few to me to eat. Despite the fact that they have little hair looking things on them like most berries do and that those kind of weird me out, I ate them. And they were yummy! Tart, but sweet enough to counteract it, and yummy! I wanted some jam to take home and share with folks.
While I was at Jacob's Falls earlier, I chanced to overhear some folks talking about where another waterfall might be found. I went over and asked and it just so happened that they were talking about Hungarian Falls! It turns out that Tamarack City is basically the same place as Hubbell, and Hubbell was on my map! So after buying jams, I continued down 26 toward Phoenix, which was kind of on the way and would also let me go along Cliff Drive.
Cliff served the Cliff Mine back in the boom days of copper mining. Cliff was the first mine to make a profit, and it was a big one! I knew that there was very little left of it, but I was hoping to find something. Sadly, I did not; I think I probably wasn't willing to go far enough off the beaten path. I started exploring one path on foot; there was a sign on the road pointing to it that said Cliff Cemetery. I even walked through a sort of pond that the path went through that was about a foot deep with a rocky bottom. I think it was supposed to be an ATV path. But after a short way in I found nothing and turned back. The internet tells me there's a lot more to it than that though. I'll have to put exploring Cliff more thoroughly on my list of things I still want to do in the Keweenaw.
I drove on from there down to Ahmeek, then through Copper City to Lake Linden and Tamarack City. Following the instructions from my brochure and the helpful guy at Jacob's Falls, I went on an adventure, driving up sixth street and into the hills. And it was quite the hill. Percy the Swift has really gotten exercised this week, with quite a lot of hill climbing, dirt-roading, and rock-avoiding.
I missed the branch road to the falls on the way through, but I stopped and asked someone else who was sitting in his car about how to get where I was going and he pointed me at a road I'd overlooked because it seemed way to ill-kept and dodgy. No way was I dring on that road; there were some rocks that were easily potential tire-poppers. I parked and made my way about a quarter mile to the falls. I went toward the upper portion first and was disappointed to find that the water splashed down a spillway between two concrete walls. This was Hungarian Falls? I moved on downstream and it started getting better.
There is a series of three waterfalls going downstream from there, each one prettier and more impressive than the last. More rock scrambling was involved as I followed a couple more photographers who were winding their way down the dirt paths along the river. To find the first two, we'd walk on fairly level ground for a short distance, then come upon waterfalls and find a way to climb down to the new lower river level and move on. The next to last one I got to was particularly impressive, with a drop of maybe fifteen feet into a bowl-shaped depression with a pool at the bottom. I shot a few photos there and moved on to the last falls I could reach, which were probably twice the height of that one. It was really impressive, and rather scary to stand near the edge of the gorge it flowed into.
Sadly, not only was there no good way down the walls of this particular canyon, but there wasn't even a good place to photograph the falls from. Trees or rock faces blocked most of it from wherever I could manage to get to and still be halfway safe. I'd really like to find a way to get to the same area from downstream, but again, that's for another day. It was getting lateish and I was hungry! I climbed, walked, and scrambled my way back to the car and headed for Hancock. There, I met up with my host and we drove to Houghton for Chinese buffet. Yum! I hadn't eaten anything that day except a muffin; food was awesome.
I realized a few times today that I was doing thing that were potentially harmful or fatal. I mean, nothing horribly unsafe in terms of probability of my getting hurt. But in several places, along the tops of waterfalls or narrow paths winding along the top of a bluff, I realized that if I were to, somehow, fall over in the wrong direction, I would very likely die. And yesterday there was the abandoned building full of big openings in the floor down to a flooded basement full of rusting machinery too. It's not likely. How often do I really just randomly trip and fall completely over? And beyond that, I was paying much closer attention to my surroundings than I typically do. I knew, mentally, I'd be fine. But being in that position was, on occasion, very much on my mind. Maybe it has to due a little with dealing with the death of someone I cared about in the recent past. It's a strange feeling that I'm not sure how to describe.
Tomorrow, I plan to visit Redridge and see one of the few remaining steel dams in the US, as well as a stamping mill ruin I understand is in the area. I'm not sure what else I'll be doing; I'll figure it out tomorrow I suppose.