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Isle Royale National Park - October 2004
Isle Royale National Park is an island in Lake Superior.  It is the largest island in the great lakes; about 45 miles long by 9 miles wide.  It is also the least visited national park.  We went only a week before the park closed for the winter and only one boat was still running to the island.  We went across with about 25 people which left plenty of solitude for all of us.  After we got dropped off we didn't see another person for the 4 days of backpacking!
While on the boat we decided to backpack along the Minong Ridge Trail.  This trail is said to be the roughest in the park and, as such, the most secluded.  We decided to hike from McCargo Cove to Windigo, about 27 miles.  This trail borders Lake Superior on the North-West side of the Island stretching about two-thirds the length of the island.
After getting dropped off by the boat at McCargo Cove, we hiked about 6 miles to Todd Harbor Campsite.  We set up camp right on Lake Superior, took water from it, and listened to the waves crash on the shore all night long.  We sat and ate Angry Lentil Tortilla Soup, made with fresh vegetables, while we watched the sun go down.

The second day we decided to skip the next campsite and hike 12 miles to Lake Desor.  The trail led to the top of the Minong Ridge and followed it pretty closely.  As you can see from the left picture below, however, the rocky ridge was sometimes sporadic and the trail dropped into the forest below only to climb back on to the ridge later.  The pictures above are pictures taken from the ridge.  The pictures below are of the trail itself.
By the end of the second day the weather had changed.  It got very windy and storm clouds were appearing.  
The constant hopping from rock to rock and the constant drop and climb took their toll on my feet.  I have backpacked in my Chaco sandals quite often but never on a trip of this length.  By the end of the second day I had large, bloody cracks in my heels and had to protect my feet with duct tape.  The tape worked well until I took it off on the fourth day taking large chunks of skin off with it.  I'll wear running shoes the next time that I backpack 30 miles. It rained all the second night.  Our new, single wall, lightweight, three pound tent worked incredibly, except for one seam in the back which we found hadn't been factory sealed.  A bit of water leaked in--annoying, but really not too bad.
We woke up in the morning to the sound of the rain on our tent.  We have always loved backpacking in the rain so we broke camp and decided that we would just hike as far as we wanted and just set up camp somewhere in the backcountry.  
The rain brought a mystical quality to everything.  The moss was more lush, the mushrooms and other fungus were more full and seemed to be everywhere.  The plants were green except for the deciduous trees which became more brilliant in their colors of red, orange, and yellow.  We wandered along the trail pausing constantly to look at this beautiful island and sit together in the rain.  The section of trail on the upper left was a boardwalk above a swamp on one of the lower sections of trail.

As we climbed back on to the ridge we had an amazing experience.  Julie had turned around and was facing me as I climbed up on the ridge.  As I got close to her I saw three moose only about 20 feet behind her.  She hadn't yet seen them and as I went to point them out I slipped on the wet rock and fell.  I was so excited that I just mumbled as I tried to point out the huge, magnificent animals right behind her.  The sound of my slide back down the rock startled the moose and they ran off.  Julie caught only a glimpse.  We continued a few dozen feet down the trail and saw that they had stopped among the trees.   I took several very blurry pictures as I ran after them in the woods with the failing light.  Of course none of them turned out.

We had heard about the moose on the island.  There are about **** of them.  The first moose came to the island by swimming the 15 or so miles from Minnesota or Canada!  Fisherman have seen moose swimming 20 miles out on Lake Superior!  The island also has about **** wolves on it separated in to three wolf packs.  That night we heard yelping.  We thought that it might be either the foxes (of which we saw a couple), coyotes, or wolves.  When we spoke to the ranger at the Windigo station, however, she told us that foxes don't yelp, there are no coyotes on the island, and what we heard was probably wolf pups.  We were pretty lucky.  The wolves on the island are very shy and rangers have worked on the island for years without seeing or hearing them.  

We camped that night a hundred or so yards off of the trail just back in the woods.  We thought that we had only hiked 4 or 5 miles because the day went by so easily.  When we started hiking again in the morning we found a trail marker within 15 minutes.  The trail marker told us that we had hiked about 10 miles the previous day and that we had only 1.5 miles to go to the Windigo station.  
When we arrived at Windigo we saw the sign to the left.  The boat was supposed to be arriving that day to take us back the next day!  Because of the storm it wasn't going to be coming out.  We hiked to the ranger station and found the weather forecast for the next several days.  The prediction was gale force winds for several days.  
We went and found a shelter in the nearby campsite after taking a picture of the dock that was supposed to have our boat on it.  Later that day some of the other backpackers arrived in camp.  This was the first time that we had seen people in 4 days.
The next couple of days were pretty hard.  The temperatures remained around freezing.  Also, we had packed very light.  My pack weighed about 25 pounds with food and water and Julie's was around 20.  This also meant that we hadn't brought much extra food and fuel.  The ranger station open up the next day and the rangers provided everybody with some terrible tasting noodles and dehydrated vegetables.  We also got to call home on a radio phone.  We remained cold, hungry, and worried about our kids for two days waiting for the boat.
We made plenty of friends, however.  Randy, on the upper left, taught us how to play Euchre.  The two guys above, whose names I can't remember, became close friends (hey, I'm writing this over a month later).  The guy to the left was also a gear-head and we chatted for hours about backpacking gear and lightweight backpacking.  We shared a cake with them and he gave me a windscreen for my stove.  The two ladies on the upper right were psychiatrists from Minnesota.  I am posing for a picture with our fantastic park ranger, Valerie, on the right.
The boat finally arrived on Sunday afternoon but the captain decided that we wouldn't be able to go back to the mainland until Monday or Tuesday.  The picture to the left is the boat finally arriving.  The captain decided that the water was still too rough to return that same day, however, so we slept another night in our shelter and finally left the island late Monday afternoon. When the boat arrived we felt good enough to smile and pose for the picture to the right.
The boat ride back was rough.  Randy and I started out playing Euchre.  When the cards actually hopped up off of the table and water sprayed over the top of the cabin as the boat jumped off of a wave we stopped and went up above.  This is a fairly large boat and carries over 30 people but it was still rolling side to side and crashing down over waves.  I felt pretty sick and spent the ride back outside on the back of the boat.

When we arrived on shore we drove down to Two Harbors and ate at a really neat restaurant, The Angry Trout.  
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