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No summer vacation is more fun than a Circle Tour of one of the Great Lakes — and nothing is more of a pain than planning one.
This year, I’m planning to cabin-camp my way around Lake Michigan, which is lined by state parks with gorgeous stretches of sand and dunes. You can’t buy a better beach vacation at any price, but you have to plan ahead.
Planning is tricky because you pass through four states, 30 state parks and two big metropolitan areas, each of which floods beaches with hordes of sun-worshippers on weekends.
Only a day’s drive to the south lies a world as old as the glacier-cut north woods are new.
Here, in the foothills of a worn-down mountain range, elephantine boulders stand in herds. In riverbeds, billion-year-old slabs are as slippery smooth as clay just pressed by a toddler’s thumb. Springs pop out of the Earth’s depths, shimmering as blue-green as the Caribbean.
This is what a volcanic landscape looks like after 1.5 billion years of continual erosion: very rocky and very rolling. There’s rarely enough topsoil to till, and locals eke out a simple living. The world of strip malls seems far away — in days of visiting state parks and historic sites, you may never see a single national franchise, just the mom-and-pop cafes and motels of yesteryear.
In Wisconsin, the American dream came true for a penniless boy from Iceland — and the rest of us made out pretty well, too.
In 1873, 5-year-old Hjörtur Thordarson traveled with his family from Iceland to Milwaukee, where his father soon died of typhoid fever. The youngster's schooling stopped in second grade as the family moved to farms in Wisconsin and North Dakota, then resumed when the boy — called Chester — joined his married sister in Chicago and, at age 18, entered the fourth grade.
"All I wanted was a chance to learn," he said later.
If you do only one thing outdoors in winter, do it by candlelight.
Nothing is more magical than a forest full of flickering lights. Most of the lighted trails are in state parks, but the City of Lakes Loppet in January is on Minneapolis' Chain of Lakes, and organizers promise a luminary pyramid and an "enchanted forest'' along with the usual hot cocoa, cider and coffee.
The Book Across the Bay tour between Ashland and Washburn, Wis., crosses Chequamegon Bay on a candlelit path. At the end, there are fireworks, live music, a chili chow-down and a giant bonfire.
What a way to spend a weekend: hiking up and down ravines, clambering on rock, admiring views of water from ridgelines.
“It’s like hiking on the North Shore,’’ my husband said.
But it wasn’t Lake Superior’s North Shore. It was Iowa. And everyone knows Iowa is one big, flat cornfield.
In Minnesota's early days, creating a park was no picnic.
As the public admired the towering pines around Lake Itasca, loggers dreamed of the miles of board feet they could produce.
"No measure was ever more unreasonably harassed and opposed," wrote park founder Jacob Brower. But in 1891, the Legislature gave the people their first state park by one vote.
In winter, only the most dedicated pilgrims make the trip to Itasca, Minnesota's most revered state park.
Yet the park is beautiful without its forest canopy. It's easy to see its bones, the lumpy quilt of knobs and kettles laid down by retreating glaciers. It's easy to see the 300-year-old pines that escaped loggers. And it's easier to listen — to the sassy chatter of a squirrel, the prehistoric croak of a crow, the rat-a-tat of a woodpecker.
In winter, the park grooms 32 kilometers of trails for classic and skate skiing. On the trails, skiers see the legacy of Jacob Brower, the far-sighted surveyor who, in 1891, used his own salary to start piecing together the state's first state park.
One spring, I hit the nature-lover's jackpot, almost without trying.
Exploring a septet of Minnesota's scientific and natural areas, or SNAs, I found more pasqueflowers in bloom than I'd ever expected to see in a lifetime. I saw a panorama of the Mississippi as the Dakota would have seen it 200 years ago. I walked under the budding canopies of old-growth forests and listened to choruses of courting frogs.
Wow! An SNA, it turns out, is a fantastic place to see spring at full throttle.
Under the cornstalks of Fillmore County, an unusual sculpture garden sits in shadow.
Stalagmite topiaries line walkways, alongside pale-green flowstone as translucent as Chinese jade. Stalactite statuettes dangle in artistic arrays.
They’re obviously created by a Pollock of rock, a Van Gogh of stone. Yet their genius relies not on the medium — water, applied one drop at a time — but on eons worth of time.
Just up north, there’s a vast wilderness of lakes, virgin forest and wild rivers lined by waterfalls and rapids.
It isn’t like other north-woods forests — not as they are in this century, anyway. It’s a wilderness unto itself, and though it’s no farther than the state parks farther up Minnesota’s North Shore, it seems a world away.
It feels a world away, too.
If you’ve ever walked in Wisconsin, chances are you’ve walked on the edge of a glacier.
The ice is gone, but not the rubble it pushed across the landscape, or the rock its melting waters carved. As the last glacier retreated, it left a path that geologists can follow as easily as yellow lines on a highway.
That path now is the 1,100-mile Ice Age National Scenic Trail, with 620 miles marked, usually by yellow rectangles tacked to trees. It’s easy to follow in the forest, but many of the most spectacular spots are right along highways.
In Wisconsin, a bunch of rocks sets hearts aflutter.
They enchant geologists, of course, but also scuba divers, rock climbers and botanists. The rest of us, too — hikers, birders, campers, Boy Scouts.
We all go to give Devil's Lake its due.
See the FUDGE sign in blinking white lights. See the plane tail protruding from the faux-ruin façade of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. See the Wax World of the Stars, the Dungeon of Horrors, the Trojan Horse . . .
Yes, it’s Wisconsin Dells. But it’s not the only Wisconsin Dells.
Tourists always have been part of the scenery in this picturesque part of Wisconsin. The first settler was a printer and
publisher, and one of the first residents was a young carpenter who crippled his right hand in the Civil War and became a
photographer.
In one 19-mile stretch of Minnesota's North Shore, Nature presents a one-two-three punch of incomparable beauty.
Just half an hour north of Duluth, Gooseberry Falls State Park presents an eye-popping spectacle of waterfalls, lumpy beds of ancient lava and twisted cedar clinging to rock outcroppings.
Six miles farther, Split Rock Lighthouse sits picturesquely on its cliff, a tourist attraction since 1924, when people could get to it on the newly completed Minnesota 61. Few tourists on the North Shore fail to traipse the park's lakeside trails, at least far enough to get a good photo of the pale-yellow lighthouse.
In the land of 10,000 lakes, prairie often is dismissed as, well, dull.
But in the farthest corner of Minnesota, a dramatic patch of terrain offers more spectacle than an Imax show.
I stood atop Blue Mounds one afternoon in June, watching as bolts of lightening rocketed earthward from a leaden, wraparound sky. At my feet, domes of blood-red rock erupted out of pale grass; nearby, piles of boulders squatted at the edge of a 90-foot cliff, but there was no shelter for anything bigger than a squirrel.
In its marshes and woods, John Muir first discovered the joys of wilderness. On its sandy plains, Aldo Leopold became a pioneer of land stewardship. On its meadows, two young ornithologists created a haven for cranes.
The natural world found some of its greatest allies on a swath of rolling, glaciated land in south-central Wisconsin. Muir went on to found the Sierra Club and is known as a father of America’s national parks. Leopold inspired legions with such books as “A Sand County Almanac.’’ George Archibald and Ron Sauey founded the International Crane Foundation.
Wisconsin often is called the cradle of conservation. It was the first state to ban the use of DDT, before it was banned nationally in 1972, largely thanks to Lorrie Otto of suburban Milwaukee, who put native plants in her front yard in the 1950s and became known as the godmother of natural landscaping. Earth Day was founded in 1970 by yet another Wisconsinite, former Sen. Gaylord Nelson.
We’re at the end of the Ice Age, at the edge of an endless mound of blue ice whose vast, super-cold surface has sent 200-mph winds whipping into Wisconsin. The winds can strip the flesh off a face in 30 seconds, so the local mammoth hunters have gone south for the winter.
Now the hunters are back, standing at the edge of a milky-white, 70-mile-long lake made by melting ice. There are 500-pound
beavers here, too, and 8-ton bison. The hunters run up to a woolly mammoth, sink an 8-inch spear tip into its neck and dash
away.
As they wait for the animal to bleed to death, they hear a rumble, then a roar, as the earth begins to shake. A 100-foot wall of water descends on the valley, cutting through ancient sandstone like a knife through butter. Suddenly, the landscape has some features we can recognize — the canyons of the Wisconsin Dells, for one.
As Will Rogers famously said, the trouble with land is they're not making any more of it.
In the north woods, land prices are rising as the population swells and people look for places to build vacation and retirement homes. Wall Street investment bankers are demanding timber companies convert their vast land holdings into profit. And as cheap wood pulp from abroad depresses their revenues, it's hard for the companies to say no.
"It's the perfect storm," says Ron Nargang, director of the Nature Conservancy's Minnesota chapter.
