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Many people turn lighthouses into a hobby. In summer, they travel from beacon to beacon, photographing them and collecting stamps in their U.S. Lighthouse Society passports until they've got 60 and can move onto the next passport and, eventually, the "Platinum Circle'' patch awarded after 240 lighthouse visits.
It's not easy to get to every lighthouse, however. Many are on islands or inaccessible by car, so aficionados are quick to sign up for the special boat trips offered during lighthouse festivals.
Below are some of the cruises that will take visitors to lights in the western Great Lakes in 2008. On many, places go
quickly.
Copper Harbor, Mich., never has had an easy existence.
Indians and explorers always knew there was copper sitting along the Keweenaw Peninsula. But the desolation of the area made mining difficult; the earliest expedition, sent by London investors in 1771, gave up in disgust on an area Patrick Henry told Congress was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon.''
Lower Michigan had to be persuaded to take the Keweenaw and the rest of the Upper Peninsula in 1836, when it was applying for statehood. One opponent complained that the area, separated from Detroit by Lake Michigan and nearly 600 miles, was nothing but "20,000 square miles of howling wilderness.''
On Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, distance is both curse and blessing.
Jutting deep into Lake Superior, it's far from big cities — for Detroit residents, Nashville and Washington, D.C., are closer than the Keweenaw (pronounced KEY-win-awe). It was "beyond the most distant wilderness and remote as the moon," statesman Patrick Henry told Congress after early mining attempts were abandoned in 1771.
But its deposits of pure copper were the world's largest, and in 1843, a copper rush brought in workers from dozens of nations. By 1913, 60,000 people lived in Calumet, extracting millions of pounds of copper for Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. But a failed strike that year soured life for workers, and declining demand, low prices and another strike ended the mining era for good in 1968.