First explorations of Pictured Rocks

I felt like I saw quite a lot on my first day at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, but it really was just the tip of the iceberg. Literally.

We had spent the night in Marquette, MI, about 45 miles from Munising, the town at the edge of the park, where I’ll be staying. We drove to the airport, where my dad picked up his rental car, and then we had to drive the rest of the way to Munising separately. We planned to meet at the visitor center in town – luckily it was very easy to spot! We picked up a bunch of brochures and trail guides, and one of the rangers at the information desk turned out to be Pam, the woman I had talked to on the phone about checking in the next day. This was when we learned that the weather was indeed behind by several weeks – about the same amount of time as in Missouri.

We went to lunch, read through all the material we had collected at the visitor center, then went and checked in at our motel, where we crashed for a while. Finally we ventured forth on our first explorations of Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.

We decided to drive out toward Sand Point first, and make sure we knew where headquarters was so I could check in the next day. First we stopped at the Munising Falls Visitor Center, where I’ll be working. I knew it was going to be small, but it was still a bit of a surprise! No wonder they only have one park ranger at a time staffing it! But it’s only a short walk from there to the waterfall, and that makes up for a lot.

Of course we walked out to the waterfall, but even an 800-foot trail takes us a long time, especially when we are both taking pictures! I had to get a lot of photos just so I’ll be able to see, later, how things have changed as spring and summer proceed.

(Photos are behind the cut here...)

As I mentioned in my previous entry, the trees here are still bare. However, there were a lot of smaller plants growing – those spring ephemerals, flowering plants that do their blooming while the bare branches allow them some sunlight. I didn’t see anything blooming at first, but I noticed that the leaves coming up looked very much like the dogtooth violets or “trout lilies” that we had seen on our wildflower hike in Missouri a few weeks ago. The leaves are very distinctive, with mottled red and green patterns, and a single leaf spiking up. Then I spotted some blooming, and there was no doubt the two flowers are closely related!

This is what we saw in Missouri:

This is what we saw at Munising Falls, Michigan.

Later we saw a list of common wildflowers, and it included trout lilies! I looked it up and what we saw in Missouri was Erythronium albidum, and the yellow ones here are Erythronium americanum.

The waterfall was beautiful. There was a big chunk of ice behind it, formed by the spray and not yet melted away, even though it was getting fairly warm out. We couldn’t go up to the water, because there was a railing and warning signs about rockfalls – but I’m guessing that water was quite cool!

On the way back I had to stop and take a photo of a stump I had noticed earlier. Something about all those twisting, twining roots… it looked like tentacles, like some alien creature, an earth-octopus…

(Yes, my brain is strange. So is everyone’s.)

Like I said, it took a while for both of us to get out of the trail…

We continued driving down the Sand Point road, and had to stop and get out at the first sandy beach. This may have been the actual Sand Point – I’m not quite sure! It’s a beautiful, tropical looking beach with pale sand and clear blue water… but the ice chunks floating in the water made for a rather surreal scene!

The ice, the perfect reflections of clouds, the elaborate ripple marks visible through the perfectly clear water… The strange shapes floating along over those ridges looked like spaceships floating over a desert landscape. It was quiet, and every so often there would be a sudden slosh as a miniature iceberg calved into the water, or a chunk of ice collapsed. There were some tiny insects or water bugs down in the sand ripples, but they were too tiny to get a good picture – and too far out! I had no intention of ending up in icy quicksand, even for a photo of an interesting bug!

Across the road was a path to the Sand Marsh Trail, a half mile loop. We didn’t walk the loop but we did walk out far enough to get a view of the marsh – where I had to take a “before” picture to compare with any pictures I take later! It is amazing to me that those trees can just grow in standing water like that. The view won’t be nearly as clear once the leaves on those bushes come out!

Finally we got back to the car, drove the rest of the way to Headquarters, turned around and came back, and went on a little longer drive out to Miner’s Castle, one of the most iconic rock formations in the whole park. Once again, it took a while for us to get out to the main attraction, because the first thing we saw was a big patch of those yellow trout lilies! A lot more of them were blooming than at the waterfall, and there will be more blooming soon. The whole forest floor was covered with those leaves.

Miner’s Castle is a popular overlook with views of the cliffs. They were spectacular, stained with a lot of different colors from the different minerals in the rocks – but we kept getting distracted by all the ice out on the water! These pieces were a lot bigger than the ones by the beach, and the water around the edges and in pools on the top was an incredibly pure, clear blue.

It took a while to walk down to the lower overlook and back, and then to the two upper overlooks. As we left the second one, I noticed some white flowers in the woods and went over to look in the woods. They were dutchman’s breeches – another flower I recognized from Missouri! It will be interesting to see how many more of those there are. We also spotted a trillium, still in bud - no telling yet what color it will be!

I also noticed some fallen birch trees. These logs were really starting to fall apart – but the bark was still in good shape, wrapped around the decomposing wood! It was so tough, it was easy to see how it would hold up as a birch-bark canoe!

It was getting late by this time, so we headed back to Munising. We decided to try the local Chinese restaurant – it was a bit of a wait, but the food was pretty good – and then went back to the motel. Dad was watching several games at once on TV while I worked on my computer – uploading and sorting photos, setting up this blog and writing out the first entry. I finally realized I was going to have to split it up – I had too much to say!