Swallowtail butterfly! I saw quite a few of these.
The road ran right alongside the beach.
It was warm enough that I was glad for every patch of shade!
Why take a picture of flowers when you can take a picture of flowers and a bee?
Not quite sure about this one, but it seems to be a fly of some kind.
After a while there was a wayside exhibit about shipwrecks along the shore, with a note saying to go down on the beach and walk from there to see some shipwrecks. I didn't realize how far I would be walking!
It was a little tricky crossing this stream, but interesting to see how it exposed the pebbles that were otherwise covered by the sand.
It never ceases to amaze me how vivid those colors can be once the rocks get wet!
First glimpse of a shipwreck!
Looking back the way I came... the beach had turned from sand to cobbles and was getting hard to walk on!
A bigger section of shipwreck, partially out of the water. With the waves Lake Superior can get, it's amazing there's anything left.
Looking back at the shipwreck - it turned sandy again for a little while...
But then back to rocks.
Some of them very big rocks...
I kept walking along, but the footing was difficult on the rocks, and the bank had gotten very high and steep since I first went down onto the beach. I was literally just about to turn around when I saw stairs in the distance! Well, not quite stairs, but steps... logs cabled together to provide a foothold up the bank. It was a little slippery, but definitely easier than what I was anticipating having to do on my own!
From there it was just a minute's walk to the lighthouse! I was planning on taking a tour but I had some time to wait, so I sat in the shade and ate lunch, then walked around and took pictures outside.
This is the lilac bush in the lower left corner of the lighthouse picture above. There were so many butterflies! There were a number of swallowtails, which did not want to sit still for a picture, but I got one at last.
Looking out toward the Au Sable Dunes, that tall pinkish line beyond the water.
When I went to take the tour, the ranger leading it was Sandy, who I remembered from training! There were a few other people there, but we talked for a while afterward. She led us through the house attached to the lighthouse - it's not completely restored to what it would have looked like, but there is some furniture, and she was able to tell us a lot about what it was like being a lighthouse keeper. They had to be completely self sufficient, because it was twelve miles on a faint trail to the town of Grand Marais! It could be a hard life.
Then we climbed up inside the tower. We could even go out onto the catwalk outside!
This is the big Fresnel lens that directed the light from several big oil-burning wicks out across the lake. All those wedge shapes are prisms, which captured the rays that were going out in all directions and refocused them to form one big, bright beam in a single direction. (One of the books we sell at Miners Castle is "A Short Bright Flash", about the man who invented this lens and the modern lighthouse. It's a fascinating read.)
Another look at the dunes, from the top of the tower! The Log Slide is somewhere over there...
This is the modern light that is doing the same job as that giant six-foot lens used to. Instead of a big silo stocked with cans of oil, it runs on a single small solar panel (below.)
A look down the staircase before I began my descent...
I waited to take a picture of the house until after I went up in the tower.
I stayed and chatted with Sandy for a while before I headed back. Since I was walking back on the road instead of the beach, it went a little faster - and I saw some things I hadn't seen on the way there... Including some orchids! I saw several pink lady's slipper orchids, which was very exciting.
One more glimpse through the trees - here there were flat layers of red sandstone stretching down into the water.
When I got back to my car I drove just a few more miles up the park road to Grand Marais. I wanted to check out the beach there, because it was outside of the National Park and so rock collecting was permitted! I asked for directions and found a stairway down from the public campground. It happened to lead through a bit of forest that was completely covered with blooming dogwood plants.
Down on the beach I walked along the water's edge, looking for agates but also picking up whatever pretty rocks caught my eye. At one point I sat down in the sand a little way from the water and dug down a bit. I didn't find anything that was obviously an agate, but there were a few that I thought might be. I also scooped up a big handful just to represent all the different types of beach pebbles.
At one point, I disturbed a sand spider!
Well, it wasn't my fault! He was camouflaged!
After that it was time for the long drive back to Munising. At least it is a pretty drive!
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