Wilson Tavern, photo by Marty Hogan.
Handmade dwellings with forgotten dreams is what Marty writes about his massive Broken Souls set of photos.
Check this out big as a house and in his Broken Souls slideshow. If you’d like to follow along, Marty posted the itinerary for his October Photo Trip.
Michigan in Pictures has a lot more photos from Marty.
Copper Harbor, photo by Christopher’s eye.
The Copper Harbor history page from the official website of Copper Harbor says:
When Michigan became a state in 1837, 32-year-old Douglass Houghton was appointed as the first State Geologist. Houghton began a comprehensive geological exploration of the state to determine the extent of its mineral resources, visiting the Upper Peninsula in 1839 and 1840. This report to the Michigan legislature noted the probable extent of copper deposits in the Keweenaw Peninsula and stimulated new interest in Northern Michigan.
Publication of Houghton’s report of the mineral-rich Keweenaw Peninsula awakened the attention of eastern businessmen. The nation’s escalating need for brass (an alloy of copper and zinc) prompted further exploration of the area for exploitable copper resources….
Many of the earliest travelers to Keweenaw Point stayed only until their dreams of quick riches disappeared. But some stayed on to settle the area and a few of the current townfolk and shop owners are descendants of those first rugged settlers. Early Copper Harbor became the administrative center for a group of remote copper mining locations spread through the forst of Keweenaw Point. Later, the Harbor rang to the sound of axes and crosscut saws as the growing region required vast quantities of pine logs to support mine shafts and provide housing for a growing influx of immigrants. Today the Harbor still has the feeling of its frontier origins.
Here’s more about the history of copper mining at Copper Harbor and you can check out the official site for things to see and do around Copper Harbor in the present day.
Check this out bigger in Christopher’s slideshow and also have a look at the Copper Harbor slideshow from the Absolute Michigan pool on Flickr!
Flow, photo by John Clement Howe.
John took this shot in Au Train, Michigan where the Au Train River flows into Lake Superior. Check it out bigger in his Lakeshores slideshow.
Speaking of flow, rivers and water, if you’ve never seen Irena Salina’s documentary on the World Water Crisis, I heartily encourage you to check out Flow. The New York Times review has this to say about Flow:
A documentary and a three-alarm warning, “Flow” dives into our planet’s most essential resource — and third-largest industry — to find pollution, scarcity, human suffering and corporate profit. And that’s just in the United States.
Yet Irena Salina’s astonishingly wide-ranging film is less depressing than galvanizing, an informed and heartfelt examination of the tug of war between public health and private interests. From the dubious quality of our tap water (possibly laced with rocket fuel) to the terrifyingly unpoliced contents of bottled brands (one company pumped from the vicinity of a Superfund site), the movie ruthlessly dismantles our assumptions about water safety and government oversight…
Road 442.jpg, photo by smartee_martee.
“When the goldenrod is yellow,
And leaves are turning brown –
Reluctantly the summer goes
In a cloud of thistledown.”
~ Beverly Ashour, September
In September, Holly steps back in time, Romeo bites into a peach, Hamtramck and everyone else celebrates Labor Day, Detroit gets its jazz on, Marquette & Old Town Lansing play the blues, Rochester celebrates art & apples, Mackinaw City enjoys hops & fun, Grand Haven reels in the salmon, Kalamazoo and Muskegon gets their Irish up, Paw Paw welcomes the wine Harvest (and Leelanau does too) and Grand Rapids comes back for seconds with the phenomenal ArtPrize! that’s just a few highlights!
You can check out many more September events and hear Earth, Wind & Fire singing their ode to the 9th month at the September 2010 Michigan Event Calendar on Absolute Michigan.
Marty took this shot on Road 442, north of Danaher in Luce County. Check it out background big and in his brilliant Michigan Fall Colors slideshow!
IMG_0060, photo by JimSchoensee.
I was looking for the legend of why the Lake of the Clouds got its name. It turns out that this signature scenic site in the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park got its romantic name in the 1930s or 1940s depending on the source you believe. The later source has some more detailed information, so I’ll relate it here:
The name “Lake of the Clouds” makes me chuckle. The lake was originally named “Carp Lake” by the settlers of these parts in the 1840s. In this usage “carp” is short for “scarp,” or “escarpment,” the rocky basalt-and-conglomerate ridge you see to the left, and has nothing to do with the ugly bottom-feeding fish. When the area became the Porcupine Mountains Wilderness State Park in 1945, some marketer thought “Carp Lake” wouldn’t fly with city-slicker tourists and insisted the name be changed.
Whatever name it goes by, it is indeed a beautiful vista – get information about Lake of the Clouds trails from Hunts Guide to the UP.
Check this out bigger and in Jim’s slideshow.
Lower Harbor Light House, photo by Perucco Photography.
Terry Pepper’s Seeing the Light has an extensive recounting of the history of the Marquette Harbor Light begins:
With the Jackson Mining Company active a few miles inland, a thriving community sprang up around the natural harbor at the foot of Marquette Bay. Incorporated in 1849, docks and wharves soon appeared to support the shipment of ore. With plans underway for the construction of the new lock at Sault Ste Marie, it was plain that Marquette was destined to become the premier shipping point and destination for Superior maritime traffic. To serve as a guide to vessels entering the harbor, Congress appropriated $5,000 for the construction of a lighthouse on September 28, 1850.
Read on for information about the demise of that first light and the construction of the current light. The lighthouse is now part of the Marquette Maritime Museum and is open mid May to October for tours.
Check this out bigger and in Brett’s Waterscapes slideshow.
Many more Michigan lighthouses from Michigan in Pictures.
Black River Falls – Ishpeming, MI, photo by Odalaigh.
The awesomely awesome GoWaterfalling.com has this to say about Black River Falls which are located 8 miles south west of Ishpeming off of Country Road 581 in the Escanaba River State Forest:
The Black River surges through a narrow channel here. When viewed from the front, the falls looks like a plunge, but it actually slides down the rock at a relatively gentle angle. That is fairly typical of the type of waterfalls you find in this rocky country.
…The Black River flows into the Escanaba River, which flows into Lake Michigan, making this waterfall part of Lake Michigan’s watershed. However it is probably much easier to visit while circling Lake Superior than Lake Michigan. It is only about 10 miles off of the Lake Superior Circle Tour. It is over 60 miles off the Lake Michigan Circle Tour.
Check this out background bigalicious and in Charles’ slideshow.
Many more Michigan waterfalls on Michigan in Pictures.
Hey everyone, sorry for being a day late with this. I plead film festival. ;)
Check this out bigger and see more from this shoot in his Houghton & UP MI slideshow.
The Seney Stretch, photo by Justin Bugsy Sailor.
Today is the last Wednesday of June, and on Absolute Michigan, that means it’s a Weird Wednesday. Today Weird Michigan author Linda Godfrey has a piece on Shocking but Scenic Seney that features Hemingway and the Ogre of Seney and the seedy history of this town that you’ll want to check out.
Hunt’s UP Guide says that while Seney was once the Upper Peninsula’s most raucous lumber town with a population of 3000 – now just 300 – today Seney is best known as the start of The Seney Stretch:
…that mind-numbingly monotonous 30 miles of M-28 between Seney and Shingleton that’s the most direct route from the Mackinac Bridge to Pictured Rocks and Marquette. Here the highway is almost straight as an arrow and flat as a pancake because it’s crossing a swamp. The scraggly, flat, boring landscape can get burned into a motorist’s brain and mistakenly become representative of the entire U.P. interior.
Wikipedia’s entry for Michigan Highway M-28 adds that the Seney Stretch is the longest curveless section of highway in the state, and one of the longest straight stretches of curveless highway east of the Mississippi.
Check it out bigger in Justin’s slideshow.
164/365 – Dredge, photo by dcclark (catching up again!).
Brenden Balliod’s Great Lakes Shipwreck Research (a fantastic resource for divers & historians) has this to say about the Quincy Dredges #1 & #2:
For almost 100 years, the copper mines of the Keweenaw extracted copper from mined rock with the use of stamp mills. The mined rock was smashed by large stamp heads and the brittle non metallic rock broke off leaving the metallic copper. The broken poor rock was ground into “stamp sand” and simply dumped into the lake. Subsequently, large fields of stamp sand now line the Keweenaw Waterway and Lake Superior. Portions of Torch Lake by Lake Linden and Hubbell were almost completely filled in. After WWII it was found that the stamp sand still contained a great deal of copper which could be extracted at a profit by regrinding it. Because of this, in 1947 the Calumet and Hecla Mining Company built a suction dredge capable of vacuuming stamp sand off the lake bottom to a depth of 110 ft. The dredge was operated by the Quincy Mining Co. and was a common sight on Torch Lake throughout the summer months, where it could be seen “mining” the discarded tailings from Torch Lake.
The dredge was usually laid up during the winter months by anchoring it out in the lake, and it carried onboard pumps to combat the slow leakage of water through its hull. Apparently, at 9:00 AM on Sunday January 15, 1956, the pumps stopped working, and before they could be restarted, the dredge plunged to the bottom, leaving only her roof exposed. Raising the dredge was thought to be uneconomical and only limited salvage was conducted. Gradually, the dredge settled into the lake bottom leaving only the peak of her roof above water.
Today, the Quincy Dredge #1 is barely visible above the surface and can be seen from Hwy. M26 by Hubbell. Her sister dredge, the Quincy Dredge #2 lies near her, up on the beach at Mason. The Dredge #1 is a truly creepy dive and offers low visibility, especially near the lake bottom. Her steel superstructure is all that remains, and it rises over 40 ft. off the lake bottom. A good deal of machinery has been left at the site, but low visibility and general creepiness hampers most exploration. Divers who want to explore the Dredge should do so in early Spring or late Fall with a good dive light. Ice diving the Dredge in the Winter may also be a good option for divers with ice diving experience.
Click through to see old photos & maps. There’s a lot more shipwrecks and other diving opportunities in the Keweenaw Underwater Preserve. About the photo, David adds:
This photo has a fun story behind it. The dredge is beached at the shore of Torch Lake, not too far from the highway. I parked near it and walked in, where I met two kayakers who had just come to shore after looking around the water side of the dredge. We chatted, and not five minutes after I’d met them, they offered to let me take a kayak out and see it for myself! — Which I did, of course. I love the UP!
Check it out bigger and in his slideshow.
Michigan in Pictures 