The Presque Isle is clearly among the wildest and most scenic rivers in Michigan. It's source is the highland headwaters of Wiscinsin, and flows into Lake Superior sixty miles away in Gogebic County.

  My favorite stretch of the river is what we call "The Gorge". Extremely steep clay and rock banks crowd the stream, often so tightly that a walk along the river requires getting wet to wade around overhanging cedars and cliffs. The banks are as tall as 165 feet, and the river below them descends 135 feet, in one and a quarter miles.

  The gorge is difficult to reach, and demands a lot of physical activity to enjoy, another reason it is so special to me.

  The Gorge exposes bedrock where the Copper Harbor Conglomerate overbeds the Porcupine Mountains Volcanics.

Here we are looking at a well-exposed area of the Copper Harbor Formation. Upstream just a short distance lie the Volcanics. These rocks are approximately one bilion years old, and the Conglomerate shows evidence of river activity formed from the melting waters of a long-ago ice ige.

Plant life clings to these rocks. Nightshade shown here, and a lone cedar growing on an island shown at the top.

The floodplain and banks are populated large hemlock, mature maple, and big white pine.

I found this tremendous bracket fungi in the woods. It was fresh, and brilliantly orange. It was about eighteen inched tall.

Another scenic river, Copper Creek, flows into the Presque Isle from the south, its last tumblr is a small waterfall. The grey-headed coneflowers that usually bloom there are wilted, but some New England Aster was hanging on to lend some color to the scene.