Wilderness Diary

April 1999

Trapper's Shack...Found!




Several more trips up Ash Creek, some quite brutal, failed to show us the Lost Trappers Shack. I made one more trip in late April up the West Branch of Ash Creek, and there it was! For four years I'd been looking up the wrong Ash.

The shack was much as I remember it, with the roof and walls still intact. I made a little fire in the wood stove to test it, and it worked just fine. Above is Sara crawling out the door. Below is the wood stove and cooking utensils.

4th of July

Nature Outdoes Man



The town of White Pine fireworks were upstaged by a thunderstorm that rumbled over Lake Gogebic, to the south. Above is a photo of fireworks and lightning. We returned to Silver City to be further entertained by another storm over Lake Superior, below. Reports the next day said that the North Shore of Minnesota was inundated by six inches of rain from this storm.

July 1999

Keweenaw Sea Stack



My wife Patty and I visited the Keweenaw, and went kayaking off Bear Bluff near Bete Grise. There is a "sea stack", a rock separated from the shore, about forty feet high and quite narrow. In the above right photo Patty is sailing into peril, disturbing the nesting gulls on top of the stack, provoking some loud dive bombing from the panicked birds.

Autumn 1999

Gotta love those fall colors!



Here is a view of the Big Iron River near my home. Below is an abstraction of colors reflected in a small part of the Little Greenwoods Falls.



Leaves were dancing and twirling in the little creek near Mirror Lake 8-Bunk Cabin in the Porcupine Mountains...



Below are sun-struck whitecaps and the signature Porcupine Mountains shoreline in an early fall storm.





To Be Continued...