An Urban Boychick Takes on the Outdoors

This entry is part of my write-up of a September 2024 trip to The Apostle Islands. The story begins   here . Monday 9/9 Monday's conditions were benign and so we headed out to see the Sand Island Sea caves. First, we made the roughly three mile crossing to see the historic Sand Island lighthouse, built  in 1881. From there we paddled down the island's coast, and WOWZA ! Whatever we had been expecting, the sea caves exceeded it. The Apostles are sandstone islands, and over the millennia the water has etched out beautiful caves into the islands' shorelines. The caves on Sand Island aren't super tall, but they're deep and form a maze of twisty passages, each unique, that you can explore by kayak. Some of the passages are big enough to paddle all the way through: go in one spot and come out another. And the sound of the water in the caves is great too. It's all super cool. We all had giant grins plastered on our faces the whole time we were there. We spent a lot of ...

This entry is part of my write-up of a September 2024 trip to The Apostle Islands. The story begins  here . Saturday 9/7 Repositioning days are always tiring. You have to break camp, load the kayaks, paddle to a new locations, then unload and set up camp all over again. We got an early start - by this time we recognized that the morning was the calmest time on the lake. York Island, our second campsite, was fairly close to Little Sand Bay, where we had launched, and so our route involved retracing our steps, albeit under much calmer conditions, including lunch at the same Raspberry Island beach where we had stopped for a much-needed break on the way out. We did deviate a little bit from the direct route to explore a sea cave at Oak Island. Oak is a large, centrally located island with a number of campsites, and would have been a good spot for us to have camped - except it's been closed all season due to "ongoing bear activity", so while we could look at the cave, we weren...

This entry is part of my write-up of a September 2024 trip to The Apostle Islands. The story begins  here . Thursday 9/5 Thursday morning we drove the roughly 20 minutes to our launch point at Little Sand Bay in The Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. Upon our arrival we were met by Ranger Angel (it makes sense that the Apostles have a guardian Angel, right?), who directed us as to where to launch, checked our permits, gave us useful information about the weather, and told us how to describe our location ifwe needed to call 911 (!). She also gave us a once-over and declared that we appeared to be "shipshape". It is not her responsibility to evaluate people's ability to paddle in the open waters of Lake Superior, but by her own admission if she detects that people don't have the appropriate skills or preparation, she'll gently steer them to safer courses of action.   Loading the kayaks at Little Sand Bay Many people are familiar with Gordon Lightfoot's song The...

Monday 9/2 After packing the car to the accompaniment of a pretty sunset on Sunday (a positive portent), Tall Tom and I departed for The Apostle Islands on the afternoon of Labor Day. Rob and Béla were a few hours ahead of us. There’s not much to say about driving the Interstates – the miles slowly ticked by as we headed through Pennsylvania and into Ohio. I will mention that I was surprised to encounter diversity I hadn't expected at a highway rest stop outside of Cleveland. I noticed an obviously Orthodox Jewish guy gassing up a minivan, and spotted the rest of his family inside the rest area. In a sort of balance, when we came back to the car there were two Muslim guys prostrate on the grass strip next to the parking area doing their evening prayers. Being a dog owner, Tall Tom pointed out that the grass right next to the parking spots at a highway rest stop might not be the most sanitary place to stick your face, but oh, well – the things we do for our faith. While the two of...