Eastern Mountains: Passable or Precious?

A friend from Cameroon once commented on how flat North America was.  He said that there are no mountains anywhere in sight.  I told him that Detroit is hardly a good place to judge a continental landscape by, but he said that he had traveled out to the Rockies and said that they were so low compared to what they had in much of Africa.  Equatorial African mountains certainly are tall, but that is because most of them have extremely high prominence, meaning that they are lone peaks sitting on much lower ground.  Mount Cameroon, for example, sits near the Atlantic Ocean on tropical lowlands and sticks up more than 10,000 feet above the surrounding landscape.  Mount Kilimanjaro rises over 19,000 feet from its base.

In contrast, the Rockies, the Sierras of California and Mexico, the transverse and peninsular ranges of Southern California, the Brooks, and the Cascades, our tallest mountain ranges, all have bases that start from much higher ground for the most part.  There are exceptions, of course, and three of the 10 most prominent peaks of the world are on our continent.  In no way, however, do our native ranges look less dramatic.

Those peaks are anywhere from 12,000 to 14,000 feet above sea level, and while the bases might sit at 7,000 feet or so, they are still mountains.  So what makes a mountain, exactly?  Most people think about a pointed mass of gray rock with a snow cap at the top.  The scientific community seems to have tons of differing opinions, with some communities stating that a mountain needs to have at least 4,000 feet of rise to it, and other saying a mountain requires at least 8,000 feet of elevation, which would eliminate the Appalachians and even much of the mountains of western Texas as candidates. And come on, take a look at the Shenandoah mountains and tell me they do not fit the bill!

Some people I know call these hills.  Those are some pretty impressive 3,500 foot hills.  I don't know about you, but when the temperature at the base is 90 degrees, and up near the top it is 76, I would qualify this as more than just a hill.  At the base there are Southern Magnolias and Tupelos planted to line city streets.  At the top you have red spruces, white pines, and hemlocks.  During the winter months the upper half of the range will be covered in snow while the valleys and Piedmont will be sitting in their lovely mud and mid-40s. In some places, things can even get a bit rocky, and the tops will be open meadows or rocky balds.  I'm sorry, but these are more than just hills.

So what is a mountain?  I would say that a mountain is a mass of the planet that protrudes from the ground significantly enough to have different vegetation and temperatures at its top than what would be found at the bottom.  A hill would be something much lower, and without much relief to it.  In my post on the Great Plains, you can find pictures of the Flint Hills in Kansas, which provide good examples of what I would call hills.  I could go on with a list, but I suppose I would do better to make a map of a familiar region with what consists of mountains and hills.

The mountain areas are teal, the hills are that yellowish-green.  Perhaps I am too generous in calling some things "mountain".  In each of those areas, however, they have sufficient vertical relief and road grades as high as 16% in places.  Most of the Appalachian region does not require explanation (ignore the bottom part of the map, as well as the top of Quebec, I just forgot to scroll down there while painting), though some of the other regions might.  In Quebec along the Ottawa river are the Laurentian mountains, which share characteristics similar to the mountains to their south, the Almaguins and Algonquin highlands.  These are substantially rainier and rockier than the surrounding areas, so much so that they actually cast a slight rain shadow to areas east of them.  These regions are the only place in Ontario that one can find certain species of trees and mushrooms.  To the west, still in Ontario, are areas that have not been given any particular range name, but actually are part of the northern continental divide, separating waters that drain north to the Arctic and south and east to the Atlantic.

Over in Michigan, in the lower peninsula, are areas of relief one would not expect to find in an otherwise pancake flat state.  Towards Gaylord the area almost passes for Appalachian.  This is along M-72, about seven miles west of Kalkaska, MI.

Closer to Lake Michigan and to the south, the area rounds out a bit more and becomes hilly, an excellent contrast between "mountain" and "hill" according to my definition.  This is again along M-72, descending down to Grand Traverse Bay, on the Leelanau peninsula.

Maybe only I can tell the difference.  Anyway, near the Wisconsin/Michigan border are the Porcupine Mountains, the one place in Michigan lucky enough to be blessed by the Canadian Shield and its wonderful granite.  Again, this area is not extremely tall, and only bears around 1,200 feet of relief, but the effect on the climate and vegetation is noticeable.  The mountains can see daytime highs in the forties as late as June and as early as September.

How about those yellowish areas?  That big north-eastern pointing spear in Michigan and Indiana is called the Jackson Lobe, some of which is also referred to as the Irish Hills.  It is largely a glacial moraine left over from the last ice age, consists of sands and till, and is one of the last strongholds of eastern oak savanna prairies still left in the area.  Over in southern Ontario, the hills are part of the rump of the Niagara Escarpment and the Oak Ridges Moraine, one of the largest protected greenbelts in the world.  This was formerly the dividing boundary between the lands of the Huron and Iroquois peoples.  Of course, they only made it that way because the muskrat/beaver border wars had already marked this border centuries before. The beavers won, but the muskrats ended up building more strip malls and outpaced them economically.  The beavers eventually lost their colony of Barrie, which the Muskrats would reorganize into their northernmost bedroom community.

Aquatic rodent territorial conflicts aside, the mountains and hills of this greater area have long served as cultural and economic boundaries between different regions.  Furthermore, even the slightest rise in elevation and transition into rockier areas causes big shifts in the local vegetation and animal life.  This can be seen powerfully heading north on I-75 past West Branch, MI, or on Ontario 11 once one passes over the Severn river.  More subtle changes can be seen heading into the Appalachians on I-80 in Ohio eastbound from about the Cayuga river onward.   You can probably find changes anywhere on that map above if you look close enough.  Go see for yourself, and bring plenty of rodent spray.

The Charms of Different Waters

Last night, during a conversation about the qualities of bottled water, my brother remarked that tap water tastes no different from bottled water.  Water, after all, is just water.  This is very true, water is and will remain Dihydrogen monoxide unless its very stable bonds are broken by agents such as potassium, which can make water explode.  Regardless of its stability, water can dissolve quite a lot of things, such as salt or sugar.  Water collects minerals that dissolve into it and produces different kinds of quality depending on what was at hand.  The Genessee river in Rochester, for example, is brown and muddy as it exits into Lake Ontario, owing to sediments suspended in it from the rich soils and eroded rock that it flows through. The Ottawa river is somewhat black or tea-coloured for most of its length, owing to intense amounts of tannins that result from an abundance of plants and trees that fall into its poorly acid buffering granite watercourses.   The Detroit and Niagara rivers are usually the same aquamarine that much of the Great Lakes are, a near ocean like shade that results from the Lakes' incredible absorption capabilities and underlying dolomite fields.

Tannin rich waters from just downstream of Miner's falls in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore.  The water is quite clean, despite appearances.  It varies from golden to a dark brown.  Great to swim in, probably not so great to drink, unless you have a tolerant body or need a good spring cleaning.  I myself have drunk some pretty potent water from the Petawawa river without once contracting beaver fever.   Most people need to boil it, though, after which it can be some of the best tasting water around.

Then we can take a look at Lake Michigan, with its lovely greenish blues that are nice to swim in, even if the waters feel a bit more gritty.  They have a chalkier taste to them, pretty much what Chicago and Detroit tap water tastes like, minus the trace amounts of chlorine.  This lovely spot is where the Manistee river gently flows into Lake Michigan.  You can float on your back down the river right into the lake, and depending on the time of year you do it, such a swim will involve a nice thermal surprise.  

The waters all taste different, and they all even feel different on the skin.  Bottled waters, if sourced naturally from springs or exposed bodies of water, will taste different based on mineral concentrations and specifics.  Poland Spring, for instance, tastes very smooth and slightly crisp, because it comes from a slightly acidic source within granite bedrock deep in Maine.  Evian has a more alkaline taste to it, because it comes from an area of the Alps with concentrations of calcium in the surrounding rock.  While you are forking over sometimes as much as five dollars for bottled water, which is ridiculous in itself, the truth remains that water can taste different and is not universally the same everywhere in the world.  Case in point?  The ocean!

In the ocean, another factor comes into play that might not have effect on the taste of water except in larger lakes and rivers, namely that of what else is swimming in it.  No, I don't mean whales and tuna, but I do mean macro-algae like kelp, coral masses, and even concentrations of bacteria that are more at home in the primordial conditions of the world sea than on shore or in inland bodies of fresh water.  Then there is salt.  Just look at what it can do to water in the ocean.

Nice, no?  Sure, you can get some pretty intense foam in a lake on a stormy day, but walking into the ocean on a wave blessed beach is like stepping into the ultimate Jacuzzi.  The salt perfects whatever else might be in there, which can include hundreds of different minerals.  Sea salt is an excellent exfoliant, and once the salt is either washed off or falls off the skin, your outermost layer feels fantastic.  Salinity is not uniform throughout the world ocean, and can vary based on a number of factors including temperatures and how many tequila shots the mermaids in the area happen to be drinking.   That picture above, and these below, were taken at Cabrillo National Monument, in San Diego.   In the first picture, you can see the kelp forests growing beneath the surface.  In the last shot, you can make out some of the tide pools that are just teeming with life.

Southern California has incredible water.  It is rather cool for its latitude, moderately salty, and is softened by the amount of kelp that grows about 100 feet offshore for much of the length of the coast.  The bottoms are generally sandy, even though much of the coast can be rugged, and there are far less dangerous creatures in the water than are found offshore in Florida and much of the Gulf Coast.  This is probably because eastern and southern beaches have warmer waters, and are much more saline.  The beaches of the Atlantic and Gulf coasts are, however, worth visiting, and their waters are preferred to those of California by many people.

In any case, the oceans surrounding North America are special.  While I would prefer to live on a lake, and one special lake in particular, having a second home on the sea somewhere would be a nice thing too.  Breathing comes easier by the shore, and moist winds can actually help lower blood pressure.  The air even contains ionized oxygen molecules that add to the already calming physical and psychological effects that standing next to a large body of water brings.

Our waters are a wonderful place to begin a better exploration of our continent.  Our predecessors certainly thought so.

The Great American Desert

Last post we ventured into the Midwest and your author made shocking claims as to what it should actually consist of.  Daring arguments were made as to what could consist of cultural and ecological boundaries of the region, arguments that left out portions of states that are normally considered parts of the Midwestern area.  In the same post, the Midwest was largely described as a region of certain values and open lands.  The historical record given related that many settled in those lands, but some thirsted for something more, for truly open country, and headed further and further west.

Imagine, if you will, a family or two heading past the tallgrass prairies and scattered woodlands into the sunset.  Imagine them cutting through some trees and shrubs somewhere in Kansas or Nebraska, expecting to find yet another open space with a line of trees in the distance.  Instead, they find this:

They had heard stories before, of course.  Government surveyors, French beaver hunters, even caravan merchants headed for the Mexican markets in Santa Fe had come and gone through the cities of St. Louis and Chicago for decades, telling tales of a vast, empty dry land that opened up beyond the sunset.  They heard stories about many things.  Now the reality of the stark open lands was set before them.  But almost immediately, as a traveler from these days will find, they would discover that the Great plains would end up being far more than just a thousand miles of flat barren sands.

They would find rolling hills.

They would find incredibly rich soils, plentiful rains, and hundreds of species of wildflowers which blanketed the ground.

They would even find places where the eastern forests would refuse to give in to lighter rains and frequent, sweeping fires.  They would find large open expanses where there was more sky than planet, where the wind would constantly howl, where the horizon would go on forever.

They would choose to stay in the "Great American Desert" while others would turn back to the eastern lands  and still others would follow the wagon ruts and rivers west to the lands of promise in Oregon and California.  For a brief time, things were peaceful.  Americans, both immigrants and those born in the lands further east, would herd animals, plow and plant what they could, and hunt the Buffalo that teemed throughout the rolling lands of grass.  They would live in peace with their neighbors, the Osage and Pawnee. They would build homes dug into the ground and roofed with turf (there were trees, but there were few of them and they were not of construction quality or size).  In Canada, they would move out onto these lands and even marry some of the Cree and Assiniboine people there.

Then in the lands of the south, men from further east would insist on ownership of the land.  They would run metal rails across it, they would kill all the Buffalo (sometimes for fun), they would let their herds eat through the grass so fast and often that it would not regrow, and they would find shiny metals in the ground that would cause human stampedes.  The Osage and Pawnee would die from diseases, and the Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, and Crow would point fingers at the newcomers and one another. Much blood would be spilled.  In Canada, the descendants of the First Nations who married the French settlers and company men of the Hudson Bay company would perhaps see what had happened to their south and would rise up against the easterners before they could do the same to them.  Their leader would die for their struggle; their voice would echo far into the future.

The winds would carry these voices of the north and the south.  They would be so loud that no one would forget what had happened on these open expanses of grass.  Perhaps they have been heard, for few people would ever live in these lands again.  In many ways, the plains remain as they started.  They are still very much a land of frontier.  The buffalo are largely gone, Indians are a memory and the object of memorial battlefields rather than a presence, and barbed wire fences in different range lands.

Yet the grass still blows beneath a broad sky.

The land seems to go on forever.

The plains seem to retain a quality of the great unknown that they had two hundred years ago.  Many people dismiss them as something to quickly pass through, a stretch of land between the friendly trees and farms of the east and the grand vistas of the mountain west.  People insist they died of boredom!  Others call Oklahoma through Alberta the "fly-over" lands.

Then some people, like me, know they have truly made it to the west once they see those last trees grow shorter and shorter and cling to riverbanks.  Not that the trees out there are unimpressive, mind you.  Plains Cottonwoods and Green Ash can be quite the welcome site along rivers like the Platte and Canadian.

Yes indeed, such trees can be a welcome sight if the prairie becomes too monotonous.  Then again, very few of the crossings are.  Sure, I-70 has about 200 miles of pretty bland terrain in western Kansas, but most of the other routes follow river valleys, pass by volcanoes, and roll up and down with sweeping terrain.

And yes, in some places, you can stand literally in the middle of nowhere and see nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles.  Even then, though, you notice the small things.  The grass gets shorter.  The air gets drier.  You start seeing sagebrush everywhere, and tumbleweed blows across the road.  Shrubs get replaced by cacti.

And then, just when you thought you were going to reach the end of the world, where the ground dries up and you think for sure that nothing can be past that next hill but more endless plains...


You see this.

This then, is the point where you know you have not been going into endless wastelands, but you have been swallowed already by the immensity of the North American West.

This is why I did not include much of the plains in the Midwest, because they are truly part of the west.  The air is dry, the horizons are grand, and even the towns have more to do with silence and the war against a hectic pace of life then they do with being towns.  They stick up from the plains like small oases, little islands of trees, often with a church steeple in the middle, and broad dusty streets that still have tumbleweed flying across them in high winds.

Are you expecting a saloon fight to break out?  I sure was.  That is, until I realized that here are people who could care less about a good fight.  Or government.  Or how prosperous the downtown boutiques are.   Here, the most prominent features of town are the local eating/drinking establishment with the most cars outside (which depends on what is on the menu a given night) and the roundabout in the middle of town where sits the modest county hall and a statue to either a famous explorer or famous Indian.  You might see a statue of Truman in Independence or some army colonel in any given town in Illinois, but here you are more likely to find one of Black Kettle or Pierre DeSmet.  This is a land of farming immigrants, native peoples in love with the sheer immensity of the land rather than what can be grown from it, the descendants of French explorers and fur traders, Mexican and Texan ranchers, and homesteaders, even freed men looking for a new future.  This is where the western lands begin.

What is the Midwest?

Growing up in Canada, certain designations given to regions, cities, and peoples seemed inappropriate to me when I moved down to the States and was suddenly inundated with a new world view regarding the way things are to be properly labelled.  Southern Ontario and the corridor from Windsor to Quebec had always felt like an equivalent to the eastern United States, even the corridor paralleled it geographically more than 300 miles inland.  Needless to say, I was a bit puzzled when people referred to Detroit and even Cleveland as "Midwest".  For one, despite what people may wish, Michigan on the whole shares more of a political affinity to interior New York and Pennsylvania than it does with Iowa or Illinois.  We largely have the same regional dialect of American English here as they do in Buffalo or Altoona, and even our quintessentially "Midwestern" German immigrant population out in the countryside came to us around the same time as it did for western New York and much of southern Ontario.  Our cities, in contrast, are islands of Italian, Irish, and Polish immigrants, and a deeper heritage remains of our French beginnings.

Geographically, we are due north of Florida and Georgia, and the vast majority of our state lies within the Eastern timezone.  (And yes, so do Indiana and Ohio).  Finally, our landscape and climate is far more a child of the Great Lakes and the legacy of the Laurentide Ice Sheet than it is that of the Midwestern prairies.  Back during the 1790's, Michigan was called the Northwest.  The frontier has long since moved on, however, and with it all the good land values that have been packed off to places like Washington and California.  The beaver migrations undoubtedly had much to do with this, the small aquatic rodent ever on its quest for virgin stands of birch trees in which to build moderately priced condos.  

Now, I am likely to generate some controversy with this map, but have patience, I can explain it.

The red line indicates my proposed definition of the American Midwest.  The blue line offers a new region altogether, which is international in scope.  I call this the Nearwest or Lakes region.  As you can see, I straddled Chicago on both areas, but Chicago is, much like New York and Toronto, an Alpha World City.  The area above both regions is something different, something northern, and a bit harder to define and broadly include into one region.  To the east we have the Appalachians and the Maritime lands of New England and the Atlantic Provinces.  To the south we have the upper South.  To the west we have the Great Plains and the beginning of Western America.  The notable gap in the upper center is the Wisconsin Dells and the Mississippi valley around La Crosse and Winona.  The area, which I have been to many times, just has a different feel to it than the rest of the country.  The glaciers never even came here during the last glaciation, and the area is thus known as the driftless area.

So how is it that we can have towns like Independence, Missouri, and Davenport, Iowa considered Midwestern but not Toledo, Ohio or even Gary, Indiana?  Well, take a walk down the old downtown sections of each place and tell me if they are really the same.  Let's start in Independence, once the furthest western bastion of the United States.  On the map above, it is where that I-35 shield is on the Kansas/Missouri border.

That town center is quintessentially Midwestern.  The places of prominence are the civic buildings and large social gathering spots like the theater.  The layout is quite open and focuses on two features: space for congregation and space for the sheer enjoyment of space.  Space is something that defines the Midwest.  There are forests everywhere, of course, but they are not nearly as intact as they are in the Lakes region, even after intensive logging and farming there.  Savanna and prairie have a lot to do with this, but so does resource management and agricultural practice.  Mentality is the biggest driving factor; the Midwest is the land of initial expansion and Manifest Destiny, lands that Americans had to fight for even after they secured them in the Treaty of Paris.  George Rogers Clark National Historic Park is the place to go if you want to see what this entailed, the battlefield where this part of North America was first truly defined.  I admit that I have yet to go to it myself, and count it as a big gap in my firsthand experience of our continent.  Needless to say, those who fought here under the flag of a young nation were the first in a line of Mid-westerners who burned with a convert's zeal for a land they not only secured for that nation, but in many ways for themselves in a friendlier declaration of independence from the eastern lands across the mountains that they left behind.  Their descendants and those of the immigrants and freed men that joined them share their values, their love for open spaces, even their unique barbecue cuisines, vocal inflections, and particular styles of blues music.  Take a look at Springfield, Illinois.

This is a city of wide avenues and spaced buildings.  The state capitol takes the most dominant place, and the other prominent features are libraries, churches, and theaters.  Kansas City, Omaha, Des Moines, and even St. Louis have such streetscapes.  What about the rest of town?

The last home is Abraham Lincoln's house.  As you can see, space is a dominant element, both in the yards and streets.  These are scenes from the Lincoln Home National Historic Site, and the entire neighborhood where Abraham Lincoln lived much of his adult life in Illinois is preserved intact.  Similar spaces can be seen at Truman Home National Historic Site in Independence, Missouri.  The homes are those of the middle class and wealthier residents, but even the poorer sections of both towns have the same design elements in terms of urban planning.

  

In contrast, towns in Michigan, southern Ontario, and western New York have centers that maybe feature a small green space with a gazebo in it, and closely packed buildings that are largely commercial in nature.  Social gathering spaces are smaller in scale, and while you may still have a theater or two downtown, it will be surrounded by quaint cafes and small restaurants, bookstores and other shops.  The civic buildings are off to the side, as if government is relegated to its own space.  Does that mean one region is better than the other, or Independence is more authoritarian than Saline?  Not at all.  What it means is that both towns are monuments to the variants of American (meaning North American) democracy.  In one case, democracy means participation.  In the other, it means delegation and separation from daily life.  The Midwest is a land of broad community, inter-dependence, and the freedom of homesteading and frontier.  The Lakes region is a land of industry, individualism, and the making of cities into truly habitable and enjoyable spaces.  I actually do not have any pictures of nearby down-towns!  I suppose that is because I see them all the time.  Examples are everywhere, from Ypsilanti to Port Huron, Milton and Orillia, Ontario to Batavia and Williamsville, NY.  The region is very much a bi-product of the United States and Canada, a claim that Tim Horton's has latched on to (the region I closed in with blue is actually where most of their franchises are located).  

In terms of landscape, if you want to see the contrast, just drive along I-94 in Michigan, and then I-80 or I-55 in Illinois.  There are exceptions of course, such as parts of I-75 in Michigan being very open, the westernmost parts of the 401 looking more like parts of Iowa, or I-70 in Missouri being forested.

Take a look at I-70 in central Missouri just before the Missouri river crossing.

Or, far more typical, restored tallgrass prairie on I-55 near Bloomington, Illinois.

Prairies, you see, once covered far more land in the center of our continent than most people realize.  Today they can often be derided as "fly-over areas" or something to race through to get to the more interesting mountains, deserts, and forests which border them.  In truth, the first settlers of Indiana and Illinois ran into these large expanses of grass, flowers, and shrubs and absolutely fell in love.  Many towns in the Midwest were actually founded in the middle of them or atop hills, rather than near rivers or woods, because the allure of the open lands was such a contrast to the woods that had to be cleared and the stumps that had to be removed further east.  There were still trees around, and most towns, as seen above in Springfield, were planted thick with them.  In the Midwest, settlers could have the best of both worlds.  The endless flat grasslands most people think of when they hear "prairie" existed farther west, in central Kansas and Nebraska.  Here there were fields, forests, good soil and easy topography for farming.  There were and are also challenges.  There were blizzards, scorching summers, tornadoes, all things that made some people want to move back across the mountains or head further west to the new frontiers that opened up there.  For those that stayed, and those who later came to fill the plentiful room, this would be their American paradise they had dreamed of.  

Others stayed further north, in larger industrial cities or in smaller farms surrounded to this day by extensive woodlands.  Their story and land is cause of another post, however.  They are the people and lands of the doorway between east and west, of the Erie Canal, the Detroit River, of Toronto, Detroit, Buffalo, Cleveland, and Rochester.  I suppose, if you needed a better label, you could use the "Nearwest".  I, of course, still prefer Upper Canada.  For a parting shot, you can see that it is not too hard to imagine the straits between Lake Erie and Lake St. Clair as a highway, rather than a border.

Lake Michigan's Northern Shores

The Upper Peninsula of Michigan is a strange and wonderful thing.  Length-wise, it presents the traveler with a scale of space more appropriate to crossing one of the larger western states.  The distance, for example, between Ironwood and Saint Ignace is over 300 miles, and in the absence of flat, straight freeways, it takes over six hours to traverse the route.  The landscapes can also vary significantly, from the heavily forested lands of Menominee (which has been explained to me to be an ancient Indian word for "almost Wisconsin")...

To the mining port town of Marquette...

To the polite tourist "welcome to da north eh" town of Saint Ignace, which is sort of a Michigan version of Mattawa, Ontario.

The man waving to you is Fr. Jacques Marquette, S.J.  Well, his statue anyway.  His grave is about five yards in front of him.  He and his friend Louis Jolliet were the first Europeans to explore much of the area, and were instrumental in linking Louisiana to Quebec and encircling the far less interesting and definitely less fun English speaking folks in the thirteen colonies of British North America.  While other folks were busy chasing beavers up in northwestern Ontario and Minnesota, these two Jesuit approved explorers thought that there had to be some link between the inland seas of the Great Lakes and the really really long and muddy river now known as the Mississippi.  They found one the hard way, by seeing just where Green Bay ended.  They trudged through Wisconsin, which might be fun, but back then there was not cheese anywhere in sight.  They did find the going easier once they left behind the northern forests and entered the Oak Savanna that once covered a great deal of central and southern Wisconsin.

They went down the great river, hoping to make it clear to the sunny Gulf, but started feeling that their expedition would run afoul of Spanish people, who had every right to be jealous of their amazing French Canadian cuisine and canoes.  They turned back at the mouth of the Arkansas river, which would later partially serve as a border between New Spain and New France.  On their return trip from what would have been a journey to get some cheap crawfish in New Orleans (which had also yet to be founded, much to their chagrin), the disgruntled French Canadians figured that the Illinois River would make a much better route back to the cooler air and plentiful beaver lands of Canad... er I mean the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.  He and Jolliet parted ways once they returned to the upper reaches of Lake Michigan.  Jolliet had some business and reports to give back in Quebec, and Marquette wanted to check out more of the immediate shorelines.

I can't say that I blame him, because the northern bits of those shorelines are pretty darn nice.

The water is your usual Great Lakes greenish-blue, but it feels a bit different up on this end.  A bit less gritty of a feel to it than further south, even a bit less grassy/plant-like.  It does not have the majestic slightly acid feeling that Superior and Algonquin lakes have, but it is definitely "northern".  This sort of thing is hard to describe, you pretty much have to go there yourself.  The southern coast of the U.P. is not only a departure from the rest of Lake Michigan, but it is different from the Superior coast and even has unique variations within its length.  Except maybe down by Menominee, however, it decidedly looks "north".  There is no granite bedrock here like over in Ontario or up past Marquette, but there is a good load of the glacially-deposited sand around.  There are limestone outcrops too, because believe it or not, the northern hump of Lake Michigan actually is the northern part of the Niagara Escarpment.

It is far more pronounced down by Hamilton and Niagara to be sure, but heading along US Highway 2 between Escanaba and Epoufette, one will see outcrops of that familiar limestone that serves as a backdrop to the vineyards of much farther south.  You can see it rather well north of Saint Ignace, where the cedars like to hog all that limestone.  One particular pinnacle has even been made into a tourist trap, Castle Rock.

In fact, there is even an amazing restaurant where you can enjoy local fare and sit on the top of the escarpment looking down to the lake.  On a clear day, you can even see across to the other part of Michigan.   This shot was taken looking back to Epoufette Bay.  

A good place to eat.  Any trip to the U.P. must include a meal stop for pasties.  At the Epoufette Bayview Inn you can do just that, served up with a generous portion of thick beef gravy.  Not quite poutine, but maybe the next best thing you can grab south of the border.  Of course, they also serve lake trout, whitefish, and other fresh catches from Lakes Michigan and Superior.  They also have a small shop which can use some help.  Epoufette is a nice little town that does not offer much to the passing traveler other than this inn and restaurant, but the views are simply incredible.  In fact, you can even see the Mackinac Bridge 30 miles away.

Not the clearest image, but you can make out the tall white towers of the span.  If you look closely, you can also see the bridge deck itself.

The road between Saint Ignace and Epoufette closely follows the lake and passes by small dunes and a ten mile long beach.  The road grows wider here to allow parking, and access to the shoreline is a simple matter of walking down a small sand bank.  When I passed by this last late May, there were tons of swimmers.

West of Epoufette, a French-Canadian fishing town by the way, US 2 passes a great little rest area that features beach access through the trees and an interesting marker.

As you can see, the landscape is quite northern, and very similiar to what one would expect across the border 100 miles away.  This part of the U.P. does not sit over the Canadian Shield, but there are plenty of granite boulders everywhere, conveyed a relatively short distance by the Laurentide Ice Sheet.  Like much of northern Ontario, however, there is plenty of sand.  

The beaches continue on, broken by chunks of the escarpment here and there, until around  Manistique, where the character of the shoreline changes from beaches, spruce bogs, and near boreal forest to more of a rocky and swampy thing with transitional forests of pines, birches, beeches, and maples.  Around Escanaba, the escarpment moves into the lake and across Green Bay to the Door peninsula of Wisconsin, where it continues south to Chicago.  Escanaba itself is an interesting and relatively sophisticated city, not at all like its namesake book would seem to suggest.  It has many old Victorian buildings and a rather broad, western looking downtown.  The city sits on the Bay de Noc, a quiet arm of Lake Michigan, and a rather southern-looking beachfront, dotted with islands of silver maples.

One can continue southwest past Escanaba on Michigan highway 35 towards Menominee, and despite heading south and being just over four hours away from Chicago, the landscape surprisingly gets more northern, and the beaches return.  The gas also gets more expensive, cheese advertisements pop up everywhere, and you gain an hour crossing into the central time zone.

Overall, a lovely shoreline and land in general.  The locals are laid back, and share tastes in cuisine similar to those favored by northern Ontarians/Ontariens.  It is truly within the door of the great north, and a trip across the Mackinac Bridge leads one to a truly different world from the lands south, even from the rest of the United States.  I never fail to get emotional when I cross that bridge, the same feeling I get crossing the bridge over the Severn river on Highway 11 north of Orillia.  All of a sudden, you are taken to a different world, a world of pines, spruces, granite, beaches, Algonquins and Hurons, Jesuits, and my people.  I have been through much of this lovely continent, and appreciated its variety and soul.  My heart, however, will always remain dans le Nord.  

One last view then, the one always seen as one drives down to the Bridge and falls down the escarpment back to the straits and the southern lands beyond.