September 27th -- Tahquamenon Falls and Whitefish Point

Another rainy day. All day. It rained very hard last night, though it may have seemed worse than it is because of all of these big trees I'm parked under. But when I got up, it was raining, though not all that hard.

But I wasn't gonna let that stop me ... I may as well go check out the sights anyway. So, I headed out in the BMW for Tahquamenon Falls, the prime tourist spot around here. First, the upper falls. On the half-mile hike out to the falls, through the woods, I was getting mighty wet and wished that I'd remembered to wear some boots instead of my sneakers. Oh well, they'll dry eventually.

During the walk out there, a little forest creature went running across the trail right in front of me. It looked like a ferret. But it disappeared into the woods and so I didn't really get a close look. Later, I found a ranger and asked, and he said it was most likely a pine marten, whatever that is. Well, let me tell you, a pine marten looks like a ferret.

Anyway, I made it out to the falls and it was gorgeous. Sure would have been nicer if the sun had been shining, but as you can see from the pictures, it's still a nice place. The falls themselves pale in comparison to (say) Niagara, but the surrounding scenery is much nicer.

I got a few pictures from various spots along the river's edge, then headed back to the car and drove down to the lower falls. These are much less impressive, they basically looked like some rapids on the California rivers. I was hard pressed to call them waterfalls.

But they'd built these really nice boardwalk paths out to various viewing spots, and the hike itself was great. Lots of wildlife, and I didn't get nearly as wet and dirty as I did heading out to the upper falls. Still, hiking a total of about 2 miles in the pouring rain was questionably smart.

Now that I was thoroughly drenched, I decided to go try to find something indoors. There is a shipwreck museum up at Whitefish Point, which apparently is famous for lots of shipwrecks, including the Edmund Fitzgerald (you know that song by Gordon Lightfoot, right?)

A museum seemed like just the ticket for a day like today, so I headed out that way. The museum is actually pretty small but it was absolutely packed, probably because there just aren't that many indoor activities in this area. They tell the stories of a number of local shipwrecks for the last 100+ years out in the Great Lakes, and show a film about the Edmund Fitzgerald.

The museum is on the grounds of the Whitefish Point Lighthouse. It's an active coast guard lighthouse, so you can't go up into the tower, but I enjoyed the visit anyway.

I thought about breaking camp and heading out, maybe to Canada, but it was after 4pm by the time I got back to the campsite, so I'll just spend the night here, do some laundry, and head out in the morning. I'll probably just head to the southern peninsula and blow off Canada (hey, I've been there), but we'll see how I feel in the morning ...

Thanks for reading!
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