WINTERLAND
This snowshoe tour explores a secret corner of the Apostle Islands
Jon Michels paused in a grove of towering hemlocks on a small ridge overlooking a creek.
“I could spend hours right here,” he said as he rested on his trekking poles that disappeared into two feet of pristine white snow. We stood in silence for a few minutes, listening to the twinkling trickle of the creek below and a woodpecker hammering away at a tree in the distance.
We were snowshoeing deep in a tract of old-growth hemlock forest in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore on the Bayfield peninsula, about a mile from Michels' home on the edge of the Red Cliff Reservation.
“I've been coming back here for years and I've never seen anybody back here. It's hard to get back here,” he said as we trekked from his land into the park.
There are no roads, parking lots or trails in this part of the national lakeshore that hugs Sand Bay. In the summer, kayakers and boaters launch from the marina at Little Sand Bay to the east, but even then this land is far removed from visitors whose sights are set on Sand Island to the north and the famous sandstone sea caves along the mainland to the southwest.
Those sea caves are a popular attraction in winter, too, when huge ice formations form along them. If Lake Superior freezes enough, you can hike a couple miles from Meyers Beach to explore the icy caverns.
When that happened for the first time in five years in 2014, the caves made international news and attracted hundreds of thousands of visitors.
The spectacle repeated itself briefly in 2015, but the caves haven't been accessible since, including so far this year. The window for the caves to open is usually mid-February through mid-March, and it requires a combination of cold temperatures and light
winds to allow the lake to freeze enough for it to be safe to walk on.
But the caves aren't the only reason to visit the peninsula in the winter, especially since the area gets about 100 inches of snow every winter.
“The snow is beautiful,” said Apostle Islands National Lakeshore Superintendent Lynne Dominy, noting there are other winter activities to do on land in and around the park, from snowshoeing and skiing (both downhill and crosscountry) to fat-tire biking.
Some of those activities provide a glimpse of the park's remote wildness that the ice caves, which draw hundreds of thousands of visitors, do not.
“My dream is to have people coming up here and experiencing the lake, and not just to see ice caves, because there's more than ice caves and sea caves up here,” said Michels, who offers snowshoe tours through his company, Wolftrack Guides.
One of those tours takes visitors to ice caves outside the national lakeshore on the east side of the Bayfield peninsula, when conditions allow. When I visited last year in late January, even those were not accessible (some became accessible a few days later). But Michels wants to take people beyond the area's most famous attraction.
“In the summer when we're kayaking, everyone wants to go out to Meyers Beach, and it's spectacular, but you get out there, there's lines, you gotta wait to get into some of these things, there's boats whipping around. I tend to lean away from those places. I've spent a lot of years exploring this area, looking for special places,” he said.
About 80% of the national lakeshore, which continues its 50th anniversary celebration this year, is a wilderness area, a designation reserved for natural spaces that are the least trampled by humans.
Michels' secret hemlock grove is exactly that.
He called it “a spiritual place,” and said he wants to share that special spiritual feeling with others through his tours.
“I think most people have walked or been to a place where they feel something, and that's here,” he said. “It's especially strong for us here, but I know that other people come here and feel that. Bringing people to special places and letting them have that experience is one of the things we're trying to do.”
Snowshoe tours
Michels started his guiding service last winter with a business partner, Travis Barningham. Michels had worked with Barningham, a Red Cliff tribal member, and his business, Rustic Makwa Den, to lead kayaking tours in the area and tours of the ice caves on the Red Cliff Reservation.
Michels is from Minnesota and previously worked as a geologist and natural resources specialist. He moved to Red Cliff about nine years ago, and last year decided to branch out from kayak and ice-cave tours to offer snowshoe tours.
Among those offerings are a tour of Frog Bay Tribal National Park, the nation's first tribal national park when it opened in 2012. The park is currently closed to non-tribal members, but when it opens to the public again, one of Michels' tours takes visitors on a 4-mile trek down to the lake and along the shore to see some ice caves, if conditions allow.
Our tour started farther west, on Michels' land at the edge of a parcel of the national lakeshore overlooking Sand Bay.
He described the tour “like a trip back in time,” since we started in an area that had been logged 25 to 30 years ago and ended up in an area with trees that were centuries old.
After strapping on snowshoes in his driveway, we trekked between spindly aspen and birch trees before squeezing through a cluster of evergreens and dropping into a ravine that cradled Sucker Creek.
“It's kind of like going into Narnia,” Michels said, noting that the transition brought us into an area of old-growth forest with centuries-old hemlock, white cedar and yellow birch trees that had escaped the loggers' saw, partially due to the hilly terrain.
We followed a trail he had already forged through the snow but soon broke off and made our own fresh tracks among those left by coyotes, snowshoe hares, foxes, squirrels and ruffed grouse.
We didn't see any wolf tracks, but Michels said he had heard some howling the night before. There is a monitored pack in the area, known as the Echo Valley Pack.
“We're bushwhacking now, we're floating!” Michels shouted as we pushed through pristine powder.
Our snowshoes helped us stay mostly on top of the nearly waist-deep snow. I told Michels that this was what snowshoes were made for, and he said that they were vital for the Ojibwe who have called that area of Wisconsin home for 10,000 years.
Michels shared some of the history of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa on the tour, from their interactions with French fur traders in the 1600s to the U.S. government in the 1800s, including what has become known as the Sandy Lake Tragedy.
In 1850, U.S. government officials changed the location of the tribe's annuity payment from La Pointe on Madeline Island to Sandy Lake, Minn. A group of Ojibwe went to Sandy Lake to retrieve the money and supplies, not expecting to stay long. But the payments were delayed until December, and 400 Ojibwe died of starvation, freezing or disease while waiting and on the journey home.
After the tragedy, Chief Buffalo, the main leader of the La Pointe Ojibwe, and other leaders went to Washington D.C. to convince President Millard Filmore to rescind the removal order. They met for a few hours and smoked a pipe Buffalo had brought from Wisconsin. The next day, President Fillmore rescinded the removal order and ordered treaty negotiations to begin.
The 1854 La Pointe Treaty came out of those negotiations and established reservations including those for the Lac du Flambeau, the Lac Courte Oreilles and the Bad River bands in Wisconsin. The Red Cliff Reservation, however, was not directly established through the treaty. The land, known as the Buffalo Estate, was initially given to Buffalo for his work in the negotiations. The rest of the La Pointe people were supposed to move to the Bad River reservation, but many stayed with Buffalo at Red Cliff. In 1863 the U.S. government attached Buffalo's land to the 1854 treaty and established the Red Cliff Reservation. Chief Buffalo is buried on Madeline Island, and some of his descendants still live on the reservation. Two busts of the chief — one marble and one bronze — are in the U.S. Capitol building.
“If he hadn't been overshadowed by all the Indian wars, I think he'd probably be one of the most famous and respected native leaders in the country,” Michels said of Buffalo. "All the relations with natives in history was all about warfare, and Buffalo did the opposite. He used the political process and was successful at it, and it just didn't catch historical traction.”
Part of Michels' goal is to share this overshadowed history and why the land is so important to the Ojibwe with people who might just come to the area to snap a selfie with the ice caves.
“Travis and I have decided that's really going to be a big part of what we're trying to do here, is separate ourselves a little bit from the mainstream tourism," he said.
More information: Wolftrack Guides offers snowshoe tours of the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Frog Bay Tribal National Park, and the Red Cliff Point ice caves, when ice conditions allow. The tours range from two to four hours and can be tailored to abilities. The road to the park is plowed, but an all-wheel drive vehicle will make access easier.
Tours cost $50 and snowshoes are available to borrow. For more information and to book a tour, call (715-3319166) or see wolftrackguides.com.
Tours do not travel to the mainland ice caves in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, which are monitored by the National Park Service. The caves, which begin about one mile northeast of Meyers Beach, are open only when the park services deems them safe to access. For up-to-date conditions, call (715) 7793398 ext. 3 or see nps.gov/apis.
Contact Chelsey Lewis at clewis@journalsentinel.com. Follow her on Twitter at @chelseylew and @TravelMJS and Facebook at Journal Sentinel Travel.