Go Green Travel Wisconsin: Apostle Islands National Lakeshore

One of Wisconsin’s true gems, the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore is a year-round wonderland and a model for green travel and sustainability efforts.

Here is an excerpt from a description provided to the Travel Green Wisconsin program:
“Along windswept beaches and cliffs, visitors experience where water meets land and sky, culture meets culture, and past meets present. The 21 islands and 12 miles of mainland host a unique blend of cultural and natural resources. Lighthouses shine over Lake Superior and the new wilderness areas. Apostle Islands National Lakeshore has more lighthouses than any other National Park Service area with 8 historic towers on 6 islands. … The Bayfield Visitor Center is a good place to begin your National Lakeshore visit, whether by car, afoot, or by private boat. At the visitor center you can view audiovisual programs and study exhibits about the park's history, natural history, and recreation opportunities.”

Even in winter, the lakeshore provides unique and isolated getaways. The most popular destination in winter is to visit sea caves along the mainland shore near the western boundary. About a mile across a lake-ice trail, visitors will find dozens of caves, each filled with icicles and intricate ice formations.

For details, check out the National Park Service web site on the Sea Caves. For the most current information on access to the sea caves, call the main Park Service number at (715) 779-3397 and choose Extension 3.


Another popular winter activity is to escape to Madeline Island, across from Bayfield, to enjoy snowshoe hiking in the 2,400-acre Big Bay State Park,which gets nearly 80 inches of snow in a typical year.


A good place to start any visit is at the Park Service Bayfield Visitors Center. During winter, the center is open Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.


Apostle Islands National Lakeshore


Travel Green Wisconsin Green Guide Score – 84


Green highlights and innovative practices

-- Uses recycled lumber on boardwalks and stairs.

-- All island water systems use solar electricity.

-- Historic Raspberry Island light station has been rehabilitated and powered by solar or propane.

-- All boat and snowmobile engines have been replaced with cleaner 4-stroke engines.

-- Implemented slope stabilization projects that include the use of bioengineering techniques to stabilize eroding bluffs.


Web site -- www.nps.gov/apis


Contact information:Voice: 715-779-3397Email: apis_superintendent@nps.gov
Address -- 415 Washington Ave., Bayfield, WI 54814


The above photo, Sea Caves at Sunset on Devils Island, is by Phillip L. Billings.

Dennis McCann: All the moose fit to print -- and photograph

Originally published Oct. 13, 2008

I know that I can go to the guess-what-I-just-saw well only so often, even living in what seems to be this north woods wildlife park, and under normal circumstances I’d let last week’s bobcat sighting speak for itself. But I can’t help myself, because that same post referred to the unusual sighting of a young bull moose in Ashland – and, even as I write this, that very same moose is bedded down on a rainy hillside JUST DOWN THE ROAD FROM MY HOUSE.

Sorry to shout like that, but a moose on the loose would goose anyone’s excitement meter.

As I noted last week, moose sightings are pretty rare in Wisconsin, though a few are reported every year. This was my first, and to find it within walking distance of our house was a thrill. I was coming back from running a few errands when a man walking in the light rain on our road hailed me and asked if I had seen the moose. Moose? I believe I answered. Yes, he said, just down here, so off we went to see if it was still there. And sure enough, there on the rainy hillside was the moose, lying down in the brush but with its big head and shoulders and antlers easily in view.

As was the case with my bobcat encounter I did not have a camera (maybe I need to revisit that policy) so I went home and got my wife and for the next 45 minutes or so watched the moose walk a bit and then hunker down again. She got a few photos, despite questioning the advisability of approaching a maybe 1,000-pound bull moose who might not be in the best frame of mind, given that it is the rut. But the moose cooperated just enough to get digital evidence of his presence here so no one can say we made it up.

When I say it is the very same moose spotted in Ashland last week I am, of course, only speculating. But it is clearly a young bull, given the antler growth, and there aren’t many of them around so it is at least a very good supposition. The question, though, is without a young moose cow to give him company on these cool fall nights, will be take home a favorable impression of his first Bayfield visit? I hope so, and hope that his journey to wherever comes next is a safe one.

This morning we had, as we usually do this time of year, an eagle in the tall white pine on the lake side of our house and, as I left to show my wife the moose, a pileated woodpecker landed on a tree in front. I won’t burden you with separate reports on those, though. Besides, it will take something pretty special to top young Bullwinkle.

Dennis McCann: Bayfield is an apple city to its very core

Originally published Oct. 3, 2008

Autumn’s vibrant colors are everywhere in evidence in northern Wisconsin, the oranges and gold especially vivid when viewed against the brilliant blue of October skies. But the only color that matters this weekend is red, the color of apples. It is Apple Festival weekend in Bayfield, the biggest and busiest weekend of the year, and apple red rules.

Apple Festival is the one weekend a year when tiny Bayfield, pop. 650 or so depending on who is at home or away visiting the kids, becomes something else entirely. What that something else is can be different things for different people. For some of us, the change from quiet little tourist town to a bustling destination for tens of thousands of weekend visitors can be disconcerting. I had to park blocks from the coffee shop this morning, not just across the street as usual, and then wait in line for 20 minutes for the overburdened barista – yes, even Bayfield has baristas, with tattoos and piercings to boot – to produce my latte. Oh, how I suffer for my art.

But such is the social contract when you live in a tourist town that any personal caffeine crisis must take back seat to the business people who depend on Apple Festival crowds to make their season, one that seems to get shorter every year. The tourist season now begins on the 4th of July, burns white hot through August and into September weekends and finally explodes this first weekend of October. After that, park anywhere you wish. The coffee shop and restaurants, the gift shops, the charter sailboats and fishing boats and cruise boats must make their nut this weekend, because after Monday morning’s hangover the free-spending crowds will be distant memories.

And for all the congestion and lines and annoyances (many in the visiting horde are from Minnesota’s Twin Cities, if you know what I mean) Apple Festival is a great deal of fun, a celebration of red so intense that in a bluff-top cemetery in Appleton old Joe McCarthy must be spinning in his grave. Last night I volunteered at the important apple pie baking contest and pie social, an event my wife and our neighbor co-chaired for the first time. Talk about pressure – mess up the traditional apple pie contest in the apple capital of Wisconsin (sorry, Gays Mills, but you know it’s true) and who knows what shame and besmirchment would be visited on our household. Happily, the contest went off without any real glitches; the dozen volunteer judges sampled pies in a variety of categories from All-American Apple to Commercial to Creative, named the winners and awarded the prizes, all while a packed pavilion of pie-lusting people watched and waited their chance to ravage and sample the entries. Somewhere, Betty Crocker smiled her approval.

Now it is on to the party, a blowout that would likely amaze the growers who started a little fall festival for the community more than 40 years ago. There will be food (pork chops on a stick with apple mustard – hmmmm) and music, a special Apple Ale from the South Shore Brewery in Ashland and more crowds so large that they will have to park in fields at the edge of town and ride buses to the packed downtown streets. There will be a lighted boat cruise, and the popular pipe and drum corps from Thunder Bay will be on hand as always for their wake-up concert at the marina. There is even a creaky little carnival with rides and games for the gullible. And on Sunday the big Apple Festival parade will march down Rittenhouse Avenue, with apple-themed floats and apple-flavored displays and lots of high school bands whose members will rush from the finishing point back to the start at the top of the hill for a mass band that always signals the end of the parade and, by extension, of the season. And we will stand on the hill and cheer the Bayfield band the loudest. Tradition demands no less.

So fine, the city is crowded and maybe a little inconvenient but it is one weekend a year and the economy needs it to be successful. And it will be delicious fun. Better red than dead, I say.

Dennis McCann: Without sports, who would cheer for the Flivvers?

Originally published Sept. 25, 2008

I passed through Colby, in the heart of Wisconsin dairy country, this week and lamented once again that the town’s leaders have somehow failed to change the name of the high school athletic teams to the Colby Curds. Maybe some would find that cheesy, but I am a big fan of naming athletic teams to honor past achievements or other bits of local history, and how the city that invented Colby cheese chose the Hornets – Hornets? – over Curds is beyond me.

That’s one of the nice things about living in the far north, where a number of schools’ athletic teams wear names that tell something about the community’s past. Where I live in Bayfield, for example, the school teams are named the Trollers, reflecting the city’s rich commercial fishing heritage. Down the road in Washburn, the teams are called the Castle Guards, a name that arose because the city’s original high school was said to resemble a turreted castle. And a bit further to the south, the Ashland Oredockers took their name from the four giant ore docks that extended from the mainland into Lake Superior in order to load ore carriers. Only one of those remains now, and it is slated for removal, but the local teams will help recall the glory of those days for years to come.

They aren’t the only schools with cool names, though. Mellen has the Granite Diggers, and Hurley has its famous Midgets. Unfortunately, that means the girls’ teams have to be the Hurley Midgettes, which makes a new word out of whole cloth simply to spin off of the boys’ teams name. That seems unfair to the girls. Given Hurley’s sordid past I could have offered something more fitting but then I’m not sure the town parents would have approved of the Madams. As it happens, Butternut also has the Mighty Midgets, though those teams are named not for diminutive athletes but for onetime hometown hero Charles “Midget” Fischer, a professional wrassler of some renown a few decades back.

Our friends across the Wisconsin border in the Upper Peninsula have more great team names. Bessemer has the Speed Boys (and, unfortunately, Speed Girls), while the Watersmeet Nimrods were thought to have such a wonderful name it was used in a national campaign by ESPN a few years ago. (Remember “Without sports, who would cheer for the Nimrods?”)

Of course, using bits of local history to choose team names doesn’t always mean they will roll off the tongue. Gwinn, Mich., which once was a model town for an iron ore mining company, still calls its teams the Model Towners, which seems to defy easy rhyming in cheers but you never know. ("Go Towners, Don't be Downers?") But my new favorite school team name comes from Kingsford, Mich., just across the Wisconsin border, where the Kingsford Flivvers uphold local pride every time they take the field.

Flivvers? Yup, because Kingsford once was a Ford Motor Company town and the nickname for the Model T reflects that fact. I only learned that while playing golf with the father of two Flivvers this week, and he seemed delighted with the name. (In an unrelated but still interesting note, Kingsford Charcoal began when the Ford plant there, which made wood sides and other components for Ford cars, was looking for a way to use every scrap of waste wood. They turned the scraps into Ford Charcoal Briquettes, which later became the familiar Kingsford brand we still use today.)

Anyway, the Fighting Flivvers make for great headlines, and the other team names work as well. “Trollers Net First Place,” for example, or “Speed Boys Race Past Hurley,” or even “Nimrods Top the Saints.”

I’d love to see a headline that reads “Curds Squeak By Tigers.” It’s just a pity it will never happen.

Dennis McCann: Signs of the times -- and the times are weird

Originally published Aug. 24, 2008

A bit of social business took me again to Madeline Island this weekend so in the grand island tradition I missed the ferry that was to return me to the mainland in order to spend quality time at Tom's Burned Down Cafe, one of the seven wonders of the Up North world.

That might sound a little much but it's true. There is not a first-time visitor to the island who doesn't see the Burned Down Cafe in all its weathered bohemian glory and not wonder, what the hell is that?

It's a good question, because Tom's just might be the oddest bar in all of Wisconsin - and yes, that is saying a lot. It's a survivor, for starters, born from the ashes of a onetime island bar called Leona's (that's the Burned Down part). Tom Nelson brought what he could salvage into downtown LaPointe, set a wood floor atop an old car, added the box of a truck for storage, built a bar (the granite bar tops were once urinal walls at a Bayfield TB sanitorium), coolers, a stage for bands, seats, even umbrellas and a few heaters because among the things he didn't add to the place were walls. He posted a sign - "Sorry, We're Open" - and lo these many years later, despite some misguided government efforts to apply zoning to a structure that defies the very concept, Tom's is going strong, a magnet for summer hippies, island pirates, boat bums, head-scratching tourists and assorted dogs. Think Key West without all the hurricanes.

Remember what I said about inspiring wonder? My friend Jim saw it recently and wondered where the heck the health inspector was, which was surely a case of a city guy applying his elitist standards to a true island institution. It is, admittedly, a bit lenient with the dress code. No shirt, no shoes? No problem, ladies. Have a seat at the bar and what'll you have?

Red-staters might want to keep their politics hidden. Tom's, I'm proud to say, is where I got my "Re-Elect Cheney-Satan '08" bumper sticker.

At any rate, somewhere along the way Tom's Burned Down started adding wacky signs with wacky sayings, signs that in their own way offer guidance through a mixed-up world. Here is some of the wisdom I stole from Tom's the other night, which is only fair given that he stole half of these from others in the first place:

1. Red meat is not bad for you. Fuzzy greenish-blue meat is bad for you.

2. Democracy is the art of running the circus from the monkey cage.

3. How old should a highway be before you tell it it's adopted?

4. It's not pre-marital sex if you're not planning to get married.

5. Just who thought it was a funny idea to put an S in lisp?

6. Anyone who generalizes is stupid.

7. 42.7 percent of all statistics are made up on the spot.

And my favorite: A good friend will come and bail you out of jail...but a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, damn that was fun.