GRAND ISLAND

Region: Pictured Rocks/Munising/Au Train

JMP Photography

The Grand Island East Channel LIght which tour boats pass going out to the Pictured Rocks looks ancient but surprisingly intact. It stopped service in 1908.

Protecting the entrance to beautiful Munising Bay is unspoiled Grand Island with its remarkable scenery: a spectacular shoreline with colorful sandstone cliffs towering above Lake Superior, and sea caves and arches. The island, up to six miles long and 3½ miles wide, is not a wilderness area. It was logged in 1954.

Click to enlarge

Now, under the Hiawatha National Forest, the island is managed for very limited development. Camping is primitive, without running water. Owners of about 30 existing cottages were grandfathered when the federal government acquired the island. They can keep vehicles on the island. However, no other private vehicles including ATVs cannot be taken to the island from mid-June through early October.

In season (from Memorial Day weekend into early October) Grand Island is reached by a three-minute ferry ride from the dock off M-28. It's three miles west of Munising, not in town at all but almost to Christmas. (For schedule, see end of this article.) Visit the Grand Island Ferry Service's web site, grandislandmi.com, for photos, a map, and very helpful details about recreation on the island. Call (906) 487-3503 for reservations and information. (The ferry service's site seems more helpful and easier to find than the Hiawatha National Forest site on the island.) For up-to-date info sheets (rules for camping and mountain biking are subject to change) and a helpful personal orientation annotated on a map, stop by the Pictured Rocks/Hiawatha National Forest Visitor Center.

Drinking water and indoor toilets are available at Williams Landing, at Murray Bay Road, and at Juniper Flats. Toilets are also at Trout Bay

Grand Island East Channel Light (1868) operated until 1908, when it was replaced by a light on the mainland at Munising.

Kayakers, hikers, and mountain bikers are in the best positions to appreciate the island's dramatic scenery, which is mostly along the shores. Some areas are being developed for hikers only. The island is ideal for mountain bikes, whose greater speed is well suited to distances between campsites and points of interest. The old logging roads throughout the island's interior offer moderately challenging cycling. Roads and trails are now clearly signed, with "You are here" maps of the island.

Mountain bikes may be rented ($30 a day) from the Grand Island Ferry dock. The forest service says a reasonably fit mountain biker can manage the 23-mile perimeter trip around the island in a day, with stops. It suggests this relaxed route for an all-day family adventure: "travel up the southwest shore road, cut across the island to Trout Bay Overlook, then travel down to [the day-use area] for a picnic meal and leisurely beach walk and finish their day with biking along Murray Bay to Williams Landing."

One essential piece of advice provided to bikers and hikers: "Know your pace and keep track of the time" so you can meet the ferry on time. All island visitors should be aware that mosquitoes and black flies can be very bad, typically from mid-May through mid-July. Bring insect repellent and a head net (always a handy item for U.P. travel).

Trout Bay, facing northeast but still protected, is wonderful for hikers and kayakers. It has several primitive campsites. See below.

Paddlers can explore the protected shores of Munising Bay and the west shore as well. Munising Bay has many interesting shipwrecks close to the surface, which paddlers and boaters can see.

Kayaks can be rented at Northern Waters (906-387-2323) for use on Grand Island, to people who have taken a course. See points of interest in Munising. Northern Waters offers day-trip and multi-day trips.

Warning: only very experienced kayakers good at reading the weather should ever dare to venture to paddle around the island's north shore, exposed to strong winds and sudden storms.

Less active visitors can get good views of Grand Island's sandstone cliffs on the south shore on the TWO BOAT TOURS: the Pictured Rocks Cruise and the Glass-Bottom Boat Shipwreck Tour. (The shipwreck tour gets close to the west shore, too.) See Munising points of interest. Passengers can see the picturesque, privately owned East Channel Lighthouse, its wood weathered to a dark gray. The Alger County Historical Society spearheaded efforts to preserve the lighthouse.

When you take the little ferry boat to Williams Landing, you get a closer look at one of the 17 private residences on the island. If put up for sale, the federal government has the right of first refusal.

To make the island more accessible to the general public, there is ALTRAN's 3 to 3½ hour GRAND ISLAND BUS TOUR. The tour focuses on the island's natural and human history. It passes the Hotel Williams buildings, stops at the stone quarry cottage and exhibits, the cemetery, Murray Bay, the Duck Lake boardwalk, Trout Bay beach and Trout Bay overlook. Then it cuts across the island to the Waterfall Beach Overlook on the west side. The tour is offered daily at noon from June 15 into early October. There's an additional 3:30 p.m. tour from July 1 through Labor Day. The cost, around $20, includes the ferry ride. Kids 12 and under are $11. Call (906) 387-4805 for reservations. The van is wheelchair-accessible, but most trails are sandy with uneven ground.

There are some very large old hemlocks in the island's north part. But people expecting a wilderness will be disappointed. From 1904 until 1989, Grand Island was owned by Cleveland Cliffs Iron of Ishpeming and Cleveland, Ohio. William Gwinn Mather, the company's conservation-minded president, used the island as a hunting retreat, game ranch, and resort. During his lifetime, he protected its old-growth trees from logging. The Hotel Williams and Grand Island Forest and Game Preserve date from his era. They were promoted as low-key getaways with hunting, fishing, boating, tennis, and hiking. The resort operated from 1904 to 1959. Shortly after William Gwinn Mather died in 1951, however, large-scale logging occurred and continued. More big trees have been taken down by powerful windstorms.

Grand Island has a nearly 5,000-year history as a Native American fishing and hunting ground. Indians also came to the island to get quartzite. It is a hard, shiny rock that can be chipped to make cutting and scraping tools. Oral tradition depicts the island as Kitchi Minissing, "Grand Island," a special place in the legends and memories of indigenous peoples.

Concerning archaeological artifacts: unauthorized digging or collecting artifacts on federal land is illegal. (It's actually illegal to take away anything, including rocks and wildflowers.) If you find artifacts or observe illegal digging, contact the U.S. Forest Service in Munising.

In the 1790s British fur trader John Johnston from Sault Ste. Marie noted that "Grand Island is the summer residence of a small band of Indians who cultivate maize, pumpkins, and potatoes. . . . Grand Island Bay forms the largest and safest harbour upon the lake. . . . The south end of the island is low and sandy but covered with herbage; on it, and on the adjoining hill, the Indians have their huts. The bay is directly opposite where they go spearing every calm night with flambeaux."

Grand Island's long and interesting story is told with illustrated plaques at the visitor center at the Williams Landing. One notes, "Location was everything in the fur trade. In the early 1800s, American Fur Company traders and their competitors built small log cabins in or close to Indian settlements on Grand Island and the mainland. Government survey parties and missionaries also visited frequently during this period. European and Native American cultures often mixed during the fur Trade era."

One of the American Fur Company's traders' cabins has been moved to the grounds of the Alger County Heritage Center in Munising, and authentically furnished. (See Munising Points of Interest.) American Fur, founded by John Jacob Astor in 1808 to compete with large Canadian traders, became the U.S. monopoly in furs. It became a foundation of the Astor fortune.

Not long after the decline of furs, American Fur left the island. Abraham and Anna Williams and their large family arrived in 1840. They moved into the company's log buildings, next to the birchbark lodges of the island's Ojibwa band. According to oral tradition, the band had invited Williams to settle so they could make use of his services as a blacksmith and trader.

Anna Powell, the Williams's daughter, later recalled, "I'll never forget how the island looked the first time I saw it. I was 12. It was raspberry season. The bushed were loaded down with them. Mother put up lots of them. [The Indians] did everything they could think of to show how friendly they were. They were always giving us children little mococks [birchbark containers] of maple sugar."

"In 1984 Grand Island was put on the real estate market," explains another plaque. "With the support of many other organizations, the Trust for Public Land, a private non-profit group, bought the Island in 1989 for $3.5 million. Congress authorized federal purchase, and Grand Island became part of the Hiawatha National Forest in 1990." Owners of cottages retain their rights to continue to use their property. After much debate on a development plan for Grand Island, the National Forest Service has opted for very limited development focused mainly on the shoreline. Grand Island's 27-mile shore is bigger than Mackinac Island's.

Usually the narrative bridge is lost between Native American oral prehistory and Euro-American written history. However, through a quirk of circumstance, that oral connection has been meticulously researched and illuminated by retired Harvard/MIT science historian Loren Graham in A Face in the Rock: The Tale of a Grand Island Chippewa. The book is at the Pictured Rocks Visitor Center, Alger Heritage Center, and many local stores.

As an undergrad at Purdue, Loren met his future wife, Pat Alberg. Her family had a cottage on Grand Island's Trout Bay. "At first I saw the island as an escape from civilization, oblivious to its social history," Loren recalls. "Then I read Pat's grandfather's journals." The grandfather, an Indiana college professor, first visited the Upper Peninsula in 1883. His elderly Ojibwa guide, whose Ojibwa name was Powers-of-the-Air, had, as a boy, been the only survivor of an ill-advised attack on the Sioux. The small Grand Island Band of Ojibwa had been goaded into the attack by other Ojibwa bands in the Upper Peninsula.

Over Loren Graham's own summers on the island, he listened to descendants of the Grand Island Band, and to Ojibwa in Bay Mills by Sault Ste. Marie. He read the stories upon which Longfellow based his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. And he read the 1820 papers of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft about his trip along Lake Superior in 1820. (Schoolcraft was a key figure in early Michigan history and a prolific if untrustworthy historian.) "I came to feel there was a big story here, but all in pieces," Loren says. "The connections were everywhere."

Forty years after first hearing the stories, the University of California Press published Loren's A Face in the Rock.Midwest Book Review praised it for telling the eyewitness story, through Powers-of-the-Air, of the "desecration of Grand Island by the fur and logging industries, the Christianization of the tribe, and the near total loss of the Chippewa language, history, and culture."

Novelist Louise Erdrich, perhaps today's best-known Ojibwa figure (and also a German-American), lauded Loren's "steady vision and painstaking research" that results in "a fascinating and poignant story." She called it "very true and very touching." Now the book has inspired James Ludwig, an independent filmmaker with U.P. roots, to make a film. Track its progress at afaceintherock.com.

Loren's persistent research also inspired Munising native Delores Leveque, a retired nurse and great-great-great granddaughter of Powers-of-the-Air, to work with the Michigan Department of Transportation for ten years. M-DOT has created interpretive panels and a vantage point on M-28 at east of Au Train. (See under Au Train.) Delores's stories had been part of Loren's research. It's interesting but not surprising, muses Loren, that of all his books, the one he hears the most about is The Face in the Rock. He had already been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on the history of scientific thought in the Soviet Union. His short and compelling The Ghost of the Executed Engineer became a popular crossover title.

The island's most visible landmark, the poetically weathered EAST CHANNEL LIGHTHOUSE, is private property. It can only viewed from the water. The Pictured Rocks Boat Cruise and the shipwreck tour pass right by it, near the south end of the Thumb. The East Channel Light was threatened when the changing beach brought waves up to its foundation. In 2005 local volunteers finished raising money to build a breakwall, stabilize the foundation and base, and replace broken siding. Finally, the lantern room and its copper top have been replaced. It's one of the few wood lighthouses left on the Great Lakes. The idea is not to restore the photogenic lighthouse, but to retain its weathered look.

The Grand Island Ferry operates from Memorial Day weekend into early October. (906) 387-3503. The ferry leaves from Grand Island Landin,g almost three miles west of downtown Munising on M-28. It's a three-minute trip, with almost immediate return trip from Williams Landing. Approximate departure times from both landings: from July 1 to Labor Day: 9, 10, 11 a.m., noon, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30, 6:30. Early and late seasons (from Mem. Day through June and from after Labor Day to October 9): at 9 a.m., noon, 3:30, and 6:30. Reservations advised. Cost: $15 round-trip for adults, $10 ages 6-12, $5/bike. Includes $2 entry fee to island. Request a current map and info sheet from Pictured Rocks/National Forest visitor center, (906) 387-3700. Visit grandislandmi.com, the excellent site of the Grand Island Ferry Service. Handicap accessible: ferry, restrooms on island.



Protecting the entrance to beautiful Munising Bay is unspoiled Grand Island with its remarkable scenery: a spectacular shoreline with colorful 200-foot sandstone cliffs, two lighthouses (visible only from the water or the air), and sea caves. The island, up to six miles long and 3½ miles wide, is not a wilderness area, and it was logged in 1954. Now, under the Hiawatha National Forest, the island is managed for very limited development. Camping is primitive, without running water. Owners of about 30 existing cottages were grandfathered when the federal government acquired the island. They can keep vehicles on the island. However, other private vehicles including ATVs cannot be taken to the island from mid-June through early October.

In season (from Memorial Day weekend into early October) Grand Island is reached by a three-minute ferry ride from the dock off M-28. It's three miles west of Munising, not in town at all but almost to Christmas. (For schedule, see end of this article.)

Visit the Grand Island Ferry Service's web site, grandislandmi.com">www.grandislandmi.com, for photos and details about recreation on the island. For up-to-date info sheets (rules for camping and mountain biking are subject to change) and a helpful personal orientation annotated on a map, stop by the Pictured Rocks/ National Forest Visitor Center. Drinking water and indoor toilets are now available at Williams Landing, at Murray Bay Road, and at Juniper Flats. Toilets are also at Trout Bay.

You can rent mountain bikes to traverse the island, but keep in mind some parts of paths are quite sandy and some parts fairly steep, so don't bite off more than you can chew.

Kayakers, hikers, and mountain bikers are in the best positions to appreciate the island's dramatic scenery, which is mostly along the shores. Some areas are being developed for hikers only.

The island is ideal for mountain bikes, whose greater speed is well suited to distances between campsites and points of interest. The old logging roads throughout the island's interior offer moderately challenging cycling. Roads and trails are now clearly signed, with "You are here" maps of the island. Mountain bikes may be rented ($30 a day) from the Grand Island Ferry dock. The forest service says a reasonably fit mountain biker can manage the 23-mile perimeter trip around the island in a day, with stops. It suggests this relaxed route for an all-day family adventure: "travel up the southwest shore road, cut across the island to Trout Bay Overlook, then travel down to [the day-use area] for a picnic meal and leisurely beach walk and finish they day with biking along Murray Bay to Williams Landing."

One essential piece of advice provided to bikers and hikers: "Know your pace and keep track of the time" so you can meet the ferry on time. All island visitors should be aware that mosquitoes and black flies can be very bad, typically from mid-May through mid-July. Bring insect repellent and a head net (always a handy item for U.P. travel).

Trout Bay, facing northeast but still protected, is wonderful for kayaks, what with its sea caves to explore, and its sand beach for camping and launching.Trout Bay was formed by a tombolo, a kind of sand bar connecting the main part of Grand Island with what was once a smaller island to the southeast. That island is now called "The Thumb." Trout Bay has a sand beach adjacent to colored sandstone bluffs and sea cavesl on the Thumb, like the Pictured Rocks, only not so high.

Four Trout Bay campsites have been developed with kayakers in mind. They are first-come, first-served, with a maximum of two tents and eight campers.

Paddlers can explore the protected shores of Munising Bay and the west shore as well. Munising Bay has many interesting shipwrecks close to the surface, which paddlers and boaters can see.

However, only very experienced kayakers good at reading the weather should ever dare to venture to paddle around the island's north shore, exposed to strong winds and sudden storms.

Kayaks can be rented at Northern Waters (906-387-2323). See page xxx. Northern Waters offers day-trip and multi-day kayak tours.

Less active visitors can get good views of Grand Island's sandstone cliffs on the south shore on the Pictured Rocks Cruise and the Glass-Bottom Boat Shipwreck Tour. (The shipwreck tour gets close to the west shore, too.) Passengers can see the picturesque, privately owned East Channel Lighthouse, its wood weathered to a dark gray. The Alger County Historical Society is spearheading efforts to preserve the lighthouse.

To make the island more accessible to the general public, there is ALTRAN's 3 to 3½ hour Grand Island van tour. It sounds as if this tour has improved from when we took it. Now access and interpretation at interesting sites have been improved. The tour focuses on the island's natural and human history. It passes the Hotel Williams buildings, stops at the stone quarry cottage and exhibits, the cemetery, Murray Bay, the Duck Lake boardwalk, Trout Bay beach and Trout Bay overlook, then cuts across the island to the Waterfall Beach overlook on the west side. The tour is offered daily at noon from June 15 through October 5. There's an additional 3:30 p.m. tour from July 1 through Labor Day. The $20 cost includes the ferry ride. Kids 12 and under are $11. Call (906) 387-3503 for reservations. The van is wheelchair-accessible, but most trails are sandy with uneven ground.

Winter brings a different kind of activity to the island. Trout Bay is a popular place for ice fishing. Ice formations hanging from the sandstone cliffs at Trout Bay, contrasted with the blue of open water, are beautiful. Some cross-country skiers ski out to the island, crossing on the ice bridge from the ferry landing. Far more plentiful are snowmobilers. The ice bridge is usually safe from mid January through February, but circumstances can change. Seek local information on the ice bridge's current safety. The National Park Service/Forest Service will not give advice about crossing the ice.

Though there are some very large old hemlocks in the island's north part, people expecting a wilderness will be disappointed. From 1904 until 1989 Grand Island was owned by Cleveland Cliffs Iron of Ishpeming and Cleveland, Ohio. William Gwinn Mather, the company's conservation-minded president, used the island as a hunting retreat, game ranch, and resort. He protected its old-growth trees from logging during his lifetime. The Hotel Williams and Grand Island Forest and Game Preserve date from his era. They were promoted as low-key getaways with hunting, fishing, boating, tennis, and hiking. The resort operated from 1904 to 1959.

Shortly after William Gwinn Mather died in 1951, however, large-scale logging occurred and continued. More big trees have been taken down by powerful windstorms.

Grand Island has a nearly 5,000-year history as a Native American fishing and hunting ground. Indians also came to the island to get quartzite, a hard, shiny rock that can be chipped to make cutting and scraping tools. Oral tradition depicts the island as Kitchi Minissing, "Grand Island," a special place in their legends and memories. In the 1790s British fur trader John Johnston from Sault Ste. Marie noted that "Grand Island is the summer residence of a small band of Indians who cultivate maize, pumpkins, and potatoes. . . . Grand Island Bay forms the largest and safest harbour upon the lake. . . . The south end of the island is low and sandy but covered with herbage; on it, and on the adjoining hill, the Indians have their huts. The bay is directly opposite where they go spearing every calm night with flambeaux."

Concerning archaeological artifacts: unauthorized digging or collecting artifacts on federal land is illegal. (It's actually illegal to take away anything, including rocks and wildflowers.) If you find artifacts or observe illegal digging, contact the U.S. Forest Service in Munising.

Usually the narrative bridge between Native American oral prehistory and Euro-American written history is lost. However, through a quirk of circumstance, that oral connection has been meticulously researched and illuminated by retired Harvard/MIT science historian Loren Graham in A Face in the Rock: The Tale of a Grand Island Chippewa. The book is at the Pictured Rocks Visitor Center, Alger Heritage Center, and many local stores. As an undergrad at Purdue, Loren met and later married his wife, Pat Alberg, who spent summers at the family cottage on Grand Island's Trout Bay.

"At first I saw the island as an escape from civilization, oblivious to its social history," Loren recalls. "Then I read Pat's grandfather's journals." An Indiana college professor, he first visited the Upper Peninsula in 1883. His Ojibwa guide had, as a boy, been the only survivor of an ill-advised attack on the Sioux, which the small Grand Island Band of Ojibwa had been goaded into making by other Ojibwa bands in the Upper Peninsula.

Over the years of summering on the island, Loren listened to descendants of the Grand Island Band, and to Ojibwa in Bay Mills by Sault Ste. Marie. He read the stories upon which Longfellow based his epic poem The Song of Hiawatha . And he read the 1820 papers of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft about his trip along Lake Superior in 1820. (Schoolcraft was a key figure in early Michigan history and a prolific if untrustworthy historian.)

"I came to feel there was a big story here, but all in pieces," Loren says. "The connections were everywhere."

Forty years after first hearing the stories, the University of California Press published Loren's A Face in the Rock. It was praised by Midwest Book Review for telling the eyewitness story, through Powers-of-the-Air [the sole survivor of the Sioux attack, who as an old man had been Pat's grandfather's guide], of the "desecration of Grand Island by the fur and logging industries, the Christianization of the tribe, and the near total loss of the Chippewa language, history, and culture." Novelist Louise Erdrich, perhaps today's best-known Ojibwa figure, lauded Loren's "steady vision and painstaking research" that results in "a fascinating and poignant story" which she called "very true and very touching." Note to readers: it takes awhile to get into this book. Be patient, and give yourself an alert hour to get into it. Amazon customer comments include one from a student forced to read it who found it riveting.)

Loren's persistent research inspired retired nurse and Munising native Delores Leveque, great-great-great granddaughter of Powers-of-the-Air, in her ten-year effort to let people see what remains of the Face in the Rock from the Michigan Department of Transportation's rest stop at Scott Fallsnear Au Train. Delores's stories had been part of Loren's research. It's interesting but not surprising, muses Loren that of all his books, the one he hears the most about is The Face in the Rock. He had already been named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for his work on the history of scientific thought in the Soviet Union. His short and compelling The Ghost of the Executed Engineer became a popular crossover title.

Grand Island's long and interesting story is told with illustrated plaques at the visitor center at the Williams Landing. One notes, "Location was everything in the fur trade. In the early 1800s, American Fur Company traders and their competitors built small log cabins in or close to Indian settlements on Grand Island and the mainland. Government survey parties and missionaries also visited frequently during this period. European and Native American cultures often mixed during the fur Trade era." One of the American Fur Company's traders' cabins has been moved to the grounds of the Alger County Heritage Center and authentically furnished. (See Munising Points of Interest.)

Not long after American Fur left the island, Abraham and Anna Williams and their large family arrived in 1840 and moved into the company's log buildings, next to the birchbark lodges of he island's Ojibwa band. According to oral tradition, the band had invited Williams to settle so they could make use of his services as a blacksmith and trader. Anna Powell, the Williams's daughter, later recalled, "I'll never forget how the island looked the first time I saw it. I was 12. It was raspberry season. The bushed were loaded down with them. Mother put up lots of them. [The Indians] did everything they could think of to show how friendly they were. They were always giving us children little mococks [birchbark containers] of maple sugar."

"In 1984 Grand Island was put on the real estate market," explains another plaque. "With the support of many other organizations, the Trust for Public Land, a private non-profit group, bought the Island in 1989 for $3.5 million. Congress authorized federal purchase and Grand Island became part of the Hiawatha National Forest in 1990." Owners of cottages retain their rights to continue to use their property. After much debate on a development plan for Grand Island, the National Forest Service has opted for very limited development focused mainly on the shoreline. Grand Island's 27-mile shore is bigger than Mackinac Island's.

The island's most visible landmark, the poetically weathered East Channel Lighthouse, is private property and only viewed from the water. The Pictured Rocks Boat Cruise and the shipwreck tour pass right by it, near the south end of the Thumb. The East Channel Light was threatened when the changing beach brought waves up to its foundation. In 2005 local volunteers finished raising money to build a breakwall, stabilize the foundation and base, and replace broken siding. Finally, the lantern room and its copper top have been replaced. The idea is not to restore the photogenic lighthouse, one of the few wood lighthouses left on the Great Lakes, but to retain its weathered look.

Grand Island Ferry operates from Memorial Day weekend into early October. (906) 387-3503. The ferry leaves from Grand Island Landing almost three miles west of downtown Munising on M-28. It's a three-minute trip, with almost immediate return trip from Williams Landing. Approximate departure times from both landings: from July 1 to Labor Day: 9, 10, 11 a.m., noon, 3:30, 4:30, 5:30, 6:30. Early and late seasons (from Mem. Day through June and from after Labor Day to October 9): at 9 a.m., noon, 3:30, and 6:30. Reservations advised. Cost: $14 round-trip for adults, $8 ages 6-12, $4/bike. Includes $2 entry fee to island. Request a current map and info sheet from Pictured Rocks/National Forest
visitor center, (906) 387-3700. Handicap accessible: ferry, restrooms on island.

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PLACES AROUND GRAND ISLAND TO

Eat Sleep Camp