Information on Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, Sand Island & Our Summer Trip Plans

We will leave San Antonio on June 2 (with the travel trailer in tow) destined for Apostle Islands National Lakeshore (AINL), which is in Wisconsin about 70 miles northeast of Duluth, Minnesota. We should arrive there on Thursday June 5. We will park the trailer and stay (in the trailer) at the NPS facility at Little Sand Bay (the place where we worked as volunteers last summer) for about a week. During that time we will attend three days of NPS training/orientation and do some odd jobs for the park service

The view from the window of the trailer at our camping spot at Little Sand Bay. We will be in the exact same spot this year. And, yes, that is Dave doing the laundry.

On June 13 we will be taken by boat to a duty station on Sand Island, which is about four miles from Little Sand Bay on the western edge of the park and about 20 miles east of (across the lake from) Two Harbors, Minnesota.

It is possible that we will get some cell phone service on the island; possibly good enough that we can communicate with the outside world by voice and internet and text.

However, it is more likely that the cell service will be spotty to non-existent. We won’t know for sure until we get there.

Therefore, if you call and leave a voice mail on one of our cell phones, or send us an e-mail or a text while we are on the island it is very possible that we will not receive your message until we leave the island; either during our one break (June 24-25) or when we finish our tour of duty on July 8.

However, we will have 24/7 radio contact with NPS while we are on the island. Thus, if there is an emergency, you can call the park and they can get in touch with us by radio.

Our supervisor’s name is Susan Mackreth. She offices at the Little Sand Bay Visitor Center (where we worked last summer) and the phone number there is 715-779-7007.

Ideally you can speak directly to Susan but if that is not possible and/or if you do not get an answer at LSB (which might not be open every day) try the main park headquarters in Bayfield, 715-779-3397. The phones there should be answered 8-5 (CDT) seven days per week.

We will be “working” on Sand Island from June 13 to July 8 (with a two-day break on June 24 & 25). Our primary duty is to be the NPS presence for visitors that come to the island via personal watercraft (the only way to get there). There is an historic lighthouse (circa 1881) on the island and one of our jobs will be to lead visitors on tours of the lighthouse.

There is a four-site primitive campground, a group campground, a pit toilet for visitors and some other historic buildings on the island and we will be responsible for maintaining those, primarily mowing and trimming.

The island is heavily-wooded and roughly four miles long and three miles wide. In the late 1800s to early 1900s there were some permanent residents on the island (other than the lighthouse keeper) and, for a few years, there was even a school, store, post office and a single, shared automobile. Today there are still a few private vacation homes on the southern end of the island that are owned by descendents of those residents, but there are no permanent residents. Some of the historic structures from that community (along with the rusting hulk of the car) are still there and we will may have some minor maintenance duties related to those structures.

We will live in a small, modern, 2-bedroom park service residence that is powered by solar panels and propane and has a shower with hot water, a toilet, a refrigerator and a two-burner stove.

Typically there are not many visitors until July 4 and that might be more so this year because of the long, cold winter. Thus, the first two weeks of our duty on the island is likely to be very quiet, cold and rainy with lots of mosquitoes. (We are taking plenty of reading material, warm clothes and bug spray!)

It is about a 1.5-mile hike (one-way) through the woods from the residence to the lighthouse and there are quite a few bears on the island. We will probably be making that trek at least once per day, so that could be exciting.

When our TOD is finished on July 8 we will hang around LSB for a couple of days to pick berries, cook whitefish, drink beer, eat cheese curds and generally try to recover from a month of eating canned and dehydrated food without any beer to wash it down with.

From there (this is where things get more complicated) we are going to pull the trailer to Toledo, Ohio and put it in storage (keep reading, this may make sense later). The AINL-Toledo trip will take about a week because we are going to make some stops in Michigan along the way.

From Toledo we will drive straight home to San Antonio, arriving sometime around July 18.

We will be home about 10 days before departing for Phoenix. Tex’s last day of work at the San Tan Brewery is July 31. We will help him pack his belongings and bring them/him home with us, arriving sometime around August 3.

The three of us will be at home in San Antonio for about a week before departing sometime around August 9-10 for Charlottesville, Virginia. We should arrive in Charlottesville around August 11-12 and we will help Tex get settled in his apartment.

Orientation for first-year students at UVA Law starts August 18 but we should be long gone by then.

From Virginia we will drive to Louisville to attend the Kentucky State Fair (if you are keeping track; this will be our 12^th state fair).

From Louisville we will drive to Toledo and (is this starting to make sense now?) retrieve the travel trailer from storage!!

Thus, if everything goes as planned, we will be sitting at a Toledo Mud Hens minor league baseball game on the evening of August 17, sleeping in the trailer that night in a state park on the shores of Lake Erie and preparing to spend the remainder of August and most of September “really getting to know” Ohio.

We should get back to San Antonio by October 3. There will probably not be many/any travel blog postings for the Wisconsin/Arizona/Virginia segments of the summer travels, but I may try to crank out a few blog posts when we get to Ohio.

So, there you have it. The bottom line is; call or e-mail anytime but don’t expect an immediate reply.

Be well and have a great summer!

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The maps and photos below may help you get "AINL-oriented".

 


For further orientation, Sand Island is visible in the background of the two photos below, both taken from the dock areas at Little Sand Bay with the photographer facing west. Betsy took the photo of the sun setting on Sand Island last summer. The second photo was copied from a Park Service Facebook posting a few weeks ago and shows repairs to the dock at LSB with Sand Island visible in the background. (Note the ice in the water in the second photo).

We took the following photos last summer when we paddled a kayak out to Sand Island.

This photo is looking west and the Minnesota shoreline is visible in the distance. It is about a 1.5 mile hike through the woods on a good, flat trail to get here from the ranger quarters where we will be staying and it is one of the few open, treeless places on the island.

Notice the wooden flagless flag pole. One of my goals this summer is to install a new rope, pulley and tie down and get the flag flying here again. The North Shore of Minnesota is visible in the distance (where water meets sky).

These steps provide access to the rocky northern tip of Sand Island for anyone brave enough to swim in the cold waters of Lake Superior.