The Garden Peninsula in Michigan's UP

Dwight Peck's personal website

Scenes from northern Wisconsin, summer 2016

More annual lakeside fun in the Northwoods

You may not find this terribly rewarding unless you're included here, so this is a good time for casual and random browsers to turn back before they get too caught up in the sweep and majesty of the proceedings and can't let go.

The Garden Peninsula in Michigan's UP

The Nahma Inn in Nahma, Michigan, 9 August 2016. Built in 1906 by the lumber company running the town at the time, the historic inn is well-situated on Big Bay De Noc on Lake Michigan, not far from the Garden Peninsula in the US state of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. The small restaurant and pub are worth recommending, and the proprietress is extremely friendly and helpful.

Our friends Nancy, Mark, and Hudson are meeting us after a drive from eastern Pennsylvania -- they're booked into the nearby "Nahma Resort" (now the Upper Peninsula Golf and Lake Resort).

The dreaded invasive weed, the Purple Loosestrife, in abundance

Hudson's here, so probably Mark and Nancy are, too.

Our late afternoon walk out onto one of the points -- the property was formerly a huge industrial operation, the Bay De Noc Lumber Company, from 1881 onwards in what is now the Hiawatha National Forest, and Nahma was presumably a typical "company town", with all that that implies.

Island hopping

An incinerator at the end of the point; long years of service, we're told, as the hot water heater for all of the communal buildings in town.

Bay De Noc on Lake Michigan

The present Nahma Resort and 9-hole golf course, with the unrelated Nahma Inn on the extreme right (photo from http://www.upperpeninsulagolfandlakeresort.com/)

Back in the day

Red water (iron)

-- Fetch!

We became interested in the Garden Peninsula in the Upper Peninsula from reading Joseph Heywood's 4th Woods Cop mystery, Running dark (2005), featuring conservation officer Grady Service, set amidst the fishermen's 'poaching wars' of the mid-1970s.

Halfway down the west side of the Garden Peninsula (on its only road), we're visiting the Fayette Historic Townsite, another well-planned historical-educational celebration of the days of the horrific working conditions before the advent of unions.

A maquette of the Jackson Iron Company's establishment in its heyday (1867 to 1891). It was a pig iron-smelting operation in the then iron-rich UP, which in the end closed down when, not the iron, but the wood nearby for making the charcoal ran out.

As an open-air museum, this is well done, with the hotel, some commercial shops and public buildings, and a few of the middle-class staff's houses carefully restored, and good educational signage.

The hotel

The little harbor

Company store and warehouse

Kristin is gesticulating wildly.

Ah. A memorable antique; photo needed for comparison purposes.

The Shelton House hotel

"In many ways their lives were different than ours." I'll bet.

In some kind of pumping station

Back in the day, there were 30 workers' shacks provided for a rental charge, all of which have been absorbed by history. This is supposedly a recreation of one of them.

A trip to the smelters

Not a job I'd find rewarding, probably

It's lunchtime on the Garden Peninsula -- The Dock.

Call that a pizza if you want to.

Securely locked against thieves

Kachy-Ipi.... Kichy-kip.... The Big Spring! A must see.

Minnows verboten!

The Kitch-iti-Kipi barge crossing the pool in the Palms Book State Park, headwaters of a stream (on the far side of the barge) running a kilometer or so down into Indian Lake

Hauled in on its cable -- it's our turn.

Mark engages the gear as the crew stands ready.

We're on our way, under Kid Power.

Enormous fish

Bubbly jets of spring water all over the bottom of the pool

Back to the Nahma Resort (and Golf Course), idling with Mark, Nancy, Kristin, and Hudson . . .

. . . and then a good dinner in the Nahma Inn.

A quick stop at Elmer's in Escanaba on the way home, for some fresh fish from the lake (no luck)

Looking for turtles on a log back at the lake

A visit to a brilliant garden just along the lake shoreline

Kristin and Emily

Identifications and Explanations, and Advice

Vigilant Squirrel, guarding her territory (actually, this territory belongs to two cats next door, who are cowering inside waiting for Squirrel to go home)

A new convert to the cult of the hydrobike

Two converts actually

Some other hydrobikers just visible in the distance

Hudson playing fetch, with a new companion

A worthy competitor

Mark and Nancy have left early, for a long drive home.

And promptly a new visitor, from Kansas, but only for the afternoon and evening; our former teammate Lowell, who can't let slip an opportunity for even one day's hydrobiking. 14 August 2016.

Lowell wasn't here long enough this year for a photo, so this will have to do.

A heron

A turtle and a frog sunning on a log. Only one appears to be alive.

And two live turtles sunning on another log -- actually there was a third as well, sitting on top of the one on the left, but he or she made a run for it before I could get the camera out.