G.A.S.P.

On my way to Houghton the next day, I stopped at a rest stop at Tioga Creek – pretty enough to be a State Park anywhere else. I took a couple of photos of the falls and rapids. The water in all of the streams in the UP is the color of iced tea. I've

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Click on thumbnail

been told that it is due to tannic acid in the water and that the acid comes from Balsam Pines and the leaves of other trees that line the banks. It doesn’t hurt the fish; indeed many of these streams are excellent for trout fishing.

I met some really nice people at Tioga Creek. One couple, in their mid-sixties I guess, was traveling around Lake Superior on two motorcycles, one pulling a small trailer. The most interesting thing about them is that they had their two small dogs (terriers of some kind) with them. They said the dogs just loved to travel. I met another couple, probably in their mid-seventies, who had apparently just come to the park for a picnic lunch. As they departed, she gave me their last piece of homemade Upper Peninsula Blueberry Bread – nummy!

I also stopped in the town of Alberta. On the map, it just looks like any other small UP town, but it really isn’t. The town was founded by Henry Ford around 1935 as a lumber camp town and exists today in refurbished form, with some of the houses rented to local people. The sawmill and town are now owned by Michigan Technological University (Houghton) and some forestry research is performed there. You might wonder, as I did, just what did Henry Ford need with a lumber camp. Well I found out that the Model T Ford had over 250 parts made from wood, and that wood was needed for crating and packaging

complete cars and car parts. The original "woodies" also had real wood side panels. At the sawmill, they told me that Henry Ford once owned hundreds of thousands of acres of forest land in the UP.

Houghton is an interesting town. Actually there are two towns – Houghton on one side of the lake and Hancock on the other. Between them there are about 12,000 people plus another few thousand at the University. I was surprised at the steepness of the hills on either side of town. It seems that the body of water between them was a river valley until it was

dredged and straightened around the turn of the century to allow ship passage without having to go all the way around the Keweenaw Peninsula. For many years, large ore boats plied this passageway, but now it is used primarily for pleasure craft. There is still a beautiful old liftbridge between the two towns, one that I suspect will have to go up to allow the Ranger III (the NPS boat) to pass. The Keweenaw Peninsula was for many years a major supplier of copper, and many remnants of the industry remain, but copper mining moved further west a long time ago.