Snow, All Too Soon!!

This morning I woke up to the deepest snow in this part of Kentucky so far this season - perhaps 6 inches - and I'm not really interested in checking out anything further north!  However, I totally admire the staunch and sturdy people who trudge on in feet of snow - like those in today's National Geographic Magazine article in Michigan.  Ben East writes about his frozen adventure, "Winter Sky Roads to Isle Royal," in the December, 1931, issue.

Isle Royal is an Island off the coast of Michigan in Lake Superior close to the Canadian border. As islands go, it is fairly large, approximately 50 miles long and 5 miles wide. East reports, "The island is historically interesting, for here some of the first copper mines to be opened by white men in the . . . region were put into operation about the middle of the last century (1800s)" (p. 759).  Thirty years later the mines were abandoned because it was not profitable and also due to the hard winters of the area. There was evidence of previous mining of copper by Native Americans.

In the 1930s, the shores of Isle Royal was the summer home of commercial fishermen and held four resort hotels.  Mr. East found out that "occasionally a fishing family, more hardy than the average or with a warmer strain of pioneer blood in its veins, lays in a stock of food supplies and remains over winter on the island" (p. 760).  Such a family would be completely isolated and unreachable during the winter.

East was part of an expedition organized to check out the conditions "of the island moose herd" and bring back the first photos in winter.  Three men, including Mr. East, a photographer and a pilot, flew there in a plane with their supplies and landed on one of the 30 inland lakes, all frozen.  "There are probably more moose on the island than in any equal area of the United States" (photo caption, p. 763).

The trio found traveling on snowshoes on a rough moose trail from the plane to an unoccupied fishermen's log cabin the hardest part of their trip.  They found the silence oppressive.  "It is an intangible something that can be felt, a weight that presses down upon one.  It is a loneliness, solitude and desolation, belittling and awing.  It is the brooding stillness of death, in which no wind whispers, no branch stirs, no bird calls, no flake of snow eddies down from the gray sky" (p. 766).

They soon found their quiet interrupted by several moose, and then by a wolf howl.  "Moose came to the woodpile behind the cabin almost nightly during the eleven days we stayed there" (p. 769).  Unsuccessful in their attempt to photograph the moose, they attempted to leave one day earlier than planned but were grounded by a severe storm and left one day later.

This article was similar to others describing severe hardships in winter journeys. Yet it was the first that failed in one of its goals.  No matter!  Mr. East included photographs of the moose taken when he had earlier visited Isle Royal in summer with bonus photos of newly hatched sea gulls.