More Hiking in the Porkies

We love hiking, and Porcupine Mountains is perfect for it. We've tried to vary our hiking experiences so we can answer campers' questions about the trails. We took a very nice day to hike two nearby trails. Both were less than two miles each and surprised us with historical background as well as nature. The first hike was the Union Mine Interpretive Trail, a path that follows the diary journals of a copper miner from the mid-1840's. Signs and ruins along the way make the 1.2 mile trail quite an intriguing adventure.

IYKYK! Old friends and family will understand his excitement at finding a giant shovel!

Seemed like just a nice trail on a creek.

Then came the historical contexts. The hole was dug out for the large wheel of the rock crushing grinder to render copper from the rocks, circa 1847.

Lots of mushrooms, but this one was the most interesting.

A caved in mine shaft.

Not sure exactly what was these rocks supported.

Beautiful trails along the Union River

One of the copper mining shafts.

We drove a couple of miles up the road to Nonesuch Falls Trail. We thought we were just hiking to the falls, but found this was a trail through the old Nonesuch Mining Community where about 100 people lived during the mine's heyday. No ruins from the homes, but building foundations from the mining  production are quite prominent. This mining adventure was larger than the last one as more steam power was used for mining in the late 19th century. We were both fascinated by this unexpected surprise before we continued on to the Nonesuch Falls, small falls compared to others in the area. Interesting that very few of the copper mines every turned a profit.

No signs tell what the buildings were so we just pondered on our own.

This was a huge building.

We thought it was a shaft but learned later it was an oven.

We found out later that our Park Interpreter, Katie, who we've had long conversations with since we've been here was in a YouTube video about this mining area. It cleared up most of our speculations.

Found the river finally.

Open area nearby where the community homes, school, store, etc. were. The area is surrounded by old fruit trees.

The next day, the weather changed dramatically--cloudy, 80 degrees with weirdly low humidity. The clouds rolling in and the forecast warned of some storms heading our way overnight and a chance to experience the strange Lake Superior weather we've been told about, but we took advantage of the 80 degrees to walk the beautiful lake beach in the park and hunt through the multicolored rocks.

Our campground is near the point.

Beautiful multicolored rocks on a nice sandy beach.

No sunset sky, just storm clouds in the distance and very calm seas.

We got storms during the night and woke to crazy high northwest winds. We rode our bikes back to the beach again for a very different view of Lake Superior, this time from up on the road and not down at water's edge. The the skies cleared and the winds built over two days as the temperature went down giving us the Lake Superior experience. Of course, we will leave before it really gets crazy when it all freezes over.

This Facebook video from Marquette, Michigan shows the conditions there the same day. This is where we watched people jump off Black Rocks a few weeks ago. No jumping in the lake from the rocks that day. Despite the wide ranging weather patterns, we are still enjoying our time here. The sun is still warm, the skies are clear more than cloudy and the winds do calm to cool breezes.