Scoville Point: the Stoll Trail from Rock Harbor

Welcome to Rock Harbor, on the northeast end of Isle Royale National Park. You're on an island in the middle of Lake Superior, surrounded by about four hundred smaller islands, and more than three quarters of this park lies underwater. There are no roads here: everyone arrives by ferry, seaplane or boat.

Long before it was a park, this island was Minong, part of the ancestral lands of the Grand Portage Band of Ojibwe, on the Minnesota shore across the water. Band members still fish these waters today.

Today's walk is the Stoll Trail. We'll follow the rocky Rock Harbor shore out to Scoville Point, then come back through the woods beside Tobin Harbor, a little over four miles in all, with rocks and roots underfoot that get slippery in the rain. I'll tell you a story at each spot along the way and stay quiet in between, so you can listen for the lake.

Here's the trailhead, right among the buildings of the oldest resort on the island. More than a hundred years ago, a family started renting cottages and tent space here on Snug Harbor. By 1902 they were advertising room for fifty guests, as long as the guests didn't mind bringing their own tents.

In the 1920s the founder's daughter, Bertha Farmer, took over and modernized the place. She had a two-story white guesthouse built on the rocks above the lake, with sixteen rooms, electric lights and hot and cold running water, and it became the most prominent landmark in Rock Harbor. The lodge's dock was big enough for the largest passenger steamers on Lake Superior, and guests went out on berry-picking and greenstone-hunting trips.

Of all the old resorts that once dotted this island, Rock Harbor Lodge is the only one still running. And the trail ahead is named for a newspaperman who helped turn this whole island into a national park, and you'll meet him near the far end of the trail.

Those tilted lava layers wore down unevenly, so this island is a series of long ridges and valleys, all running in the same direction. During the last ice age, glaciers scraped along them, gouging out long, narrow inlets and leaving rocky fingers of land between them. That's why Rock Harbor is a long, narrow channel lined with long, narrow islands, and why this trail runs out along a slender point between two harbors. The pattern doesn't stop at the water's edge, either. The ridges and valleys carry on underwater, out under the lake.

Geologists have even named one of these lava flows after the place we're walking to: the Scoville Point flow.

Everything in the park is protected, so please leave every stone, flower and antler exactly where you find it. These old lava rocks hold copper, and they also hold Michigan's state gem, a mineral known simply as greenstone, which is one more good reason to look closely at the rocks along this shore and leave them for the next person to find.

Wherever the trail crosses open rock, look for small pools of water in the hollows. Along about thirty miles of the island's northeast shoreline, scientists have counted more than seventy thousand of these rock pools. Close to the lake, waves splash into them. Higher up, in what researchers call the lichen zone, only rain fills them. Instead of starfish and anemones, they're home to insects and amphibians, and a study of just sixteen pools found more than a hundred kinds of midges.

Those crusty patches of color on the rock are lichens, a partnership between a fungus and an alga. More than six hundred kinds of lichen grow on this island, including the pale green strands hanging from the spruce and fir, called old man's beard. In winter, lichens are an important food for moose.

The trail has two shorter loops, and near here the first one cuts across to the Tobin Harbor side, for a walk of about two miles in all. If you're short on time, that's a good way back, and the tour will pick up again on the other side; otherwise, we carry on along the shore toward the point.

Here the trail's two sides come together for the last stretch to the point.

Every animal on this island had to cross at least fourteen miles of Lake Superior to get here. Bats can fly over. Moose can swim. Wolves can walk across when the lake freezes. But bears, porcupines, skunks and raccoons never made the trip, and only eighteen kinds of mammals live here, compared with more than forty on the mainland.

Moose first arrived in the early nineteen hundreds. Wolves came later, most likely across an ice bridge from Canada in the winter of 1948. Scientists have studied the two of them continuously since 1958, the longest-running predator and prey study of its kind in the world.

The moose here stand over six feet at the shoulder and weigh close to a thousand pounds, and they're most active around dawn and dusk. If you meet one on the trail, give it plenty of room: back away slowly and put a tree or a rock between the two of you.

Look for a bronze plaque set on a stone monument near here. It honors Albert Stoll Junior, conservation editor of the Detroit News, whose untiring efforts, it says, made possible the preservation of Isle Royale as a national park.

Summer residents who loved this island wanted to protect it from too much development, and they formed a group that pushed for state or federal ownership of the whole place. The newspaperman became their leading advocate. He brought official inspection trips out here and spread the word about the island's attractions. Congress authorized the park in 1931, and it was established in 1940.

The idea of what this park should be changed in those years, too. Tennis courts and golf courses no longer seemed right. A biologist advising the Park Service urged that trails, buildings and publicity be kept to a minimum, so that a visit here would be a wilderness experience. In 1976, much of the park was designated as wilderness, and the quiet around you now was protected on purpose.

This is Scoville Point, with the open water of Lake Superior in front of you.

For centuries, people have crossed this water by canoe. Ojibwe families from Grand Portage paddled out to the island to fish, hunt, trap, gather plants and make maple sugar. From their shore, on a clear day, the island rises on the horizon, and mirages can make it look bigger, or seem to float. There were once stories that it was a floating island.

Long before that, people came here for copper. Pure copper lies in this volcanic rock, and more than four thousand years ago Native people were already working it, beating it free with rounded beach stones. More than a thousand of their pits have been found on the island, and the copper was hammered into knives, points and ornaments that traveled far beyond the lake.

Listen for loons on the water. The park has more than a hundred loon territories, home to the only loons known to still breed in Great Lakes waters.

Take your time here; the rock drops steeply in places. When you're ready, head back the way you came, and where the trail splits, take the Tobin Harbor side through the woods. It's a quiet stretch, and the next story is waiting where the first shortcut joins.

Here the first shortcut comes in from the Rock Harbor side. This side of the loop runs through the woods.

These spruce and balsam fir belong to the great northern forest. Strictly speaking, the island sits a little too far south for it, but the cold waters of Lake Superior keep the air cool enough for these trees to thrive. Balsam fir is what moose live on in winter, once the leafy plants are gone, and they browse it so hard that some young firs here stay stunted, no taller than a shrub.

Fire shapes this forest, too. In the hot, dry summer of 1936, three big fires burned about a fifth of the island. Hundreds of young men from the Civilian Conservation Corps, who had come to build the new park, fought them for more than three weeks, alongside loggers and islanders. Their fire lines kept the flames away from the resorts here on the east end, and in the old burn areas in the middle of the island, birch and aspen still grow where the conifers once stood.

Tobin Harbor is speckled with small islands and old summer cottages. In the early nineteen hundreds, so many vacationers wanted a place here that in 1914 the government had to survey a large number of little islands in this harbor that earlier surveys had missed, and buyers snapped them up.

The harbor had its own resort, too. Around 1900, a fisherman named Gus Mattson, who had a fishing station here, began renting rooms to sportsmen while his wife cooked their meals. Later called Minong Lodge, it became the social center of the harbor, with boat days for the mail and a summer regatta. By then, many of the fishermen on these waters were Norwegians, Swedes and Swedish-speaking Finns, who found a lake and a living much like home.

When the park was created, many cottage owners sold for a lower price in return for a life lease, the right to keep using their places for the rest of their lives. That's why some of these old cabins still stand around the harbor, and why a few families still return to them.

Somewhere close to the trail here are the remains of the Smithwick Mine, one of the first modern mines on the island, and probably the one most often seen by visitors today.

It was claimed in 1843. By 1847 there was a blacksmith shop, a root cellar and several cabins, and a year later the main shaft was ninety feet deep. Very little copper was found, and there's no record that it ever produced any for sale. That was the island's whole mining story: a rush in the 1840s, a revival in the 1870s, a last try in the 1890s, and then the miners left for good. At the peak, in the summer of 1847, only about a hundred and twenty people lived on the entire island. If you see an old pit or shaft, look from the trail and stay out, because old mine workings can be dangerous.

That's the end of our tour. On one walk, you've crossed a billion years of lava, met the rock pools, the moose and the wolves, and the people who mined, fished and summered here, and the people who fought to keep it wild. Rock Harbor is just ahead, and thank you for walking the Stoll Trail with me.