48 Fun Facts About Isle Royale National Park

Isle Royale National Park lies in which of the Great Lakes?

Superior. The island belongs to Michigan, yet it lies about 15 miles from the Canadian shore and 56 miles from the nearest Michigan mainland.

The nearest part of Michigan to Isle Royale, 56 miles away, is which peninsula?

Keweenaw Peninsula. Ferries from its ports need three and a half to six hours to cross, while a boat from the far closer Minnesota shore can do it in ninety minutes.

Isle Royale lies closer to Minnesota than to Michigan; which time zone does it keep?

Eastern. The island belongs to a Michigan county, while ferries from Minnesota run on Central time, so the park warns visitors that each boat keeps its home port's clock.

Besides boats, what is the only other way visitors reach Isle Royale?

Seaplane. The flight takes about 40 minutes, against six hours on the Park Service's own ferry from the Michigan side.

Isle Royale is the only US national park to do what every winter?

Close entirely. From November 1 to April 15 the island and the water for 4.5 miles around it are shut to visitors, because winter weather makes the crossing too dangerous.

In 2018 only three US national parks drew fewer visitors than Isle Royale; in which state are all three?

Alaska. Gates of the Arctic, Lake Clark and Kobuk Valley are reached mostly by bush plane, while every one of Isle Royale's 25,798 visitors that year had to cross the lake.

Isle Royale's wolf-moose research holds which record?

Longest-running predator-prey study. Scientists first thought the two populations would settle into a steady balance; instead both have swung wildly in the decades since it began in 1958.

How are wolves believed to have first reached Isle Royale in the late 1940s?

Across an ice bridge from Ontario. So few animals made the crossing that the island's wolves all traced back to a single female, and the pack grew badly inbred.

Genetic studies suggest Isle Royale's moose did not swim there in the early 1900s, but arrived how?

Brought over by people. Their closest relatives live not on the nearby shore but far off in northwestern Minnesota, a hint that someone shipped them in, perhaps to stock a hunting preserve.

How were Isle Royale's last two wolves related?

Father and daughter. By 2016 inbreeding had left only this pair, half-siblings as well through a shared mother, and the one pup they are thought to have produced was visibly deformed.

With Isle Royale down to two wolves, what did the Park Service do?

Released new wolves. The agency had first decided not to step in, then reversed itself and from 2018 set free 19 animals caught around the Great Lakes.

What did one outsider wolf's arrival in 1997 do to Isle Royale's wolves?

Refreshed their genes. Nicknamed Old Gray Guy as his coat paled with age, he came to dominate the island's bloodlines, and inbreeding fell sharply until his own descendants began pairing off.

The virus that crashed Isle Royale's wolves around 1980 probably arrived with what?

A dog. Canine parvovirus, probably carried by a pet, cut the wolves from 50 to 14 within two years, the kind of outbreak the park's ban on pets, even aboard boats offshore, is meant to prevent.

Rolf Peterson and John Vucetich, leaders of Isle Royale's wolf-moose study, are professors at which university?

Michigan Tech. Its team measured hundreds of moose skulls collected over forty years and found they had shrunk by about 16 per cent as the herd grew crowded and winters warmed.

Which tree is the main winter food of Isle Royale's moose?

Balsam fir. With the leafy plants gone, moose browse the firs so hard in winter that young trees can stay stunted for years.

Which two large mammals lived on Isle Royale for 3,500 years until humans wiped them out shortly before the park began?

Lynx and woodland caribou. Hunters finished off the caribou, last seen in 1925, and trappers had cleared out the lynx by the 1930s, just before the island became a park.

Moose get the fame, but which animal does the Park Service call Isle Royale's most commonly seen mammal?

Red squirrel. It is the only squirrel on the island and one of very few rodents, and with so little competition it has spread through every patch of forest.

What is the highest point on Isle Royale?

Mount Desor. It stands only about 800 feet above the lake, and its summit is so thickly wooded that hikers who reach it get almost no view.

Which trail runs the length of Isle Royale along its central ridge?

Greenstone Ridge Trail. Walking it end to end takes most backpackers the better part of a week, after which they ride a boat back to where they started.

What is the largest lake on Isle Royale itself?

Siskiwit Lake. In the great fire of 1936, which burned about a fifth of the island, the flames almost completely ringed its shores.

The 'Moose Boulder' hoax claimed that Ryan Island, in Isle Royale's largest lake, held what?

A rock in a seasonal pond. That would have made it an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island in a lake, until a mother and son paddled out and found there was no pond at all.

Which wheeled devices are always allowed on Isle Royale's trails?

Wheelchairs. Even portage wheels for canoes are barred, and bicycles are tolerated only around the two harbour settlements, never on the trails.

What is the name of the National Park Service's own passenger ship to Isle Royale?

Ranger III. Built for the park in 1958 to replace a war-surplus wooden ship, it is the largest vessel the Park Service runs and still makes the six-hour crossing.

Isle Royale is retiring the name Windigo; what is a windigo?

Evil spirit. A mining company borrowed the name in the nineteenth century, and at a local band's request the station now takes the harbour's own name, Ozaagaateng, 'the place where it shines outward'.

'Old Man's Beard', which hangs from Isle Royale's spruce and fir branches, is what kind of organism?

A lichen. It cannot tolerate polluted air, so the pale tangles that drape the island's trees are a sign of just how clean the air there is.

Which Upper Peninsula port sends the ferry Isle Royale Queen IV to the island in about three and a half hours?

Copper Harbor. The village sits at the very tip of the peninsula, the closest Michigan port to the island, so its boat needs little more than half the time of the Park Service's own ferry.

Isle Royale is the third-largest island in the contiguous United States, behind Long Island and which Texas barrier island?

Padre Island. A dredged ship channel has cut it in two, yet it still counts as one island and narrowly edges out Isle Royale.

What Native name for Isle Royale did the Jesuit Claude Dablon put on record around 1670?

Minong. The Grand Portage Band never stopped using the island, and in 2019 its long ties to the place put the whole archipelago on the National Register as a traditional cultural property.

Which Native nation ceded Isle Royale to the United States in the 1842 Treaty of La Pointe?

Ojibwe. The Grand Portage Band, the people who actually fished and hunted on the island, had been left out of that treaty and signed a separate Isle Royale compact in 1844.

Whose report as Michigan's first state geologist set off the copper rush that opened Isle Royale's first modern mines?

Douglass Houghton. His 1841 report started the rush, but he did not live to see it peak: he drowned in 1845 when his small boat went down in a storm on the lake.

Stranded on Isle Royale through the winter of 1845-46, Angelique Mott snared rabbits with what?

Her own hair. She and her husband had been left to guard a find of copper with almost no food, and the promised supply boat never came; he starved, and she lived to tell the story.

Chlorastrolite, the 'turtleback' pebble found on Isle Royale's beaches, holds which official title?

Michigan's state gem. It formed in gas bubbles inside the island's ancient volcanic rock, and because the whole island is a national park, pocketing one from the beach is illegal.

The ridges of Isle Royale are built mainly of which rock, laid down in about 100 separate flows?

Basalt. The pile of flows was later tilted, and ice and water wore away the softer layers between them, leaving the hard rock standing as the island's long parallel ridges.

Which steamer sank in Washington Harbor in 1928 and is now Isle Royale's most popular dive site?

SS America. Minutes after the captain handed the helm to his first mate the ship struck a reef; it was run aground, and every person aboard got off before it settled.

Why are the shipwrecks around Isle Royale so unusually well preserved?

Cold fresh water. The island's reefs lay right across busy shipping lanes, which is why ten major wrecks ring it, some with cabins and engine rooms still intact.

After the steamer George M. Cox struck a reef off Isle Royale in 1933, where did its survivors spend the night?

Inside a lighthouse. The keeper of Rock of Ages Light went out in his own boat and brought the survivors to his rock, where more than a hundred people took turns on the tower's spiral stairs.

Whose seasonal camps did the Park Service buy up when Isle Royale became a national park?

Scandinavian fishermen. They were allowed to go on fishing, some kept their cabins under life leases, and a few of their families still return to the old camps.

Which designation did UNESCO give Isle Royale in 1980?

Biosphere Reserve. It was chosen for an ecosystem shaped by isolation: fewer than half of the mainland's mammal species live on the island, and bears are not among them.

Which predator lived on Isle Royale from about 1905 until soon after the wolves arrived, then vanished?

Coyote. Islanders called them brush wolves; they had survived decades of hunting and trapping, only to vanish within a few years of their bigger cousins arriving.

What kind of Canadian protected zone meets Isle Royale National Park along the international border?

A national marine conservation area. Despite the name there is no sea in it: it covers a stretch of the lake from the Canadian shore down to the border, among the largest protected lake areas in the world.

A 1783 treaty drew the border north of Isle Royale and 'Isle Phelipeaux'; what is odd about Phelipeaux?

It was never there. A French map-maker drew it in the 1740s, later maps copied him, and the phantom island was still on the chart the peace negotiators used in Paris.

What guided Isle Royale's nineteenth-century prospectors to many of their copper deposits?

Ancient mining pits. Hundreds left by Native miners around McCargoe Cove led one 1870s company to what became the most productive mine on the island.

Isle Royale researchers argue that wolves hunt in packs partly to lose less meat to which bird?

Ravens. They trail the packs and take so much of each kill that, by the researchers' sums, a wolf eats better sharing it with a big pack that finishes the carcass fast.

Which 1976 federal designation covers nearly all of Isle Royale?

Wilderness area. The label protects more than 98 per cent of the land from development, leaving roads out altogether and buildings confined to a few spots around the harbours.

Isle Royale is the second-largest island in the Great Lakes, behind which one?

Manitoulin. The Lake Huron island is about five times the size of Isle Royale and the largest in any lake on Earth, with towns and thousands of residents where Isle Royale has none.

According to a long-told legend that historians now doubt, which American negotiator insisted on Isle Royale for its copper in 1783?

Benjamin Franklin. The tale is told on the island itself, where Mount Franklin is named for him, but historians say the peace commissioners were simply tracing what they took for the natural water route west.

Ferries from Michigan dock at which developed area, home to Isle Royale's only lodge?

Rock Harbor. Its lodge is the island's only hotel; visitors who land at the far end choose between a tent, a wooden shelter and a rustic camper cabin.

How do researchers count Isle Royale's wolves and moose during their survey each winter?

From a small ski-plane. The team lands on harbour ice, sometimes in wind chills of fifty below, and spends weeks surveying the packs and the herd from the air.