Isle Royale: Five Thousand Years in a Lake Inside a Lake

Isle Royale sits in Lake Superior fifteen miles from the Ontario shore and fifty-six miles from the Upper Peninsula. It is surrounded by water on every side and accessible only by boat or seaplane. By raw visitor numbers it is one of the least-visited national parks in the contiguous forty-eight states, which is exactly what most of the people who go there are counting on.

Anishinaabek people harvested copper from the island's surface deposits for five thousand years before European contact. The veins of native copper that run through the island's basaltic rock were among the richest deposits in North America, and the Anishinaabek worked them with stone tools, extracting copper for tools, weapons, and trade goods that moved across a continent-spanning exchange network. European copper miners who arrived in the eighteen forties found ancient pit mines, stone hammers, and evidence of systematic harvesting that dwarfed anything the newcomers initially attempted.

The island became a national park in nineteen forty. Its wolves and moose have been the subject of one of the longest-running predator-prey ecology studies in the world, begun in nineteen fifty-eight, tracking how the two populations regulate each other across generations. The wolf population has varied from fifty animals to single digits and been augmented by the Park Service with mainland wolves to prevent collapse.

The park closes from November through mid-April. In summer, the hiking trails extend over four hundred miles and the inland lakes hold lake trout that have swum there since the glaciers retreated.