A National Lakeshore and a Second Chance
Near Bayfield, Wisconsin
Everything you see across this water, the caves, the lighthouses, the quiet wooded islands, is protected as the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore. It was signed into being by President Richard Nixon on the twenty-sixth of September, nineteen seventy, after a long campaign led by Wisconsin's Senator Gaylord Nelson, a conservation champion who the very next year would found Earth Day. The original park gathered together twenty islands and a twelve-mile strip of mainland shoreline.
The land had been worked hard before it was protected. Loggers had stripped much of the timber, quarries had scarred the cliffs, and in the nineteen thirties crews from the Civilian Conservation Corps labored across the region during the Great Depression, building trails and facilities as the cutover land slowly healed. Left alone under park protection, the forests grew back so thickly that in two thousand four, about eighty percent of the lakeshore was set aside as federally designated wilderness, the largest such area in Wisconsin.
It was named the Gaylord Nelson Wilderness in the senator's honor. So these islands tell a story of return. Ground that was quarried, fished out, and clear-cut a century ago is now some of the wildest country on the Great Lakes, where black bears swim between islands and old lighthouses stand over regrown forest.
It is a rare second chance, and it sits right off the Bayfield dock.
