• Rather than taking an hourslong ferry to the remote island archipelago, travelers can splurge on a 45-minute seaplane flight
• The flight features epic bird’s-eye views of the Keweenaw Peninsula, Lake Superior and Isle Royale itself
• Inclement weather frequently grounds planes, making it important to budget time for possible delays

ISLE ROYALE — The adventure starts early for visitors to this wild Lake Superior archipelago.

Before gazing upon its rocky shores and dense evergreen forests, listening for the howls and bellows of its resident wolves and moose, or swimming in one of dozens of interior lakes or miles of Lake Superior shoreline, Michigan-based visitors must journey 55 miles across Lake Superior.

It’s not for the faint of heart, which may be why Isle Royale National Park is among the nation’s least-visited national parks. But it does offer travelers a fresh perspective on the sheer vastness of the Great Lakes.

Excluding folks with their own boat, Michigan visitors have two options to get to the island:  An hours-long ferry ride from Houghton or Copper Harbor or a 45-minute seaplane flight that offers a bird’s-eye view of some of Michigan’s most remote landscapes. 

As part of the Bridge Michigan summer bucket list series, a Bridge photographer and reporter took an eight-seat de Havilland Beaver floatplane from Hubbell, just outside Houghton at the base of the Keweenaw Peninsula, to Rock Harbor, one of few developed areas in a park composed nearly entirely of federally designated wilderness.

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It was an adventure full of dramatic vistas, a wolf sighting and a lesson in how Lake Superior’s notoriously fickle weather can derail travel plans.

Getting there

The national park encompasses the 200-square-mile Isle Royale plus more than 450 smaller islands, for a total area of more than 850 square miles of land and water. There, visitors find some of Michigan’s most unique landscapes and stand a better chance of seeing a moose or wolf than virtually anywhere else in Michigan.

At the very least, they’re near-guaranteed to come across a scat pile from one of the 840 moose that live here — that’s roughly twice as many moose as the mainland Upper Peninsula, in an area 78 times smaller.

Passengers on a recent journey included a solo backpacker from Chicago and a father-son-friend trio comprised of Pete Arango, 48, Rochester Hills, his  20-year-old son, Josh Arango, of Houghton, where he attends Michigan Technological University, and 20-year-old Andrew Romanski, of Ann Arbor.

Their goal for the week: Backpack nearly the entire length of the island, from Rock Harbor to Windigo. But first the passengers were treated to 45 minutes of gawking out the window, occasionally stopping to point out something interesting to their seat neighbors.

“It’s just a spectacular view of the Keweenaw that you really don’t get any other way,” Pete Arango said of the experience.

That makes marketing easier for Jon Rector, who has co-owned Isle Royale Seaplanes with his wife, Christine Hamilton, since 2005. Island visitors have used seaplanes as a mode of travel far longer, since before the park’s establishment in 1940.

That’s a story in and of itself. Isle Royale was once an enclave for wealthy vacationers, immigrant fishermen and back-to-the-landers who, fearing that logging and mining would transform the archipelago, urged the federal government to include it in the early national parks system. The islanders got their wish in exchange for a vow to vacate their private cottages on the now-public property.

But a series of compromises followed, as the former cottage owners and their descendants sought and won exclusive access that continues today.

Peering out the windows of the small aircraft, passengers could see those rustic wood structures peeking out from thick stands of fir, spruce, birch and aspens on the smaller islands that surround Isle Royale.

The passengers had already taken in aerial views of the farms, forests and abandoned mines that speck the Keweenaw Peninsula before Lake Superior’s turquoise blue waters swallowed the rocky red coastline (a color derived from the rich iron content). 

The next 20 minutes were spent searching the waves for pleasure boats, freighters and bobbing seabirds, marveling at the sheer expanse of the freshwater sea below.

Then the seaplane descended into the sheltered waters of Rock Harbor and a flurry of photographs ensued. The descent lasted all of a minute before the plane touched down on water, white spray shooting from beneath the plane’s floats.

Breathtaking but fickle

A pilot since his teens, the 67-year-old Rector has flown all over the map. Few routes are as interesting or challenging as the one from Houghton to Isle Royale, he said. 

With its dense forests, wide open water expanses and propensity for unpredictable weather, he said it feels similar to flying over coastal Alaska or Maine: “The topography is the same, the coastline is the same.”

His clientele is a mix of locals who work on the island during summertime, “park chasers” who sometimes treat the trip more like business than pleasure and vacationers, especially Michiganders for whom the trip is often a bucket list experience. 

“I occasionally have to step back and remember that we’re providing this kind of once-in-a-lifetime service to people,” he said.

Rector has watched people propose after a flight. Transported old-timers who are making a return trip after visiting the island in their youth. Watched parents introduce their children to the island for the first time.

It may seem like a dream job, but it can also be stressful. With just three small planes in the business’s inventory, rough weather conditions that delay flights can be challenging to reschedule. 

And in Michigan’s far north, thunderstorms and thick fog are routine, even in summertime. Rector’s first action every morning — before even getting out of bed — is to check the weather in Houghton and check the Isle Royale webcams.

“Your day could fall apart, depending on whether or not a storm chooses to come through,” he said. 

“People ask me all the time, ‘When should I go to avoid that?’ You can’t. It’s Lake Superior. It generates its own weather and it’s very unpredictable.”

That’s why Rector’s top advice to seaplane travelers is to keep a flexible schedule. Consider adding a buffer day on each end of the trip in case of weather delays.

Luckily, the voyage that day came with blue skies and only a light breeze. After unloading bags and checking in at the park visitors center, the passengers bid one another farewell before hitting the trail toward campsites for the night. 

“It’s breathtaking up here,” Pete Arango said as he prepared to don his backpack. “Leave camp, go for a quarter-mile and all of a sudden you’ve got a spectacular view of the lake and you’re the only one in the world that has this view. It’s not a line of people who saw it on Instagram.”

The return trip

Three days later, a Bridge reporting team found itself breaking camp after an all-night thunderstorm, only to learn that even worse weather on the mainland had grounded flights indefinitely.

A message on a TV screen at the Rock Harbor Visitor Center advised seaplane ticketholders to consider taking the ferry instead, so a Bridge photographer and reporter hastily bought tickets and settled in for the six-hour trip aboard the Ranger III, a 165-foot-long National Parks Service ferry that can carry up to 128 passengers between Isle Royale and Houghton.

It’s a slower ride, but offers a new perspective. As the ferry drifted through the archipelago on its way to open water, passengers got close-up views of the park headquarters on Mott Island, where staff members spend the summer, and the 170-year-old Rock Harbor lighthouse that now functions as a museum.

The King family, from Vancouver, Washington, had also changed plans after a delayed flight. Mom Brooke King took it in stride.

“We have a deck of cards, the boat has games and we have audiobooks to listen to,” she said.

Aboard the ferry, a park ranger swore the kids in as junior rangers, quizzing them on the archipelago’s natural wonders and looming threats, like invasive mussels, before administering an oath to protect Isle Royale and its inhabitants.

“It’s just crazy that this is fresh water,” King said as she marveled at the vastness of Lake Superior. “I keep looking out the window thinking, are we going to see whales?”

Despite the weather complications, she would take the seaplane again. 

“Just know that you might not take the seaplane back,” she said.

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