Great Lakes Shipwrecks

We woke to pouring rain this morning so the hike was postponed to later in the day and we visited the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum in Whitefish Point.  This museum campus consists of the original lighthouse and keeper’s house, the building for the Lifeboat Station, the stations crew quarters, and the buildings for the museum, theatre and gift shop.

The lighthouse placed here was the first one on Lake Superior in 1861.  The actual light house was originally brick and mortar which did not last through very many lake storms and icy winters.  It was replaced with the steel lighthouse we see today that we climbed up the damp slick stairs.  The Keepers house has been restored to the way it might have looked in 1890 and 1920’s when it was split into two apartments.

In 1923 the US Lifeboat Station was established at Whitefish Point when servicemen ran surf boats from shore into the storms to rescue those in peril along the Lake Superior coastline.  Once this station was started, loss of life went down by 90%.  Today this is the US Coast Guard.

The theatre shows a 14 minute video of the dedication of the Memorial to the crew of the Edmund Fitzgerald which sank just 17 miles from here on November 10, 1975.  It lies in 450 foot of water.  A special dive suit and mini subs were used to bring up the ships bell and replace it with a new bell inscribed with the names of the 29 crewmen who died that night.

The museum goes into a lot of detail about the many ships that have sunk along this part of Lake Superior and, especially, the Edmund Fitzgerald.  And there were a lot of them!  This has been a very busy shipping lane over the years so as it narrows because it funnels into the Sault St. Marie Locks, many of the wrecks were due to collisions.  Others were from high waves and winds from winter storms on the lake and the rocky and shallow shoreline that was covered by fog or snow.

After lunch we tortured our bodies by hiking over 5 miles along the Tahquamenon River from the Lower Falls to the Upper Falls.  It is not the most difficult hike we have ever undertaken but it was strenuous with lots of mud holes, roots and rocks and steep inclines to walk over.  The Upper Falls drop 50 feet and are 200 feet wide and splash over 3,500 gallons of water a second into the basin.